 I'll check the chat here. Okay. Okay. Awesome. So let's get started. Let's just wait one more minute because I think we have a few other people joining but as we're getting started, I'll say, we had, first of all, apologies if you were roused from slumbers just a little while ago. We were talking about the history of time zones and time changes, daylight savings time as a standardizing technology that still to this day occasionally goes, goes awry. So we were, I don't know if you're even aware. We were all joined the call an hour ago but apparently the time shift here and daylight savings time mixed up the appointment schedules. I don't know on someone's end. So we had an interesting conversation about that and I'll confess, I felt badly about any effort that Francis was making from your office who has been nothing but professional, supportive and fantastic. I hope she didn't rouse you from slumbers. Okay. Yeah, I woke up I think half an hour before, checked that an item from my calendar moved downward like one hour and I really didn't think much of it. So it didn't affect me personally but I saw that it affect all of you. So yeah, I guess this is your late gratification or something, what was it? All right, we've got the link there in the chat to slide out. So why don't we go ahead and get started. So Minister Tang, thank you so much for making some time to join this class at Stanford University on Ethics and Policy of Technological Change. We're in the last week of the quarter here. So the students have gone through nearly the entirety of the course and there's a team that teaches the class. I am a philosopher, I bring an ethical lens. There's a public policy or social scientist, my colleague, Jeremy Weinstein and then a computer scientist, my colleague, Meron Sahami. So three different perspectives brought to bear in the course. As a philosopher, I wanna start off in introducing you by saying that I am probably more oriented towards a kind of Socratic orientation, both in the class and in the discussions we have with guests. But today with you, I have to confess or gush in a way. You serve for me as a kind of modern day hero or at least a role model of sorts in that you have taken the extraordinary technical talents that you've acquired and deployed them for civic rather than money making purposes directly found ways to use technology in the way that Stanford so distinctively and proudly trains on people for ways that are apart from the entire system of Silicon Valley here, which is important and has produced incredible things. But too rarely in my judgment these days people acquire those skills and use them for explicitly civic purposes. So to introduce minister Tang, a minister without portfolio in the government of Taiwan, worked for a number of years as I understand it, never here physically located in Silicon Valley for Apple, but you've done all kinds of things in technology, including working within some of the companies that everyone here, in fact everyone across the world are familiar with. And you've been in office now in Taiwan for, let me see if I got this right for about five years. Okay, super. All right, with that I wanna begin in the spirit of my introduction by talking about a phrase which I gather you've used about yourself, that you consider yourself a kind of civic hacker. Yes, sir. I have in mind here thinking particularly about the students in the class as a way of suggesting, I've seen you describe democracy as a technology itself, a technology. A type of technology, yes. A type of technology, right, a form of social organization for decision-making, equal voice, civic hacking as a way to support the efforts, perhaps of civic spaces as well as democratic institutions. The names that everyone at Stanford are familiar with are the founders and the dropouts who go on to found the large companies. And another hero of mine is Aaron Swartz, a kind of leader of the open software movement that I'm sure you're aware of. But too infrequently people at Stanford look to people like you doing civic work. So I wanted to ask just if you could give a capsule summary about the path from acquiring the technical skills that you have to deciding to devote yourself with those skills to civic purposes rather than to disruption within the marketplace. Certainly. So I think the journey for me began truly when I was 14 years old, that was 1995. And I discovered this new thing, then new thing called the World Web, and told my teachers that my textbooks were out of date because knowledge was being created. And I'm part of this knowledge creating process. Well, I'm really just offering free spell checking services to people who pre-print publishers archive.org or XIV, you know, the Cornell thing that was actually, wow, it's still around. So a very large enterprise by now, it is spawned like bio archive and many other archives after that, right? So yeah, I was offering free spell checking services not just writing to the pre-print authors with the suggestions to fix typos or something. And they over the internet, they didn't know I was just 14 years old. And so they considered me their peers and we were able to have like real conversations over email and so on. So I took those printouts to the head of my school, my principal, and said, you know, you told me that I have to finish the high school and then get a good degree, maybe pass some GRE test and get into a good university, college, and maybe be a postdoc before doing all this, but I'm already doing all this. So, you know, why would I spend time on your school? And the head of the principal really liked the confrontational style, actually. And she, after looking at email printouts, considered for a minute and said, okay, from tomorrow you don't have to go to Moscow anymore. And I'm like, what about compulsory education? And she's like, I'll cover for you, which means that she faked the records. And so, so I as speaking like autonomous learning right then and started a few companies