Brave Conversations FACDec2023

Helping to create even Smarter Humans for the Digital Age

This was our 23rd Brave Conversations, our fourth in London, but our first in partnership with Founders and Coders.

Brave Conversations FAC 2023 took place within an environment where the hype around Large Language Models was beginning to settle and people were curious to explore how to use the technologies in their everyday lives.

We explored:

• What is a Social Machine?
• How do we use them better to help us in our everyday lives?
• How do we become Smarter Humans in the age of the Smart Machines?

We were guided in our conversations by the use of Mark Moore’s Strategic Triangle asking:

• What Can We Do?
• What Should We Do?
• What May We Do?

"We assumed people were going to do good things with it. We really didn’t have any idea of what bad things people would do with it.
Everything that is bad within society is writ large within the Internet. They lose their moral compass in a way."

Professor Dame Wendy Hall in Interview with Beth Ridley

Objectives

The goal of Brave Conversations is to challenge everyone who participates - regardless of what background they come from, or what their skillset and expertise are - to more fully explore and understand the interplay between humans, the societies we live in, and the technologies we have created.

We want to empower people to proactively make decisions about how we live our everyday lives, how we participate as commercial actors within the economy, and how we operate as digital citizens and exercise our political rights. That empowerment comes from demystifying data and information and understanding how it informs the everyday decisions which gradually create the future.

Each of those decisions begin on an individual human level - our bodies and our minds - and then emanates out to our families, communities, societies and from there to nation states. We are all responsible for the world we are creating and never has there been a time when we have more potential to influence the changes around us. But we need to be given the space for robust debate and respectful curiosity, learning from each other, playing with ideas, and asking the questions that are both confronting and potentially will take us to uncomfortable places.