Introduction

Okay, thank you everybody.

Good evening everybody.

A Vision for Change

My name is Simon Halton and I am going to talk to you this evening about a platform that can end war, that can fix our broken politics, that can heal our divided societies, that can make brilliant coffee. Well, the last bit is a bit of market hype, but the rest is true. The rest is true.

It's...

We're going to do a demo of it, so if you do want to scan the QR code, I'm going to say because it's a demo, unfortunately there's a max of 25 people allowed, but the first 25 people will get in, the rest I'll show you anyway.

Personal Journey

And whilst you're doing that, just to tell you a little bit about myself, I am not a developer, I'm not technical, I'm not anything to do with this product.

Although I did used to be a developer, I spent 12 years working in the city, designing derivatives trading systems and things like this. I got into AI in 1989 in a micro kind of way, but my interest grew with Moore's law. And by 2005, I was obsessed with the topic.

When Ray Kurzweil brought out the singularity is near, basically I became obsessed, it blew me away. And ever since then, I've been fanatical about it.

Professional Background

But what I do for a living is I teach negotiation skills. I teach negotiation, collaboration, conflict resolution at organizations like Goldman Sachs, the British Army, all kinds of people.

I'm a visiting lecturer at Imperial College. I've also taught at the side business school at Oxford.

I've written a number of books on the topic, published by Financial Times and Pearson.

And so, if my hobby is AI, and my field is negotiation and conflict resolution, and I write books, you might expect me to write a book on AI and negotiation. And guess what? You'd be right. The End of Conflict came out earlier on this year.

AI and Peace Tech

Basically, I'd been looking at the field for a while and for a long time, like a lot of things with AI, nothing much was going on. And then there was a little bit going on, but not that impressive. Then there's a little bit more. And then this time last year, when I looked at it, I was blown away.

Tremendous, there's a whole new field out there basically called Peace Tech, which you may have come across. And it's doing some really amazing stuff in the sector. So we're gonna look at a platform that is based in that.

Citizens' Assemblies and Peace Tech

Can I ask you a question? Put your hands up if you've heard of citizens' assemblies. Has anybody heard of citizens' assemblies? So about a third of the people here have heard of that, great.

Those of you who don't know, citizens' assemblies are really powerful ways of making group community decisions, especially on divisive topics. So as an example, in 2016, in Ireland, they had a citizens' assembly on abortion.

It's in the constitution of Ireland that it is not allowed. It's a tremendously divisive topic in Ireland. Politicians wouldn't go near it. So they gave it to a citizens' assembly, should it be allowed.

Case Study: Ireland's Citizens' Assemblies

And they had 100 people, randomly selected, but representing the demography of the country. Took them on a process, meeting up once a month for several months, expert input, facilitated discussions, lots of homework in between each meeting, and then at the end of that program, at the end of that process, they had a vote. Should it be allowed or not? And two-thirds of the people voted that it should be allowed. Early termination should be allowed.

What was really interesting though, was not just that there was a significant majority for it, but a sixth abstained and a sixth voted against it. But even those six who voted against it supported it. Because they said, we support this process. This is a process where we were heard, our opinions were taken into account. And so even though we would have preferred a different outcome, we're going to put all of our efforts behind it to make it come about. And such a divisive topic, but at the end of this program, all kinds of hugs, all kinds of new best friends, and everybody saying that they totally enjoyed the process and they wanted to be more engaged in civic dialogue moving forward.

Challenges and Innovations

Problem with citizens assemblies though, is that they're expensive. They take a long time to run. It's difficult to get sufficient people, fully representative of the different communities. So it's difficult.

Introduction to Remesh Platform

which is where this platform comes in.

So this is a platform called Remesh, and I'll just go through it. So those of you who did get in, you should have seen a screen like this, a number of demography questions at the beginning.

So the first one, I've just set these up, simple ones. Do you work in tech? I'm going to say kind of. And then it says, next question is, how optimistic are you about our AI future for humanity? I'm going to say somewhat.

And these are just kind of demographic questions so that in the in the proper process, you can see whose opinion, which kind of people are thinking what kind of things to make sure that you really do capture all types of people in the conversation.

