 Minister Tang, thanks again for joining us here at the Great Wave Festival of the House of Beautiful Business. So the House of Beautiful Business is a global think tank and community, and we are all about the idea of beautiful business. So my first question for you is, is there such a thing as beautiful government? And if so, how would you describe it? Yeah, certainly. To me, a beautiful government is a government that radically trusts the people. The more the government trusts its people, the more beautiful it becomes. Because, just like Smart City, it's about making the citizens wise. A beautiful government is to trust its citizens so the citizens can create beauty. So on that notion of trust, and that's something that you talk about very often, you say, that's really critical. Trust among citizens, trust between citizens and their government. But in many countries, in many democracies, trust has also often been lost or been destroyed. So there is disenchantment with politics. And there are, of course, like in any relationship there are moments when trust is broken. How do you restore trust once it's broken once? Isn't that harder than creating trust originally? So how do you do that as a government? Sure. I think the easiest way is just to owe up to whatever we did wrong and say that the citizens really had a better idea. We were in the wrong. We are now implementing whatever the citizens have proposed. And we become kind of the vendor to realize the citizens' alternate vision. And this is what I call reverse procurement, where the citizens set a new specification. And we deliver the necessary resources to make it a reality. We have seen many, many times of that during the counter coronavirus. You see that traditional rice cooker there? That was a, and there's smaller one there. That was from a professor, Leichen Yu, and who had this very crazy idea at the time. It seems that putting no water into a traditional rice cooker could disinfect the medical mask without destroying the medical mask material. And because the medical masks were designed to be one-time use, nobody really thought it's a scene, a scene of the technology rice cooker. I mean, it isn't that for cooking rice. But then he published and the TFDA, the Food and Drug Administration, well, initially become kind of kind of skeptical after the journalists asked them for maybe the 100th time. They tried that experiment themselves and found it to be really effective. And then we said that, oh, we're wrong in doubting them. So we invited Professor Leichen Yu to our daily livestream, CECC, Central Epidemic Command Center Press Conference, where Professor Leichen explained the science while the Minister Chen Shizhong started cooking a medical mask in the front of the TV. Later on, international research would also show that this method also works for N95 as well. So that's one example of how gestures and small practices generate trust. And trust was really pivotal also in the way you handled the COVID-19 pandemic. And Taiwan has been widely praised for the way it has responded. So what has your country done well and what can other countries learn from the way you managed with the crisis? In Taiwan, I mean, we're officially post-pandemic for mosques now with no locally transmitted cases. There's pop singers that host tens of thousands of audience, of course all wearing masks in the Taipei Small Dome in a live concert. We've been playing professional baseball for quite some time with a live audience, not a robotic audience, and many more. So for us, I think the key is just to trust the citizens. We make sure that we communicate the science early and in a humorous way so that people understand the theory, the value, and so on behind the scientific measures. And then people would come up with innovative ways. The traditional rice cooker for one, the mask availability map for the other from their own innovations without any top-down gestures such as a lockdown. Because we had a lockdown in 2003 when SARS-1.0 hits Taiwan. We locked down an entire hospital unannounced and in determinate when it comes to the SARS-1.1, which is that right after the SARS there was many attempts in making vaccination, in making drugs, and so on, which kind of fizzled but at the constitutional court at the time right after SARS charged the legislature to devise a set of regulations and laws that can counter SARS if 1.2, 1.3 comes again with no lockdowns. So for us, lockdown was so traumatic that we will not go back there. And so we made the CEC, the toll-free number, the border quarantine, the digital funds, the idea that you wear a mask to protect you from your own washed hands, cute spokes dogs. There's many, many parts that could be shared in the Taiwan model with different jurisdictions. And we've been sharing that, I think, with 14 different countries a few days before the World Health Assembly. And we call it the Taiwan model. That's interesting that you mentioned that you have to communicate it in a, I believe you said, in a humorous way that really engages people. And so obviously your response to the pandemic is built on science. I'm curious about how you orchestrate your communications. How much of it is data-based and scientific and how much of it is intuition? Or is just a good feeling for what your people respond to? Well, it's science. I mean, social science is science. And the science of communication is also