16.9. Book Talk by Sarah Pink: Can We Trust Technology?

Welcome to the Book Talk by Professor Sarah Pink! The event takes place September 16 at 15:00 at the Main Building of the University of Helsinki (room U3032). The talk is based on Pink’s and Emma Quilty’s recent book Can We Trust Technology? (Routledge 2025). Minna Ruckenstein will lead the discussion and Kirsimarja Blomqvist and Pekka Mäkelä will serve as commentators.

About the book

Can We Trust Technology? examines the contemporary crisis of trust, where people’s trust in organisations and in emerging technologies is decreasing. As governments, industry organisations and research funders are investing millions in the quest to design technologies people will trust, this book asks if it is plausible to think tech workers and research designers can produce trustworthy technologies and, moreover, if it is realistic to assume everyday users of those technologies will ever truly trust them? Drawing on incisive analysis of the contemporary context and ethnographic research with those who develop and use technologies, the book reconsiders dominant assumptions about trust, arguing for a shift in thinking away from motifs of trustworthy technology and toward a vision for trusted futures.

Sarah Pink is an Australian Research Council Laureate Fellow, Professor and Director of the Emerging Technologies Research Lab and FUTURES Hub at Monash University, Australia.

Her recent books include Emerging Technologies/Life at the Edge of the Future (Routledge 2023) and the co-authored Design Ethnography (Routledge 2022).