and each one after another exploring this idea of how people come to a swift trust over the internet and how the internet can very quickly connect people and also the dangers of some parts of social interaction that makes people lose trust with each other as easily, actually much more easily than in face-to-face settings online. And so social interaction design was definitely my main line of work. And so that brought me to the Silicon Valley and building more pro-social, rather the anti-social networks and also brought me to the Sunflower Occupy where we occupied the parliament for three weeks with half a million people in the industry and many more are willing to deliberate a trade deal, but using listening skills, facilitated conversation, open space technology, technology, which is a social technology. Now, while communication and this digital counterpart we did arrive on very coherent set of demands which was then agreed in 2014 by the head of the parliament and ever after that we were hired then as a reverse mentors to the cabinet then in end of 2014. And after I guess a couple of years of apprenticeship the civil service just considered this to be a good idea overall. And so I'm hired a full time promoter for an intern to a full ministry at large and then starting to work with mimetic producers in each and every ministry. We've got hundreds of people now participation officers that lives with cute companion animals and translates like communication material like physical distancing when you're outdoor keep two of those shivas away or wear a mask. And if you're indoor keep three of them away. And our idea of wearing mask is so that you don't put your feet to your mouth, hand to your mouth and don't do what this dog does with this rational self-interest, right? But communicated in a way that five years old and 17 years old alike would very much willingly share. And so it has a more higher R value that I don't know respect elderly kind of messages and so on. So that brought me to this pro-social messaging parts which is more like a trainer trainer network so that each and every ministry and agency now gains this idea to listen as skill using the cute dogs and also occasionally cats. Yeah, looking at the what you just showed us on your iPad or whatever device that was that's an iPad. Reminds me, I've also from seeing some of your presentations online in the past, I formed the impression that you believe that either some form of humor or play of humbleness, a kind of humorous orientation is important to the delivery of technological services. And in particular in government, I think very few people here in the United States associate playfulness or humor with public services. Can you say a little bit about how that plays a role in thinking through your own delivery of public services in Taiwan? Yeah, I saw the slide of the question is literally a humor over a rumor which is some poetry right there. So anyway, the humor over a rumor that a fast, fair, fun idea of communication basically says so in Taiwan, we still remember the martial law. We've had the longest martial law in any country in the planet. So we don't want to go back there. We don't want to go back to the white terror, right? So people could not even fathom the idea of a otherwise would be reasonable like administrative takedown. For example, in Germany, they consider it reasonable to tell the largest internet platforms to do a takedown if his speech is involved, right? In Thailand is about royalty and the image of the royalty. So each country or each jurisdiction has some ideas like for these particular part of speech, it's not enough just to address the damage later. It's actually necessary to do censorship and takedown for these very specific things. In the US used to be about pattern entry, secret and copyright violations, but I see that that part has been relaxed a little bit. Anyway, so the point is that it's jurisdiction has its things that's worth taking out, right? Taking down and in Taiwan, none. So because of our very strong aversion to the martial law era regimes of authoritarianism, of the guard against authoritarianism, anytime anyone says something, that's a takedown like I don't know, Psyhub, right? And then even considering a administrative takedown is a non-starter, which is why Psyhub lived heavily as a DTW domain for quite a while before other administrative reasons took them down, not our government's work. And so because of that, when we see a pretty damaging viral disinformation that attack the election integrity of accusing a like bad count, a bad telling or a public health related disinformation that sells like a purpose to sell masks but actually sells computer virus instead if you do try to purchase and so on. These are like downright criminal, but even for that we can't even fathom a kind of censorship or takedown that other regimes would perfectly reasonably consider. So we have to investigate what's the, both the reason of the higher than one basic reproduction value, the basic R value of those disinformation, because if it doesn't spread it doesn't really cause damage, right? And we discovered that it's really about outrage. It's really about a emotion of something injustice is happening and that people would want to highlight it and while they get into this mood of outrage they don't bother to fact check. And so that gets very easily connected to the idea of discrimination or the idea of revenge not the idea, the affect, the feeling of such and has social feelings. And when people are in those states there is no media competence to speak of. And so then we start to ask what's the vaccine? What's the antidote of the mind? And it turns out it's humor. If you have left about something then it channels the energy in the outrage into care creation, into creativity, into a sense of playfulness. This is like a transitional space on the internet that makes people's imagination into a more pro-social dimension. And so we now have this really teams