communication science. These are all very scientific. And so for example, this is science. This is the spokes dog that I mentioned. And we explained, for example, the science of covering your mouth and nose while sneezing, of physical distancing when you're indoor, keep three, shiba inus with one another when you're outdoor, keep two, remember to wear your mask because it protects you from your unwashed hands and so on. And all these are based on the very simple idea of humor over a rumor. Basically, we measure the conspiracy theories and the people's kind of myths and disinformation transmission rate. So for example, maybe a conspiracy theory travel our value of three, meaning that every hour on average one person spread to three people and that will go viral, so to speak. But if we respond in a quick fashion hour or at most two after such a conspiracy theory spread with very cute dog pictures that have their value of five, then within a day or so, our message reach more people. And when you laughed about it, you could not feel outraged about the same thing anymore. And so it serves as a kind of mimetic vaccination to make sure that people talk about these measures in a way that is not in a panicked anxious mode of outreach, but rather can laugh about it and then discuss the actual science behind it. And so it's all very scientific because we do measurements. I mean, the role of humor in communicating about the right practices regarding a pandemic is quite interesting. And also, I think what you said earlier that governments have to admit when they make mistakes in order to recreate trust. So let's maybe switch to your philosophy of open government and talk more about that because the pandemic has been such a great example, I think, of what you envision there. That's right. Yeah, so in open government in Taiwan, we make the case of radical transparency. That is to say, every conversation that we have, including this very interview, we publish either as video or as transcript online. So people understand not only the what of policy, but also the how and why of policymaking. And this is very important because without the context of policymaking, no matter how innovative people are, people's contribution would not be able to be amplified into actual policies if we do not have the same factual basis. And so publishing the context through which people can understand how policies are made is essential. And so we have, for example, the joint platform, which has more than half of the Taiwanese population visiting at least once. And it's very popular as an e-petition platform. So with 5,000 signatures collected, we can do pretty much anything on the citizens' order in order to give an account of why we're making policies this way. So it has been very successfully mobilized to, for example, to gradually bond the use of plastic straws, even on national identity drinks such as the bubble tea, or to file the taxes, but not through a Windows computer, but in a handheld device or a Mac or Linux, or even the kiosk in a nearby convenience store. And that was started by the petitioner that gets fed up by the Windows software. And then there's many more. And so if people are not happy about how things are going, instead of waiting for four years to upload three bits, which is called voting, they can get people's signatures very quickly and then get us to come out and make an account and then work out the co-creation together. And what is required for such an open-source way of going about digital democracy is specifically culture speaking. Why is it working so well in Taiwan? Yeah, because we're a young democracy. So I think what's required is this mentality that democracy is itself a technology, or rather a set of technologies that everybody can improve. It's not something that's fixed in stone. Well, back in the Greek times, the essence people actually did voting through this stone machine. So maybe at some point it was written in stone. But now we're in the digital age and people can upload much more bits than four bits per four years. And therefore democracy itself needs to undergo the same digital transformation as other businesses so that we can not only digitize and optimize, but also include more people and incorporate more innovations in the democratic process. That is the attitude of democracy as a technology. And looking at the other democracies and other societies in the world, where do you see this next frontier of digital democracy go on a global scale? Yeah, well, we learn a lot from other democracies. We learned, for example, the participatory budgeting system from Kansu and Desi Dei in Madrid, from the Paris city as well. We learned the e-petition system. We didn't create it on our own. We learned it from Beter de Kavik from Iceland. The POTUS software that we use assistive intelligence to gather people's common grounds instead of polarized opinion that came from Seattle, the list goes on. So I don't think this is a Taiwanese thing. I'm more of a digital minister and also kind of the ambassador from the civic technology community and internet governance community to the kind of real world politics to make sure that whatever we invented, for example, in the Ethereum cryptocurrency and the blockchain, there's new ways of funding called quadratic funding, new ways of voting called quadratic voting that are far more efficient but couldn't be realized in pen and paper