Can a robot fleet's reputation survive one bad incident?
research/society-trust
Can a robot fleet's reputation survive one bad incident? In a model where trust spreads by experience and gossip, a dent always recovers because people keep meeting robots; reputation is lost only through avoidance (at a 0.30 avoid-below threshold, 20/20, 18/20 and 0/20 crowds recover under neutral, 2× and 4× negativity in gossip), and robots that explain failures recovered every time. Stylised.
What it found
Simulated people hold trust in a robot fleet, updated by their own encounters and by gossip in which bad news may travel further than good. Trust that is only dented recovers in every case. What sinks a reputation is avoidance: if people stop using robots below a trust threshold of 0.30, an incident at error rate 0.8 is recovered in 20/20 crowds with neutral gossip, 18/20 when bad news counts 2×, and 0/20 at 4× (final mean trust 0.947, 0.871, 0.282). Robots that explain failures (each costing 0.3× the trust) recovered in every setting. Stylised: 100 simulated people, one shared reputation, a hard avoidance threshold, no fitted parameters.
A figure from its own output
Paper, code and results
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Other research topics
Proper scoring & elicitation28Effort & peer prediction9Verification games & slashing19Detection & tolerances14Markets as routers13Prediction-market design9Paying contributors8Decentralised training systems23Digital twins & sim-to-real164LLM chip design loops40Robot manufacturing loops53Ambient AI assistant46Self-replicating manufacturing34Simulation-first design64Engineered clothing45Task-specific AI accelerators40Algorithmic chip-design loops42Open-source purpose-built robots44The software-engineering loop43Adversarial human imitation41Open-source residential construction41Autonomous multi-angle capture34Sensing, imaging and 3D31Energy supply and dense energy storage39Robot societies among people31Agentic co-design of low-cost robots27Laundry-hanging robots25Machine learning on qualitative data23Robots on the building site27Civilizations & group psychology1History & human sciences1
Produced with AI assistance (Claude). Results are from the code in this repository and are simulated or stylised unless the abstract says otherwise; nothing here implies affiliation with or endorsement by any lab, researcher or company cited. MIT licensed.