I think we could improve the quality of debate by orders of magnitude with a recipe something like this:
1) The debate is moderated by A.I.
2) As soon as the A.I. detects a person is not directly answering a question, it cuts off their mic and they lose that turn.
3) Everybody has a fixed time to answer, and only one microphone is active at a time so people cannot talk over each other
They would game it by selectively training the A.I. It would cut off all the answers the establishment doesn't want.
This.
Debates are bread and circuses anyway. They are only useful in producing mindless sound bites.
What's more useful is a disussion between people who actually want to understand each other's viewpoint, rather than pursuade the people listening that the other guy is wrong.
ai lol
Or, people could learn how to debate the same way debate nerds do in school competitions. The process is nothing new, and even teenagers can do it.
Many questions are actually affirmations with a question, like:
-why did you kill this people? (In case the person really didn't kill anyone)
If the interviewee wants to refute the affirmation inside the question the AI has to detect it too and allow him to defend himself
bad-faith actors will quick learn to ask "Have you stopped beating your wife?" questions.
when the victim tries to explain he loves his wife.... mic is cut....
"do you think combustion vechicles should be banned in 2040, or earlier?"
when the victim starts to say climate change is fake... mic is cut...
and so on...
besides biased AI, we have always to remember that 5th grade boys will always trick the AI in no time.