and paper tools or stone tools that easily requires digital infrastructure. And so I introduced quadratic voting to the presidential hackathon in Taiwan that's been going on for a couple of years now. So it's all about translating what's already worked in the internet open source community into everyday politics. I think that is the direction to go and would be my main advice to other democracies. You've been called a genius minister Tang and you really are a galleon figure of a very optimistic way of looking at digital democracy. In fact, you wrote an op-ed for the New York Times where you said the future of democracy is digital democracy. Now, arguably you could say that we've been somewhat disappointed with digital, with big tech and surveillance scandals and privacy issues. And on the other hand, there's research saying that the worldwide support for democratic systems is really in decline. So I guess the question is what makes you so optimistic going forward and is Taiwan the exception or can it be the norm? Yeah, I think like in 2013, if you go to a Taiwan anywhere in the street ask a random people whether you think a minister can hold open office hours every Wednesday and where everything is on the record and whether you can start a petition or do a sandbox application, a prosperity budget. The president herself hands out five trophies every year for the social innovator to be given the presidential mandate. They will look at you like you're crazy. So there was a time and it was not too long ago. It was just seven years ago where an average person in Taiwan would feel that democracy is going nowhere and is kind of feeling apathy. They're not feeling any passion when it comes to political possibilities. And it took, of course, the Occupy Movement in 2014 when we occupied a parliament with half a million people on the street and many more online who talked about the cross-strait service and trade agreement and settled on a set of four demands, not one less, that got accepted by the head of the parliament. So we have the reason to be optimistic because for us, the demonstration is not just a protest, it's a demo. It shows everyone that it worked. And I think this is gaining ground. For example, the way of deliberative-style organization on the street has been then improved and perfected, I would argue, by the people in Hong Kong in the anti-elab protests. Whereas in Sunflower, there's maybe 20 different centers. We couldn't call it decentralized. But in Hong Kong, there's maybe 2,000 centers, in which case we have to call it decentralized because we cannot keep count of the centers anymore. When it comes to organization, it's purely horizontal or indelible. Be what style. And so I think around the world, people are finding new ways to horizontally organize themselves, whether they call it a democracy or whether they call it anti-establishment etocracy. I mean, it's fine by me because for me, any kind of organization that horizontally linked people together to create new possibility is a good one. It's good if some government decide to be part of the multi-stakeholder firm, like the Taiwanese government, but I firmly believe that this style of movement, I have reason to be optimistic with or without governmental support. And the horizontal organizations you talked about, the etocracies, I guess as always, to what degree does it still require a charismatic leader like you? So I know you're a very humble person, but at the same time you also are the figurehead of this kind of governing. So how important is it to rally around someone like you who has a lot of media appearances and talks about these things? And also going forward, how important will you be? Or is it now really up to the community to self-organize? Yeah, I would say in Taiwan it's on autopilot now because I relinquish the copyright of my images so anyone can remix me to endorse whatever position that I have not even heard of. So it's a remixing culture that we're looking at. And in that sense, the way I bring the Hong Kong movement up is that there's easily thousands of charismatic leaders. The people who compose may glory be to Hong Kong. The people who start this kind of chorus in singing in a random supermarket. And so on, each of those horizontal actions have its own charismatic leaders. But then it's thousands of them so I can't keep track of them all. And so to me this is what, you know, Polish-centered or bee water or etocracy really means in that anyone who feels like it's like a flash mob or something, feels like starting something, can get the charisma from the horizontal network by starting essentially a trending hashtag. And then that hashtag gains the life on its own. It becomes trending. And the first person who used that hashtag, which would be Chris Massina who invented the term hashtag, you don't ask for Chris permission whenever we use a hashtag. He certainly did not patent it. So there's no control. So the charisma is there, but there is no top-down control. There's no exclusion possible. Nobody needs to ask for my permission when they use my likeness in promoting their favorite idea. And nobody has to ask for Chris Massina's permission whenever they want to start a new hashtag. And that is the kind of style of leadership that is essentially take all sides. If Taiwan and this way of governing is on autopilot, as you said, what remains there for you to do? So when do you