CONCEPT
Access Points
The moments where lay users encounter abstract expert systems and make judgments about their reliability — the structural location at which trust in modern institutions is produced, maintained, and (in the AI case) systematically miscalibrated.
Access points are where trust in abstract systems is actually generated. A patient does not trust medicine in the abstract; she trusts her doctor, and through the doctor, the medical system. A passenger does not trust aviation as such; he trusts the airline at the gate and the pilot's voice over the intercom, and through them, the aviation system. Access points are the human and institutional interfaces at which lay users encounter expert systems — and through which they develop and maintain (or withdraw) the active trust that makes abstract systems functional. AI is now generating new access points at unprecedented speed, each of which requires new heuristics of evaluation that evolved human trust responses were not designed to provide.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Giddens developed the concept in The Consequences of Modernity (1990) as part of his theory of abstract systems. Modern life requires non-specialists to depend on specialized knowledge they cannot themselves evaluate. Access