Enhancing Diplomatic Negotiations with Logical Connectives

TRANSCEND MEMBERS, 21 Oct 2024

Anthony Judge | Laetus in Praesens - TRANSCEND Media Service

Indicative Reframing of Intractable Dialogues by AI — Russia-Ukraine, Israel-Palestine, China-USA

Introduction

21 Oct 2024 – The world is currently faced with an unprecedented array of conflicts with the prospect that these will escalate further such as to increase the number of fatalities and environmental degradation. Associated with such conflicts are an unprecedented number of fatalities due to hunger and malnutrition — with little prospect of their mitigation, despite declarations to the contrary.

These challenges, with others, are recognized in the recently approved Pact for the Future of the United Nations on the occasion of its Summit of the Future. That event was explicitly inspired by the possibility and necessity of “turbocharging” the Sustainable Development Goals with its 169 tasks, as discussed separately (Turbocharging SDGs by Activating Global Cycles in a 64-fold 3D Array, 2024). That Summit explicitly recognized the threat to humanity represented by AI, resulting in the adoption of a Global Digital Compact to frame a regulatory response. Little use was seemingly made of AI in enhancing the discourse at the Summit, although it proved possible to make use of AI to analyze the documents and the debate (AI analysis of connectives in the UN’s Pact for the Future and its Global Digital Compact, 2024; Analysis by AI of Reports of UN Debate on Artificial intelligence, 2024).

Arguably the prospects for addressing the challenges fruitfully are assumed to be associated with some form of negotiation — most obviously with respect to intractable conflicts. Curiously little is said about the processes of dialogue employed — despite frequent reference to the negotiation processes which employ them. For obvious reasons such dialogue takes place under a cloak of secrecy — usefully exemplified by Chatham House rules. It may therefore be concluded that a key process, whereby the challenges to effective global governance are addressed, is deemed to require the maximum degree of non-transparency — purportedly in the interest of ensuring global security.

A consequence of this posture is that little is known of the efficacy of the “dialogue” used in negotiation processes to mitigate problematic global conditions. The value of any publicized discourse for purposes of public relations is deprecated in contrast with processes which take place “behind closed doors” — with little publicized insight into their efficacy or the manner in which they have been enhanced in the light of insights from past failures. Consistent with this lack of transparency has been the manner in which the UN articulated and adopted the key documents of its recent Summit (Derrick Broze, Summit of the Future: the public still has not seen the final draft of the Pact for the Future, Nexus, 20 September 2024).

One acclaimed indication of such negotiation is Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In (1981/2011) — the focus of the Harvard Negotiation Project. It is appropriate to ask whether the innovation in dialogue and negotiation over the recent past has been commensurate with the exacerbation of conflict is is claimed to address. Is getting to “yes” the most appropriate framing of dialogue?

The concern in what follows continues to be the extent to which debate on future global strategy, and the relevance of AI, is adequately articulated in the light of the logical connectives fundamental to the operation of AI and a computer-based knowledge civilization, as previously discussed (Comprehensible Mapping of the Variety of Fundamental Governance Functions, 2024). The use of “connectives” in debate whether logical, emotional, “spiritual”, or action-oriented is necessarily fundamental to the articulation of coherent strategy, its comprehensibility and its wider uptake. This consideration could be considered fundamental to any UN preoccupation with “turbocharging” the SDGs.

As evident in the documents of the Summit of the Future and in the debate, the possibility that AI might be of considerable value in response to this global crisis is obscured by relatively ill-informed fear-mongering regarding the threat of AI to the future of human civilization. Little attempt is seemingly made to explore and demonstrate in detail how AI might be used to mitigate the challenges to the governance of a knowledge-based civilization — emotion having been recognized as “trumping” logic? The outcome of the UN-organized AI for Good Summit (2023) does not seem to have contributed to more balanced understanding. Unfortunately the fear-mongering has effectively been embodied in the Global Digital Compact, as approved at the Summit of the Future. Somewhat ironically even the possibility of use of AI to summarize, analyze and render comprehensible the documents emanating from the Summit of the Future has been avoided by the UN.

The concern in what follows is how coherence and its comprehension is engendered by summit debates of strategic significance for the future and the need for debate of a higher order (Second-order Dialogue and Higher Order Discourse for the Future, 2023). Some possibilities with that emphasis have been articulated previously in the light of the potential role of AI (Facilitating Global Dialogue with AI? 2024; Pathways in Governance between Logic, Emotion, Spirituality and Action, 2024; AI-enabled Mapping and Animation of Learning Pathways, 2024; Reframing Challenges of Governance of SDGs through Music, 2024).

An earlier experiment with AI engendered a speculative dialogue between ETs and the UN, given the hypothetical possibility of contact with extraterrestrials (***). This was done to explore the ability of the UN to engage with logical connectives which might be preferred by ETs — or characteristic of “others” in a global civilization deemed to be “aliens” or “terrestrial extras”. That exercise recognized the possibility that such speculative dialogue could be created experimentally with respect to an interchange between parties currently engaged in major conflict (Russia-Ukraine, Israel-Palestine, China-Taiwan, and the Koreas, for example). A dialogue of that kind could even be created between advocates and opponents of AI, given the focus of UN debate on the matter.

As in the previous experiments, the responses of ChatGPT 4o are distinctively presented below in grayed areas, in parallel with those of Claude 3.5. Given the length of the document to which the exchange gives rise, the form of presentation has itself been treated as an experiment in anticipation of the future implication of AI into research documents. Web technology now enables the whole document to be held as a single “page” with only the “questions” to AI rendered immediately visible — a facility developed in this case with the assistance of both ChatGPT and Claude 3 (but not operational in PDF variants of the page, in contrast with the original). Reservations and commentary on the process of interaction with AI to that end have been discussed separately (Methodological comment on experimental use of AI, 2024). Whilst the presentation of responses of two AI’s could be readily considered excessive, it offers a “stereoscopic” perspective highlighting the strengths and limitations of each.

As in previous uses of this approach, the question evoked is what can be “gleaned” from interaction with AIs, given their unprecedented access to information generated by a vast array of authors and authorities. The approach also offers the possibility that similar questions could be asked of any AI facility to which readers may have access, currently or in the future. The questions could well be refined, and the responses challenged, given the proactive responses of AI to such interaction.

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