realize your mission is complete and what are some of the next challenges for you going forward? Yeah, I think my work is already complete and has been completed quite a while ago. And I think I'm mostly in this just for fun now. Because I really enjoy listening to people. I really enjoy taking various different positions and ethnographically just hang out with people and learning new languages, new coaches, and so on. So I'm honored and grateful that people are paying their taxes to support me in my hobby full-time, I guess. But I don't think this is a mission, quote-unquote anymore. Certainly not the kind of the feeling that we had in 2014. Like if we don't help the occupiers, the entire democracy might be in shambles. I think especially after COVID, what we say after, but we're actually doing. So after the worst of COVID in Taiwan, I think we're firmly having a polity where people genuinely care about one another no matter how different in terms of, you know, culture or age or political belief or whatever. And with this kind of polity, I think I'm really just doing this for fun now. Speaking of fun. Speaking of fun and the horizontal movement that you talked about, of course, some of the technological innovations of these recent years have helped with that a lot. So we'd be curious to hear your opinion on a platform like TikTok, for example. On a scale from one to ten, how excited are you about such a platform and what your message stands for? Yeah, like 15 seconds of fun, isn't it? I think TikTok and the like is building on the idea of essentially the phone being an extension of our just like sensory organs, I guess. It's basically a glimpse of connectedness, which is actually asynchronous because it's not really at the same time, not as our current video conversation where I can see you nodding and nod in return so we know that we're in the same space. It's essentially in asynchronous mode and because it's so short, the psychological projection of the person holding the phone, looking at it, have to complete the gestalt that is to say to fill in what's missing and that creates both a yearning and recognizing longingness of more and also a connectedness, but that is largely a like mirror, a personal reflection of one's own interpretation and not what's actually on the other side. And so for me, I always use my iPad with this Apple Pencil and I always use my phone, which you say Samsung Galaxy, with this stylus to remind myself that the touchscreen is not my skin and that this is not an extension of my body because I always interact with it through an intermediary. It could be pencil or stylus or a, I don't know, keyboard, mouse or whatever. I don't get addicted and my psychological projections is reserved for people that I'm sure that is sharing the co-presence with me, which is like the two of you now, but not through psychological projection to the fragments of like just 15 minutes, sorry, 15 seconds, a glimpse of other people. So I don't get addicted. I don't have the feeling of FOMO and I consider these actually to be counterproductive if what we want to build is long-term trusting relationships between people. But of course, these are still great ways to discover new people. The point is simply if we don't spend quality synchronous time with them, then these are not a good substitute for what a satisfying long-term relationship could be. And how might these then be redesigned based on what kind of principles to make the sense of longing and connection more hopeful and real? Yeah, I think just sharing the space in the same time. There's ways to share the same space even amidst the COVID. For example, I just got this XR space headset and I'm really excited about it because it's the first headset that I can wear in VR for like hours and hours, like three or four hours without feeling that it's too heavy. It doesn't need a controller, so I can use my hands and navigate very freely and it can scan my surroundings so I can easily bring other people into a space that I am in. And with this, this is not virtual reality, this is shared reality. It brings people together and feel because it has a built-in 5G chip when I nod and the other person sees my nodding almost as quickly as if we're in the same room or if we're connected through fiber optic lines as we are now through fiber optics and Ethernet. And so, yeah, things like a shared reality device for me is much more preferred than a solo virtual reality experience where everybody may be in their own reality but there's nothing to connect them to data. So speaking of virtual reality, the analyst Benedict Evans has coined this term VR winter saying that interestingly enough the pandemic did not lead to a rise and it hasn't led to a rise in VR applications, right? It wasn't really a VR as our... although Burning Man is now going fully virtual, this might maybe be a sort of breakthrough moment for VR, but it's not, it's been really hard to enter mainstream. So what's your outlook on VR? How long is it going to take and does it have a future really as a mainstream technology? Well, as I said, the previous headset that I tried were too heavy and requires the use of a controller. And so unless you're a dedicated professional gamer, these two are deal breakers. I mean, maybe you would give it five minutes of your time but nothing more because it's just not very comfortable. And so it's just... I think a convenience