of comedians that's just rose out whenever we detect there's a rising trending misinformation. At any given time there may be just three because the total mental bandwidth is limited in a society they also compete with one another like virus in it. And so we roll out those very fun vaccines and then that gets even more viral than the angry disinformation, the outrage based disinformation. And when people left about there's no going back. So because this is the one way street in people's minds. So that allows us to fight disinformation without a takedown much like we fight, I don't know the pandemic was no long. Yeah. Well, so let me, can I just verify? So the government Taiwan has comedians on the payroll for this purpose? Yes, definitely. Very well paid, very well paid. Amazing, okay. Well, I wanna use that as a bridge now to ask you some questions like maybe this is going to be your answer, fight with humor. But we've covered in class the issues of free speech online, content moderation strategies, how the First Amendment interacts in the United States setting with such questions. First Amendment of course makes it difficult to carry out here what you described in Germany in certain respects, although other democratic societies have lots of different ways of thinking about this. So we've lived through here in the US just recently the takedown of Donald Trump from Twitter and Facebook. If you were either employed by the US government or employed by Twitter or Facebook, what would you have done on January 6th and January 7th about Donald Trump's tweets or posts? And independent of that particular case, I'd love to hear like guidance or advice from your perspective to people in Silicon Valley with respect to content moderation. Right. So we had in January, 2020 our presidential election almost exactly the same conspiracy theory that was spread and although it's addressed differently and so it has different results and I think it really is worth sharing. So for example, right before the election around the end of 2019, one of the most trending piece of this information and I quote is, well, the words are probably in a legible, so I'll just read quote, Hong Kong thugs compensation exposed, killing a police owns these teenagers up to 20 million. So, and with a rather scary looking young protestors image. And that's because that was shaping to be the deciding factor in our presidential election January, 2020. So this is a Reuters photo that photo actually is genuine but the original caption only said there's teenage protestors seen during the march end of story, right? So this alternate reality caption, this something talk about this 13 year old said both view iPhones and recruiting his brothers. It's entirely made up. It's intentional misinformation which means it's disinformation but we didn't take anything down. We used as I mentioned the regime called notice and public notice which is like the Canadian copyright enforcement system notice and notice, except it's on public notice. So first the people who use the line which is like WhatsApp, Antoine encrypted chat channels they flag the early warnings by a long pressing a message and this message and flagging as spun. And then when they do that, just like when you're flagging your inbox as spun it sends signals to spun house and in our case to international fact-checking network or the co-fax project from the Gev Zero community so that people see which ideas are trending. And then we made this deal with all the leading social media starting with the Taiwanese domestic pro-social social media called the PTT which is a national Taiwanese university student PTT project that's been running for 25 years with no advertisers or shareholders is still remains a national university subsidized by governments, PTT project open source co-governed audits. And so they don't have shareholder values they're very happy to do notice and public notice and with the social norm firmly in place we then negotiate with Facebook and the like so that they also do notice and public notice for example, the transparency around community nations and advertisement during election and so on. And so this is no different when the fact-checkers discovered that this alternate reality caption was indeed first seen in Zhongyang, Zhenhua, Weichang and see in the Weibo accounts of the communist Chinese central law and political unit their state propaganda unit then everyone who shared this on any social media platforms immediately shares it but with a mandatory frame that says this is proudly sponsored by the communist party maybe not proudly sponsored by the state organ of the communist party and probably also violating Reuters copyright. And so because of that anyone who shared this becomes a vector of sharing the clarification and sharing the vector of the frame also so people learn about it they learn about how to be more media competent not just media literates because when you have this notice and public notice you can also generate your own narrative based on that so you later on when you see for example on also January 2020 literally the day of the election there's another rumor that says the CIA make two invisible inks so no matter which person you vote this CIA special ink make sure Dr. Tsai's ballots always appears during the counting and whatever candidate you vote those ink will disappear basically it's on the democratic process itself. And we solve that very simply by inviting and we've been doing that for close to a decade now well to invite the YouTubers of all different parties to go into the counting process arbitrarily close to the counting stations and then they can film the entire process and each major party have these custom developed apps where they did the counting during the official counting so they have a unofficial count but from each and every major parties even during the counting process and we use paper only counting paper only ballots which means that it's very much verifiable if there are invisible