Then if I just go to the moderation page, Straight away you can see that we've got some stats. I've got some synthetic data on here, so this isn't fully representative of everybody here. So 68% work in tech, 4% don't, 28% kind of, and so on. And there's all kinds of other things that you can then break down this further.

Interaction and Feedback

What I'm gonna do now, I'm gonna press send on the question. And the question is, how do we solve world hunger? How do we solve world hunger? And then when we do that, those are people who have logged in, who are in, you'll get a text box, which you'll see. and it will say how do you sell world hunger and you've got 500 characters of input of free start free text input you can write anything you want in that after that you've got a minute and a half to enter that after that you will be shown a whole load of other people's inputs other people's opinions and with those you can either agree disagree or ignore you

limited to 25 participants, so. Yes, yes, thank you, yeah. I think I said that.

So after that, you should be, as well as being offered other people's opinions, which you can agree, disagree or ignore, you might also be shown other people's opinions in pairs, and you'll be asked to rank them. Those of you who aren't in on it, you'll see it up on here.

So I'm just going to click send. And then if we go to the screen, join the conversation.

Oh, we're sorry. Will it work? No, we're still sorry. So I'll talk you through it. I can dance it if you like.

So basically you'd get a free text here and you type in, you type in how do you think we should solve world hunger? Everybody go vegetarian or use vertical farming or less waste or local production or whatever it might be. Better distributions, whatever your opinions are.

and you can type your opinions in on that and then free text you can write as much as you like with it within within that capacity of 500 characters the ai will do the processing will do the facilitation it will then send your answer to other people other people doing it and you then get you'll get the feedback on what other people think of yours.

So let's say 50% of people think your idea is a great idea. That's what you'll be shown, because they can agree to it, they can disagree to it, or they can ignore it.

You also will be given the chance to agree and disagree to other things.

Key Differences from Social Media

Now there's an important distinction here.

In social media, let's say I were to say, I think everybody should go vegetarian. Guess what's going to happen? 10 million people are going to jump on me, going to say, how dare I tell them what to eat, etc.

I'm going to burst into tears. I never want to go back to the social media again.

Here, you can't do that. You can't say, you can't reply. And that's an important distinction.

All you can do is you can agree, you can disagree, or you can ignore. and you can put in your own input. So you might put in, I don't think you should go vegetarian at all.

I think we should eat more meat. I think that's a better way of doing it or whatever, whatever you want to put it. But it's not indirect counter to my input. So we don't get all of the ad hominem escalating anger that happens on social media.

Optimizing for Agreement

And what actually happens, you have people, you then see, you then get given everybody's opinions that people have typed in. and you get shown the percentages of how much people like it, et cetera, and what then tends to happen is that people try and game it for agreement. So people will see this comment, and they'll see the 55% like this, and they'll see this other very different comment, and they'll see the 63% like this, and they'll go, ah, I think I can come up with a sentence that can get most of these and most of these.

And basically they then come up with a new sentence. And this goes through iterative process and it becomes gamified for agreement.

Social media is optimized for disagreement, for outrage, for anger. This platform and other similar platforms are optimized for agreement.

Plus, apologies, you couldn't see that. You could see that right up until the moment that I did it live.

Moderation and Analysis

So this is the moderating side. And so if we have a look at some of the answers here. So this is... These are some of the answers that people would have typed in.

In order to solve hunger, shouldn't we first address the problem of unequal distribution of food like some have too much and others none? 62% agreed with that.

There's potential in social businesses that could address world hunger by producing food exclusively for this purpose. Maybe something entrepreneurs should look into, 62%. Type population control, 62%.

We can then start looking at this by different topic, hunger or distribution or whatever it is. We can then play around with these all kinds of different analysis that we can do on it.

As a moderator, I can also steer the conversation. I can see what's coming up here. And I can then start asking questions specific to what's come up.

And I can optimize the questions for different segments. So maybe there's a particular segment that I think, hmm, I think they just need a little bit of shaping or something, a little bit of steering. And I might send a question their way by a particular segment.

The Platform's Dual Approach

So this is a platform that is optimized for agreement through two methods. One, that method of the gamification by the participants. The other method is through the moderator, the moderator facilitating the conversation down the direction that they want it to go.