and comfort is really important for people to feel that they can express them freely in any space. I mean, if I go to a physical space but they ask me to don this very heavy dongle and I cannot gesture, I can just press some Nintendo controller keys which controls my virtual hand. I would not feel that I'm actually in that space. I would feel that I'm in a kind of simulation and that will inhibit my creative and social potentials. And so I'm not saying that XR space is the breakthrough device, but any breakthrough device need to solve for, you know, controller free and for the lightweight enough that those two convenience factor. And what about neural link? So we just heard of Elon Musk's latest. So that goes obviously further for this human-machine interaction. Is that exciting to you and in what way and where do you see that going? Yeah. Well, I think neural link currently can transmit several bits of information like maybe enough to move a mouse pointer or things like that. But what I'm talking about in the shared reality requires like gigabits per second which is not even one-tenth of the bandwidth of what Neil had in the Matrix original movie with this USB line when not really USB with this connection, the spinal cord connection. I think that's 10 gigabits per second or so if you want to capture all the sensory stimuli. So, of course, neural link is a beginning but bits are not currently, you know, broad enough as a broadband to make the pigs believe that they're in another reality. And so it of course may be useful for people who are paralyzed and so on, but for it to really become like sub-vocalization or a communication machine or telepathy machine or things like that, the technology still needs a lot of work. The same might apply to GPT-3 which was called by the MIT Technology Review called the most powerful language model ever. It's been this overnight sensation developed by the OpenAI Alliance. What's your take on GPT-3? How significant is it in the evolution of AI? Yeah, I think I've played hours and hours with GPT-2 with Talk2Transformer and I plan to use GPT-3 to make an art installation that can synthesize my speech and response and so that people can have a kind of 24-hour a day conversation with my poetry basically because one of the things that GPT-3 does very well is that you can tell it, take the Lord of the Rings but express it in the style of Dr. Seuss and it does that brilliantly. And so it's not original in either content or style but it can mingle the contents and the styles in very surprising configurations that were very difficult for human beings to work with so much configurations in the same time. And so I think it's a great canvas on which our creative mind can set ourselves free. It's just like when I work on translation projects I prefer translating like difficults like Jabberwocky or even all the way to Finnegan's Wake and there is no one right translation and now with GPT-3 we can explore much more widely into the possibility space of culture and of language and therefore create or recreate as translators the kind of feelings that Joyce would want to express in that contemporary state into our contemporary state and that's something without GPT-3's help one person can easily spend decades in just translating one chapter of Finnegan's Wake into modern language like a non-English, well non-Finnegan's Wake language. So I think it's a great boon to the people who are doing creative work around words. One more follow-up question on GPT-3. You know it's still prone to spooing out hateful, sexist and racist languages so many other language models just like humans. And it's also sometimes very off as other commentators have observed with very trivial things. So how long will it take until we can really fully trust it? And then again maybe the philosophical question is do we have to fully trust it? Yeah trust it for what? All I said was it's a glorified synonyms dictionary and of course it's synonyms not on the words level but on the paragraph and stanza and it doesn't do rhyming that well but on the paragraphs level, on the essay level and so yeah I mean you don't trust the Oxford dictionary in the traditional sense of trust, right? You would say that you consider its information to be informative or that if it gives you some example sentences you would say that it reflects the words usage but you would not just take some example sentences from the LED and then call it your essay. That would be very interesting but wrong. And so I don't think when we use the term trust we mean trusting as in trusting other people here. We merely mean that it can explain a full account of where did they get that idea and that may be the lowest kind of requirement that one can expect of AIs nowadays which is to be accountable, to give an account and explanation of where its attention were and what were the source materials that it looked at to produce such an answer but how to make use of those answers I don't think that we should treat it as an oracle where we just lightly assume that it's right because when it's all said and done GP3 is a tool that predicts what's a likely next word given a very large corpus and that's what it does and I trust it to do that but not anything else. Another very exciting technology that everyone is talking about is quantum computing of course. How do you stand on that and give us your opinion on where it is currently