HackingTheUniverse

The following link is to an excellent post on dealing with trust issues with automated agents.
Trust and Transparency for Intelligent Agents

Here is a small excerpt:

You might be surprised by how many purchasing decisions robots already make. Black-box trading systems on Wall Street and across the financial markets accounted for over 1/3 of all stock trades in 2006, and will push 50% of volume in 2010 according to the consulting firm Aite Group. Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) systems and other standards based protocols in manufacturing, logistics, and procurement frequently execute purchasing decisions with little or no human intervention. You can event train Amazon.com to automatically send you items based on a schedule you teach it.