It seems like that was indeed one of his points -- that perhaps the future now depends on solving problems that do not have objective measures of success:
> Our next steps might be far more effective than simple resolutions, which are easily ignored or pushed aside.
That seems naive at best. How can you even judge what is effective with out some sort of metric? Seems like it would lead to alot of wasted effort.
As an aside,usually the tools and techniques used to solve a well defined problem become pretty important. They lead to other well defined questions and then further objective progress.
I also think the major problems we face are reasonably well defined, for example climate change and emission targets. Even then we struggle to actually solve some of them. Being nebulous will just make progress harder.
Really is a bit rich to compare yourself in some way to Hilbert while being so hand wavy.
> Our next steps might be far more effective than simple resolutions, which are easily ignored or pushed aside.