and where it might be? Yeah, sure. I think in terms of cryptography and ensuring a secure link quantum computing is exciting because it carries the potential of breaking the existing crypto mechanisms but also it carries the potential of establishing a really like nothing since the invention of the one-time path a truly secure link between people free from eavesdroppers at least eavesdroppers that cannot go and modify the laws of physics which is very difficult by the way and so I think it provides us with novel materials to work with in terms of communication in terms of computing. I think it's a very worthwhile area of study and especially cryptographers need now to work on post-quantum to first guard our existing digital infrastructure to make sure that a transition from traditional crypto to post-quantum crypto is as painless, as smooth as possible without much disruption and certainly hopefully taking not as long as the IPv4 IPv6 transition and then we also need to make sure that whatever new quantum encryption apparatus that we make still remains affordable as is the pretty good privacy tools that made initially the public key infrastructure affordable otherwise we will create a huge power imbalance where people who have quantum computers can effectively eavesdrop on the rest of the world's communication and their communication devices are too expensive to be enjoyed by the system and that would be very undemocratic. So you touched upon it already. Some of the technologies we talked about race, serious privacy issues and Shoshana Zuboff wrote this book about surveillance capitalism and the pandemic has of course perhaps enhanced support for contact tracing apps and for transparency as a virtue per se but I'm curious about your concept of privacy and where you would draw the line between what you earlier called radical transparency and the right to obscurity even in public or especially in public the right to be forgotten, the right not to be recognized So where do you draw the line? What's your concept of privacy? Radical transparency means transparency at a root the state makes the states inner workings transparent to the citizens but we're not making the citizens transparent to the state although that could also possibly be called transparency that's not what we mean. What we mean is to make how the public sector functions demystify it making sure that there is no inner workings of the state that escapes the audits from the people but it doesn't mean that individual public servants are free from privacy although I make a transcript of all the meetings that I chair each participant is given 10 working days to co-edit the transcript to maybe pseudonymize themselves if they wish to do so if they bring up an anecdote about a friend who have not cleared that anecdote for publication they can edit a way to convey the same meaning without mentioning any particular friend if we make in-jokes we translate it into some out-jokes during those 10 days of co-editing but the point is that it serves a public good and it takes effort, takes time to essentially go back and make sure that parts of the speeches are less transparent than full transparency but it takes effort so radical means at a root it means by default by default everything is transparent but if people go back and edit that takes time this is as opposed to closed door meetings often record meetings where nothing is kept in record but occasionally people may quote other people to other journalists and then the journalists will fill in psychological projections because there's a lack of context and then I would argue it's actually worse for democracy it's better for democracy if people can all agree on a version of record that doesn't invade anyone's privacy and it's felt comfortable to all participants and after 10 working days we release that version and other journalists can then contribute by adding their perspectives which is the really valuable part the analytical power of the investigative journalist rather than comparing who gets the scoop from whom and I think that is the case for radical transparency it reinforces privacy and it does not encroach on privacy and on privacy and surveillance on a governmental level and of course if we talk about Taiwan we have to talk about its relationship to China as well and you called in an article China's province Xinjiang a quote prototype model of a fully totalitarian surveillance state so how do you see other regions in and around China maybe most recently Hong Kong moving in a similar direction I said that compared to Xinjiang previous attempts of totalitarianism is at best sub-total they're not totally total because there were no digital apparatus especially computer vision that could track at so many people 24 hours a day and now with computer vision they could and they did deploy things that way and so I think it serves as a constant reminder that when we say transparency there is a value behind transparency if you say it with a democratic value you point the camera to the state and you make the state transparent but if you say it from a totalitarian mindset you turn that around and then point the camera at the people and then you make the people transparent to the state and the state completely obscure and so I think the power of the camera holder is very, very important and I think Thomas Mann coined the word to mean that the citizens should hold the