inks there's no way that is escaping the YouTubers eyes and so that the point here is that if people don't believe the opposition party's YouTubers most of them don't they do believe their own party's YouTubers and when those YouTubers report the same counts people don't buy into this invisible ink story anyway so this is radical transparency and participatory accountability inclusive accountability anyone can be a auditor in the sense of that that's so we see this rumor goes up and then once the YouTubers numbers start to agree and people get their count from their favorite party members then this goes down again so I would say that whatever happened in the US was more of a symptom of these systems not in place and that's my take. All right, super interesting so let me expand from that and ask one last question before we open it up and take some questions from Slido Mark Andreessen wrote a widely noted I guess it was a blog post about a year ago or just a year ago basically saying it's time to build and at least what I inferred he meant by that was that it's time for entrepreneurs to come to the fore again and build companies and creative ways that get beyond the great stagnation we wanted flying cars and we got 140 characters instead a kind of exhortation to the software geniuses at Stanford and beyond to create the new generation of companies if you were able to give a similar exhortation to the talent at Stanford University and beyond about what they should be building or what they should be doing if not building I'm curious what software do we need to support rather than subvert democratic institutions what types of career pathways do we need for people at Stanford and beyond so that social systems and individuals thrive rather than being threatened by the current or kind of landscape of big tech Well I'm just free associating here because I am seeing your face in the middle and a circle of students and each name with a mute button mute icon next to them and so my free association when hearing your question is that maybe you know unmute yourself and unmute others like literally give voice to people and I think that this idea of democracy as a type of technology is really about increasing the bit rate because in traditional way of thinking about democracy each of us get three bits every four years per person of upload and that's it, call voting and in other times we're muted or we're literally muted and there's really no way for us to study agenda I mean we may answer a online poll or a SMS poll or a survey call from be part of focus group or whatever but we're anonymous there we're just aggregated data to the democratic process and the commercial world and the social sector have all developed ways of co-creation I'm thinking about crowdfunding crowd sourcing and many like now staples already infrastructures of the whole creative process to get your customers to be not just customers but essentially your partners in co-creation and so people would pivot their ideas very quickly I think that idea came from Stanford actually pivot their idea very quickly when their stakeholders discover a better way of doing things but the government's because of the limited bandwidth of the democratic process couldn't do so until four years or two years down the line right so my invitation really is to think of democracy as a bit-rate constrained process and work on ways to empower the voiceless just as in Taiwan you are a national participation platform already more than one quarter of the 10 million or so visitors per year in the country with 23 million a lot of people the initiatives more than a quarter are from people who are not even 18 years old who are still in the basic education schools and so on and because of that they don't get this idea that I need to mute myself until I'm 18 years old and therefore matter to the civic process anyone who's like six years old, 12 years old they always perfectly good citizens initiatives especially around sustainability because they are on the business end of climate change and when we empower these people more they will probably not strike and go to street on Fridays but they effect real change all right let's move over to Slido Ryan we're a small enough group here that I'm just going to invite you to unmute yourself yes thank you that's the call to action oh okay sure hi Audrey thank you so much yeah so I was just reading some things I also saw a podcast or a part of an episode of a TEDx technology podcast that you recorded once along sort of the like information campaign in Taiwan but I was I don't know this question is more for you personally like where did your I guess like transparency idea for government come from like I guess maybe what were you reading or who you were listening or talking to and then also aside from just government how could how might this help companies such as like before Facebook especially when it comes to user data yeah thank you very good question personally I participated in internet governance as I mentioned when I was just a 14 or 15 years old across the internet nobody know I was just 14 right and and so I work on technologies such as the ATEM technology who's a successor of the RSS or alternative to the RSS system to connect the the blocks together and so on so in that case I'm working on what Aaron Schwartz among others have created and bring it into a more real time publication subscription and so on and I discovered that's really in the bloke's fear or in the internet engineering task force which is where we're doing those standard making nobody can force anyone to do anything that the internet society doesn't have a army or a navy's for the matter so all we have is transparency is rough consensus and running code and making the process transparent so people if they are negatively affected can get that addressed immediately and when nobody feel that this will hurt them or we can at least all live with it then we literally hum right either in the same space or