On Friday, September 23rd, the National Speech and Debate Association (NSDA) released the two potential resolutions for November Public Forum debate. The topic area was "Fourth Industrial Revolution". The potential resolutions read as follows: "OPTION 1 – Resolved: On balance, smartphones have improved the quality of life for users." and "OPTION 2 – Resolved: On balance, the benefits of the Internet of Things outweigh the harms of decreased personal privacy." Since their release, Public Forum debaters have raised widespread objections to these resolutions. Some of the most common criticism and issues with the topics are as follows:

The resolutions themselves aren't conducive to good PF debate. They force people to turn to the most obscure, squirrelly arguments in the hopes that people don't have blocks. This decreases clash and thus the educational quality of debate.

While the topic area of the "Fourth Industrial Revolution" is a relevant debate, the two current resolutions select segments of the topic area which are either "lopsided to prefer one side over the other in all debates" or are "highly irrelevant". There are many more important questions that the Association could have debaters research and debate than whether "smartphones are good".

To focus a little more on the side skew these resolutions propose, both resolutions heavily favor the affirmative side of the debate. The first option has a major preconceived bias for the pro, insofar as almost 70% of adults in the United States own a smartphone (the number is probably higher for people in debate who own smartphones). Moreover, it is infinitely difficult for the negation to have any sort of foothold in arguing that "on balance", smartphones are bad. Any small objections are rooted mostly in pseudo-science, are not true, or are not a big issue. Meanwhile, the affirmative has infinite ground to specify hyper-specific advocacies, which ruins any sort of predictability for the negation to prepare for, encourages pro teams to run "pseudo-plans" because the internet is constantly changing, and rids the debate of any sort of reciprocity in that the affirmative has infinite ground, while the negation is confined to a small set of untrue or trivial impacts. The second option also has a major skew to the affirmation. The Internet of Things (IoT), while very relevant to today, is extremely broad in scope. Major issues come into play when the affirmative can, again, run hyper-specific advocacies without any sort of predictability or reciprocity, while the con is limited solely to privacy impacts. Not only does this significantly hamper the negation's ability to effectively debate or win rounds (for the above reasons), but it again falters in the face of preconceived bias. Recent surveys find that a majority of people (from a consumer standpoint) support the concept of a "smart home" or at least having "connected devices". Most people don't see a privacy violation, because, for most, the IoT is simply having your refrigerator notify you on your phone that you are out of milk, or sending maintenance data to a company for repair and future product development, and such. Looking at a B to B (business) standpoint, there is even less ground. One would be hard pressed to effectively argue that the presence of sensors in, or the interconnectedness of anything from industrial machinery to infrastructure, and such, would violate any privacy.

These resolutions (chiefly the second option) provides little diversity from the 2016 September/October topic. It proposes the same safety versus privacy dichotomy present in the former "Probable Cause" topic.

The "Fourth Industrial Revolution" as a topic area can provide many fruitful and diverse topics. The topic can lend itself to many more balanced, interesting, and fresh debates with resolutions pertaining to issues such as "artificial intelligence", "3D printing", "industrialization of labor", "space exploration", "biotechnology", "cybersecurity" and much more. We petition the NSDA for their reconsideration of the November PF Debate resolution options. We request that, at the very least, the resolutions be rephrased to provide more balanced ground to both sides (for example, in the second option, omit "of decreased personal privacy"). We also propose that the NSDA consider overhauling the current resolutions by providing entirely new resolutions which improve the quality and education of debates at November tournaments.