Artificial intelligence needs a common ruler
Yang Zhao, Zhenfei Song, Pengyu Tan, Xingchuang Xiong, Xiang Fang · 2026
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Description
Yang Zhao and colleagues argue in a 2026 essay that artificial intelligence lacks a shared basis for judging whether systems deserve trust. AI now shapes decisions, knowledge work, and critical infrastructure, yet invented answers, weak reproducibility, and unclear accountability persist. The authors contend the bottleneck is no longer raw capability but whether trust can stay objective and comparable as systems change.
Their proposed framework rests on four properties: comparability, traceability, reliability, and governability, shortened to CTRG. The common ruler they call for is not a benchmark or a rulebook. It is a measurement system, modeled loosely on the International System of Units, that keeps those four properties checkable across different systems and settings. The essay closes by sketching a two-layer design linking shared trust foundations to practical deployment.
Catalog record
| CREATOR | Yang Zhao, Zhenfei Song, Pengyu Tan, Xingchuang Xiong, Xiang Fang |
|---|---|
| YEAR | 2026 |
| COLLECTION | PAPERS |
| FORMAT | TXT |
| FILE SIZE | 12646 |
| LICENSE | https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0 |
| RIGHTS | CC BY |
| SOURCE | Europe PMC |