camera not the state to hold the camera and I think that is a very important lesson that we're learning around the PRC regime and it serves as a constant reminder for us to not go where they're going So you go ahead, sorry, Monica You go I wanted to come now to your role as a leader so a bit more personal questions that I'm just very curious about So I grew up in a Chinese household but in Germany, so I'm Chinese German and in my home we never really touched on super intimate conversations about who you are and how you led to others identity, intimacy, sexuality and love really and I'm curious you as a leader on the global stage being an outspoken transgender and also stating that you are sort of post-gender so not non-binary Just whatever my pronouns are Exactly, you don't really care So you go one step further How do you see your role and responsibility as a leader for future generations in that regard, especially for Taiwanese people but also the Asian diaspora around the world and the simple attitude that if the environment is not friendly or is even hostile vis-à-vis who you are then it's not your fault, it's the environment that needs to change When I was a child, when I was 7 years old I started writing and I write with my left hand because I'm left-handed, my dad also and his mother, my grandma also they were taught to kind of forcibly learn how to write with their right hand mostly because I think all the word pen and calligraphy writing and whatever the writing directions was right to left vertically at that time and then there's also like the telephone booth it's definitely everything is on the right hand side and like the entire environment is designed with right-handedness in mind and it's just normal and the left-handed people are told to cope basically and when I started learning to write my grandma also told me that the environment will be hostile to me and that I have to eventually learn to use my right hand but not even a year after that I encountered personal computers in which case the mouse doesn't care the mouse if you put it on the left hand side you just swap its left and right buttons so it doesn't care whether I'm left-handed or right-handed and when I type on the keyboard of course I have to use both hands and so suddenly and nowadays when I pick them on my phone it doesn't care whether I pick them from my left hand or right hand either and so because of the environment that changed I make sure that nowadays I don't think and define myself as either a left-handed person or right-handed person I'm in fact and by dexterous by now and it actually makes me more free I would argue especially in virtual reality but we say controllers but the point I'm making is that if people see arbitrary binary distinctions in Taiwanese politics it used to be pan blue or pan green and if you see for example when I filed HR form when I become a digital minister my party affiliation is right next to my agenda and so I just wrote none not applicable on both of those squares and it's a really interesting and I would say also empowering gesture for many people who see themselves not captured by the pan blue or pan green political division not captured by the girl like or boy like gender stereotypes being able to simply say whatever I think is a powerful gesture and more and more people in Taiwan are now indeed doing that and how does this like whatever and not checking any boxes basically attitude and viewing of the world really influenced your leadership yeah well rather I can check all the boxes right it's the same thing and then because in my mind I don't see half of the population being different from who I am and so it enables me to be more empathetic if people talk about their puberty I have gone through two puberty so there's bound to be something similar in my life experience in your life experience when people talk about handwriting every time with my left and my right hand right so there's bound to be something similar between me and you and if you have some life experience that I cannot empathize with I make a point of just exercising my mind and maybe I can embark on a journey of a week or two of just mingling with your culture until I can see the world from your culture's perspective and this is called transculturalism I think it's a very important context and the context of transculturalism I think goes all the way back in early 20th century when Dr. Sanya Sen who initially started this revolution of fighting off the Minchurians in the ethnic Han rule but then he embarked on this idea of Zhonghua which is literally between flowers so that he brought this idea of transculturalism into the founding of the new republic so that the Minchurians is just one more culture that can interpret this republic of citizens and that we can learn from which is a very radical approach back in that historical context and we're now applying the same transcultural attitude to the indigenous Taiwanese people to the new immigrants and even non-human beings because we all share this ecological reality together So I've read somewhere that as a child also you were bullied and I'm curious whether there was a specific moment in which you realized that you would rise above the bullying, you would be able to articulate your own truth and have such an impact really at the world stage Was there a specific moment or what was sort of the catalytic event that allowed you to do