Just end this conversation. And just go to more, there should be, yeah, there we go. So then there's a lot more analysis that you can do on it.

I won't go into it in any detail. There's a whole load more features that I won't go into just because of time. But what I will do is give you an example.

Scaling Peace Efforts Globally

I talked about the Citizens Assembly in Ireland, and that was very powerful, but it's not scaled. It wasn't scaled. I'm going to give you an example where the AI platform enabled it to scale to a much larger community.

And this person here, Colin Owen. Colin Owen is a research associate at Liverpool University. He does what's called peace polling. And he was involved in the Northern Ireland Good Friday Agreement.

The Good Friday Agreement, if anybody remembers, was considered impossible. When you look at the Reverend Ian Paisley on one side and Martin McGuinness and Gerry Adams on the other side, nobody thought that that was possible, that they would come to any peace agreement. It was so successful that this is Reverend Ian Paisley and Martin McGuinness, they became best friends. They became known as the Chuckle Brothers because, as you can see from here, they got on so well and had such a great laugh together. It's a tremendously successful process.

Case Study: The Good Friday Agreement

What Colin Irwin used to do, peace polling, he would walk the high street with his clipboard and he would stop people as they were doing their high street shopping and he would ask them some demographic questions, are they Catholic, are they Protestant, et cetera. Then he would ask them, what did they want to see in the peace agreement? And he would then collect all of this information and he'd relay it back to the negotiators.

The negotiators would look at it and go, oh, Okay, so the Catholics want this. They'd never accept this, but they'd be willing to accept this. Okay, and the Protestants want this. They'd never accept this, but they'd be willing to accept this. Okay, I think we can see where the deal is gonna be.

And they did this with issue after issue. They'd go back to the streets with the next issue, do the polling, feed that back to the negotiator. And ultimately they were able to come up with an agreement that they were very confident, when it went to a referendum, would be supported by the people. And it turned out that the people's input in this is a very important part of it.

If we contrast this with the Oslo Peace Accords, which took roundabout the same time, the Oslo Peace Accords, they came to an agreement that was a very good agreement. Everybody in the room thought this was a very, very good agreement. Unfortunately, it was done in secret. because it was illegal for both sides to talk to the negotiators of the other side. So it was all done in secret.

So then when it was presented to the people, to the communities, neither of the communities supported it. So it died a death, sadly. So this... People's input into the negotiation is an important part of it.

Case Study: Libya's National Unity

Fast forward, Colin Owen does exactly the same in places like the Sudan, in the Yemen, in Sri Lanka. I'm going to give you an example of what he did in Libya, and this was using Remesh, using this platform.

And in Libya, after the civil war, You can imagine, it was pretty chaotic, warlords all over the place, very tribal, gang driven, everybody armed to the teeth, not a very good situation.

They tried to create a government of national unity. Again, everybody thought absolutely impossible.

Irwin facilitated a process using this platform, including a thousand people at the same time. It was a two hour conversation. It was done live on TV and a third of the country watched it. A third of the population of the country watched it.

And they came to an agreement on what the government of national unity should be, what it should be consisted of. In that two-hour process, that government of national unity still runs. So it's a very powerful process.

Conclusion: Why Platforms Like Remesh Matter

As I said, it can end war, as it did in Libya, fix the democracy problem, because it really does... get full, build full trust in the process.

Oops, sorry about the animation. Solves local community issues, heals our polarized societies, infrastructure projects.

The reason why HS2 is decades late and trillions over budget is because of they never get the full support from the people because there's so many different stakeholders. How on earth do you get agreement with the stakeholders? Well, this is how, this is how you do it.

So infrastructure projects, organizations to be really successful by full ownership of the organization, by the people, all of the decisions, all of the input by the people. So they feel fully motivated. They feel proud to be part of this organization using a platform like this.

even aligning AI. How do we align AI? It's really easy.

You find the interests of humanity, which is pretty easy, and then you align the AI with the will of humanity. Easy. Well, the will of humanity, how do we get that?

Well, this at the moment can do 5,000. There's another 5,000 people's input.

There's another platform called Polis, which you may have heard of, which does, which at the moment does 40,000, 40,000 people's input, but it's scaling up. And why not get the will of humanity through this way?

So the revolution starts here.