on the mailing list we literally hum our consensus a rough consensus into action and then we go go and develop our own coach and so this to me seems to sign that if the transparency is inclusive that is to say anyone who could get negatively affected and has an email address could join the decision-making process that and if nobody can force anyone to do anything then by definition by default it works toward a common good it avoids the tragedy of commons and is more likely to avoid a tragedy of horizons because the people who represent the future generations interest because it's not a voting process they could also get their idea more nuanced eclectic ideas into the mix and into the rough consensus setting so I would say that I learned it personally from internet governance now for corporations I think that also helps a lot because we're now in an era of stakeholder capitalism we are seeing now in the some parts of the world like Taiwan and the party are in the especially young people but more and more consumers are not satisfied of the companies just doing their like minimally efforts to avoid polluting the environment or polluting the society nowadays in Taiwan people consider the company that do nothing to be proud of the problem and they demand to see where they are in the you know solution to for example reducing carbon footprint among other things also reducing conspiracy theory footprint in that case of the more anti-social social media so because of that any company that is not transparent with the customers probably face more a higher chance of a social boycott or social sanction and the only way to turn the co-creation energy of your customers with your leadership team and so one is to be basically the same as the open government principle to be inclusively transparent and also invite participatory accountability all right there are a bunch of other questions that are anonymous we're going to come to those in a minute but Bagarath I've got a question from you actually a couple of them but why don't you just unmute if you're willing and and and ask your question to the minister sure hi minister Tang it's so great to be with you I had a question on just like what are some lessons you can share with us about successfully integrating technology with government and what are like some of the challenges you have faced and how how did you overcome them because here there's tons of regulation and sometimes bureaucracy can be slow so I was speaking with the former chief data scientist of the U.S. DJ Patil and he mentioned how it can be challenging to navigate through all of that so I was just wondering what do you think helped you become successful yeah the career public service can be slow but it also could be really fast and the tempo the iteration in agile speech that the length of the sprint or the scrum is is where it's mattering so personally I hold my office hours to social innovators in Taiwan every Wednesday so what I'm doing is essentially improving the the kind of bandwidth from social meditators anywhere in Taiwan with the career public service by bringing out fresh ideas every Wednesday which means that after this video conference I'm off to the social innovation lab which is my office and the office is itself co-created with the leading social innovators in Taiwan and beyond so this is my my office like literally and soccer field here is by people with Down syndrome who turns out not are only good in bakery they're very famous bakers but also in Taiwan and but also very good at creating art so they just draw whatever they see and it's like the the lens of Van Gogh's eyes and people automatically become more creative when they step into this place with pretty good music pretty good food and and things like that and I do bring in this ideas but I don't command anyone in my office in the space to to realize it for people who are in the public additional innovation space my office if you check out digital ministry at TW you see the people there are secondments from pretty much half of the ministries so more than 12 ministries have sent secondments or dispatches to my office and they're all career public service but they don't report to me I don't order them to do anything they don't give me orders all I ask is that we work out loud we use a Kanban board started physically but now the office has like 20 staff and 30 interns and you know many the network of comedians and preservation offices more than 100 people in total we can't use physical Kanbans anymore so we would send it online but and nevertheless the spirit is that we just have fun and share food every week on a weekly basis incorporate those social innovation ideas into visible things and for the career public service station in my office they know that first of all I absorb all the risk if things go wrong if we had to pivot it's all order spot so say they are happy about proposing genuinely new idea sometime anonymously through Slido actually and also it saves time for most of the bureaucracy they're wary about implementing something that saves their time but actually waste people time other the citizens during the process if they're not familiar with it or some other departments which will absorb the time cost or the like the retraining cost and so on so they're very conservative in the innovation that they deploy but because pretty much all the people facing bureaucrats are already in my office so whenever they hear something from a video conference call with a remote area and so on they don't say oh I have to check with the Ministry of Interior the Ministry of Interior dispatches sitting right next to them I have to check with Ministry of Health and Welfare because they're sitting right next to them and so because of that they were able to in a facilitated conversation gets to the rough consensus about okay this seems that nobody is losing from it and because every other Ministry's dispatch even if they're not related to it they can also play outside customer