that? Yeah, I think a particularly liberating moment came when I was 15 years old and I talked to the principal of my high school saying that I've already been making open source although there's no such word back then free software contributions with open access or that word haven't arrived at that time either with this archive, ARXIV open academic community and where people post their pre-print papers and I write random emails and people write back and before long we're doing research together I show the principal the printouts saying that I don't see the reason of attending a senior high or a university animal because I'm now doing research and the principal used to tell me that I have to spend like 10 years getting very good grades going into a prestigious university working for my favorite professor as a postdoc before I can actually do research but now I'm actually already doing research as a 15 years old and then the principal after looking at the printouts thought for a minute and said okay, tomorrow you don't have to go to school anymore and I will cover for you and then she did cover for me essentially faked the records of my attendance and that enabled me to then just study randomly at universities especially around philosophy and then also co-founded some start-up enterprises before I turned 16 Speaking of bullying are we at risk of bullying AI? Are we at risk of discriminating against AI? Because isn't AI the ultimate other? Should we generate or nurture a different relationship to AI and consider it more of a living thing? Yeah, I think when an AI has their own life history when they are able to suffer as described by Ted Jiang in the novel Collection Exhalation I think that particular one is called the Life Cycle of Software Objects it's a novella it talks about something that you talked about about bullying AIs but truth to be told I think our AI at this moment even with GPT-3 is maybe on the kind of simulating nematodes stage and not at all at a stage where we can meaningfully say that they're suffering and so yeah we will deal with that problem before that problem presents itself by having conversations around for example Ted Jiang's novella and I think that will brace people for the impact when one day maybe with quantum computing maybe with full brain simulation that we do have AIs that can feel pain and suffering although most futurists say that it would not happen in the next five or ten years it gives us plenty of time to prepare let's talk about in the remaining time that we have let's talk about language because you touched upon literature and the importance of literature Thomas Mann, Finnegan's Wake, James Joyce you mentioned already others I guess my question is what's your favorite word? my favorite word by the way I talked about Steve Mann I think the person who coined the term Susvalence so if I said Thomas Mann that was a Freudian slip anyway so my favorite word that's a really good one I think it's got to be both Arabic numeral and a kanji and it's literally zero you write with a circle and on the on language and also more because you mentioned you write your own poetry and I've read also that you live by the Taoist philosophy so what are some core principles for you personally that you take to lead your own life and work based on that philosophy? yeah maybe you read that wired interview where I quoted randomly the Tao Te Ching and I think this is really nice stanza that the wired interview quoted about the use of not where the pot's not is useful so the prophet in what is is in the use what isn't although when you talk about my personal philosophy because that's more like a work philosophy so my personal philosophy is maybe one chapter that's chapter 10 of the Tao Te Ching and it goes like this can you keep your soul in this body hold fast to the one and so learn to behold can you center your energy be soft, tender and so learn to be a baby can you keep the deep water still and clear so it reflects without blurring can you love people and run things and do so without doing opening, closing the gate of heaven can you be like a bird with her nestlings piercing bright through the cosmos can you know by not knowing to give birth to nourish, to bear and not to own to act and not lay claim to lead and not to rule this is mysterious power it's beautiful, thank you thank you very much Mr. Tang, before we let you go one last question for you speaking of language we called our festival in December last year strangely enough the Great Wave, naively so we had no idea what was going to unfold but since then the Great Wave and it had a lot of connotations before it has even more meaning for us now what does the Great Wave that term the Great Wave what does it mean for you? yeah it's something the idea of the the eternal the Great Wave, the ocean is as close as internal beings as there is on the planet earth and so yeah I'm reminded of again the Dao De Jing like the increase of life is full of portent the strong heart exhausts its vital breath the full groan on the edge of aging and these are not the way to know harmony is to know what's eternal and to know what's eternal is enlightenment and that is what this picture of Great Waves summons in my mind Mr. Tang, thank you very very much for this time with us and for all this for these inspirational insights thank you very much thank you for the great conversation thank you for your questions