If we want to move forward with the big issues, we need to have narrower conversations

Two very different topics that have been occupying my mind, for various personal and professional reasons, over the last year are (1) the events and issues surrounding Israel and Gaza, and (2) Artificial Intelligence. [I completely get that the first of these topics is incredibly serious and the suffering on all sides is tragic - I hope no-one finds it distasteful that I use it in this post.] For both of these topics, and a number of others, I have been a little disappointed at the quality of thought and discussion that is taking place around them. I believe that part of the reason for that is that they are each a complex web of interconnected issues that essentially go on forever, require lots of different bodies of knowledge, tread on the territory of deeply-held beliefs, and need different strategies to understand and engage with. Giant multimodal, multichronic (a word I think I just made up for different time periods) forms of what social scientists call ‘wicked problems’. For example, when one is trying to understand the Israel-Gaza stuff, and the best way forward, there is of course a very urgent and immediate humanitarian perspective, a very long historical perspective, a very broad geopolitical perspective, a religious perspective, military, strategic and tactical perspectives. When we mix those all up, it is very hard to make the very necessary progress. Having a conversation about getting aid to people who need it, mixed up with whose land is whose, mixed up with what tactics are allowable, mixed up with who is connected to and behind it all is very intractable. With Artificial Intelligence, there is an immediate pragmatic, competitive perspective (how can I use it to get ahead), a socioeconomic perspective, definitional questions (what is AI), ethical, privacy, regulatory and intellectual property questions, long term effects on industries, skills, education and employment, the impact on trust and truth, energy use, and even concerns about the machines taking over. Each incur very different issues and require very different knowledge bases to engage on. It seems to me that in order for us to make progress, every time we have dialogue in the hope of moving things forward, we have to aggressively narrow and focus each conversation. By talking about what the purpose of each conversation is, what is up for discussion and what is not, and what assumptions and preconditions we are going into the conversation with. We may sometimes need to ‘eat bitter’ and go into conversations accepting assumptions that we really don’t like, in order to move the story forward. Let’s all have narrower and more explicitly narrowed conversations on important topics. Let's discuss less to achieve more. #unthink #unask #unlearn