Interfaith Dialogue and Peace … and AI

By Keith Fox | Civiltalk | Let’s Clarion This Series

Some of the most difficult conversations human beings have are between people who hold deeply different beliefs.

That is especially true in interfaith dialogue. Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists and people from other faith traditions may see the world very differently. The goal is not necessarily to agree—or to ask anyone to surrender what they believe.

The challenge is to understand one another well enough to remain in conversation despite those differences.

And that makes me wonder about something else happening in the world right now: artificial intelligence.

Much of our conversation about AI focuses on cognition. How much can AI know? How quickly can it reason? What jobs can it perform? When will it become smarter than we are?

Those are important questions. But cognition is only one dimension of intelligence.

Human beings also listen. We empathize. We build trust. We recognize emotion. We manage disagreement. We persuade, forgive, cooperate and form relationships and communities.

As artificial intelligence becomes more capable, I believe these distinctly human abilities may become more important, not less.

We are actually developing two related but very different kinds of skills.

Conversational AI is human-to-machine. We are learning how to ask AI better questions, provide context, challenge its assumptions and work collaboratively with increasingly capable systems.

But Conversational Intelligence is human-to-human.

It is our ability to listen carefully, understand another person’s perspective, communicate clearly, manage disagreement, recognize emotion, build trust, find common ground and move forward together.

Clarion CI can help us strengthen those abilities.

It can analyze a conversation and help us see things we may have missed. Were we really listening? Did someone’s perspective get ignored? When did the conversation become defensive? Where did trust begin to break down? Could a different question or response have produced a better outcome?

But AI should not replace the human conversation.

It should help us become better at having it.

That is what makes the potential application to interfaith dialogue so interesting.

Around the world, people with profoundly different religious beliefs, cultures and histories are trying to live together, solve problems together and sometimes overcome generations of distrust.

Imagine using AI not to tell people what to believe, but to help them become more aware of how they are talking to one another—whether they are listening with curiosity, understanding another person’s perspective, disagreeing respectfully, reducing defensiveness and finding areas of shared humanity.

That is where technology and human intelligence can work together.

Technology will not bring peace to the world.

People will.

But technology may be able to help people strengthen the Conversational Intelligence required to have the difficult conversations that make peace more possible.

That is also the idea behind what we are building at CivilTalk. We use artificial intelligence to make the human dynamics of conversation more visible—so people can better understand what happened, why it happened and how they might communicate more effectively the next time.

The AI era therefore presents us with two very different challenges:

How do we become better at talking with machines—and how do we become better at talking with each other?

We will need both.

Conversational AI is Human ↔ Machine. Conversational Intelligence is Human ↔ Human.

And when the goal is understanding across our deepest differences, the second may ultimately matter even more.

CivilTalk | The Conversational Intelligence Company

Better Conversations → Stronger Relationships → Better Outcomes