Anyone can now produce a confident, well-written claim about anything, in seconds, for free. I don't think we've fully absorbed what that does to the value of words. A polished paragraph used to be weak evidence that a competent person had spent time and attention on it. It isn't evidence of anything anymore.
What doesn't get cheaper is a person whose word has matched their behavior for twenty years. If anything that gets more valuable, because it's one of the few things left that can't be generated on demand.
What trust actually is
Not a warm feeling, and not likability, though it gets confused with both. Trust is a track record: your word has predicted your actions often enough, over a long enough time, that other people can predict reality through you. The part that matters most is cost. Anyone honors a convenient promise. The information is in the moments where you could have quietly broken your word and benefited, and didn't, possibly without the other person ever learning what it cost you. That's the only version that compounds.
Nassim Taleb wrote a whole book about the underlying principle, Skin in the Game, and whatever you make of his manner, the core observation holds up. The person worth listening to is the person exposed to the consequences of being wrong: their money, their reputation, their relationship with you. A pundit who predicts confidently from behind glass and pays nothing for a miss is not in the same business as a surgeon, or an underwriter, or a builder who has to eat the overrun.
It's also not agreeableness, which is the confusion I see most often. The person who tells you what you want to hear isn't building trust; they're spending it. Some of the most reliable people I can think of are blunt and not especially pleasant to disagree with. Likability is about the moment. Trust is about whether counting on you turned out to be correct later, when it got checked against reality.
The contractor version
The clearest everyday case is the contractor who calls mid-job and says the work is going to run past the quote, here is exactly why, here are your options. He could have buried it in the final invoice, and plenty do. He told you while telling you could still cost him the job. People who've had that experience tend to remember the contractor's name for a decade and hand it out like a favor, which is what a reputation actually is: other people distributing your track record for you, for free, because it held.
A doctor saying 'I don't know, but I'll find out' works the same way, and faster.
Why it becomes the scarce thing
Machines now produce unlimited fluent, confident, plausible output, including unlimited fluent, confident, plausible falsehoods. In early 2024, an employee at Arup, the engineering firm behind the Sydney Opera House, transferred about 25 million dollars after a video call with his chief financial officer and several colleagues. Everyone on that call except him was a deepfake. That's roughly where the floor is now. 'Does it sound right, does it look right' has stopped being a filter, because everything sounds right.
So the question shifts to who is standing behind the claim, and what happens to them if it's wrong. This isn't a new move, incidentally; it's what societies have always reached for when claims got cheap. London has required silver to carry a hallmark since 1300, because a buyer couldn't judge the metal by looking at it, and the mark tied the object to a guild that could be punished. We are going to need a lot of hallmarks.
The part I'm least sure about
It's tempting to say a machine can't be held accountable at all, and I've written versions of that sentence myself. It isn't quite true. The company deploying a model can be sued, fined, and shamed, so accountability doesn't vanish; it moves upstream and gets spread across a legal department. But diluted accountability is exactly the kind people learn not to rely on. When something goes wrong you want a name, a person who has to look at you, not a settlements process. I don't think the demand for that person goes away just because liability technically exists somewhere in a corporate structure.
I spend my working days building an assessment platform, so I should admit a bias: I believe things about people are worth measuring. Even so, I don't think trust can be tested for. It accumulates at the rate of one kept promise at a time, and that slowness is what makes it hard to counterfeit, in a way that almost nothing else still is. There's no prompt for it.
The exercise I'd actually suggest is small. Think of the person whose word you rely on most, and ask what they did to earn that. In my experience it was almost never brilliance; it was a string of unglamorous moments where their word and their convenience pointed in different directions and the word won. Then the harder version: whether you're that person for anyone, and what your record honestly says. I don't know how the market for trust plays out from here, whether it gets priced, certified, gamed, probably all three. But building it still takes years and losing it still takes an afternoon, so whatever amount you have, I'd protect it.