because we're all citizens ourselves right so if people get above consensus then it's likely to save everyone's time and for ideas that reduce everyone's risk and save everyone's time the career public service is very fast in implementing it at that they're like oh what way don't we get it done yesterday and so that's then improve the mutual trust because it improves the feedback cycle the speed from people calling into the office or the hotline saying hey I don't know I invented a new method of using traditional rice cooker to cure the virus but doesn't destroy the musk and that gets amplified immediately we make a creative film of me cooking the musks dry steaming without adding water or a young boy calling saying you're rationing our musk and all I get was those pink medical musk or the boy in my class have navy blue surgical great musk and I don't want to wear pink to school well then we talk to the persuasion officer the person who lived with that cute dog and they made a suggestion and lo and behold at the next day on 2 p.m. all the medical officers in the central epidemic command center regardless of junta or pink and with pink medical musk and all and it became really sensational all the all the leading brands then just changed their social media profiles pink and I think our ministry of health even said that pink panther was the child of a hero and so the young boy become the most hip boy in the class for only he has the color that heroes wear and I guess the heroes hero wear so on and so because of this it massively increased the mutual trust and then we get more fresh ideas from the civil servants as anonymously on slide sometimes and also from decision makers all right so you're painting for us this kind of wondrous picture of radical inclusivity and participatory governance and openness and transparency a playfulness and humor written into it comedians on on the staff just as important as other civil servants a couple of the anonymous questions on slide out the next on on my screen ask questions again to put you know just as you call democracy a form of a technology and we're looking at the bit rate of participation well you know American democracy is is at a much greater scale than Taiwanese democracy we're 12 or 15 X the size in terms of the population scale in in many respects introduces new problems in into the mix and I wonder if you think the kinds of things you've accomplished in Taiwan would translate more or less smoothly or cleanly into an American context to the scale or is there something different about the scale of American democracy take the question that's asked about trust in particular as a as a different kind of challenge that you would need to rethink if you were you know in these in these quarters rather than where you are in Taiwan well the population of of say New New Jersey is one third of Taiwan and California is just I think slightly more people right we have 23 24 million California's was 39 million and so we're on comparable scales is what I'm saying because to work across different time zones is is difficult as like proven today and and people who live in different time zones there's less chance of real-time interaction right so I think for this cross-time zone conversation the ideas of maybe something like immersive virtual augmented reality is probably needed if you want to people to feel this kind of empathy in real time across time zones but within the same time zone is always much easier and I think that the two foundational requirements one is broadband as human rights universal broadband in Taiwan even if you're on the tip of Taiwan almost four thousand meters high the Jade Mountains or the Saviyah or pen of the known you know indigenous languages all these interpretations could get a full live streaming when people go to the top of Taiwan because they know they have to make this per second both ways for just 16 euros per month unlimited data and they know that if they don't it's my fault they can actually call me so this is a solemn guarantee that we use you know helicopters spectrum auction methods whatever to to make sure that everyone has universal broadband access because otherwise when we introduce these mechanisms we're essentially leaving people behind we're excluding them from the democracy where you're muting people who were previously unmuted and as unthinkable and so that's the first thing and the second as I alluded to is the idea of digital competence we don't teach media literacy anymore we teach media competence the same for data and digital competence meaning that the young people are not just a consumer which they had to remain consumer until they're 18 years old but rather they're already producers of narratives they fact check the presidential debates and forums they make their own environmental sensing machines the PM 2.5 sensing machines in particular called Airbox where it's pretty standard actually in the primary school curriculum so each and every dot you see here is some primary schooler and their teachers contributing to a distributed ledger that measures the sensing the environments in real time and really to me there's no other way to teach about data stewardship about bias about the idea of a feedback cycle of stakeholder of data and so on data pipeline and so on without people actually participating in the production and the narrative making of data so that's our primary school education so with data and media competence and with Providence Human Rights I don't I think this is remarkably scale free if people end well with overlapping time zones then we can get overlapping consensus uh-huh fantastic I will confess that that sounds almost too good to be true for the sporadic orientation in me but I mean well we're in the future right like full 12 hours that's true that's true and it's distributed unevenly as the as the Institute for the Future here in Palo Alto well done we've got some more questions on Slido but you know with folks here there is a hand raising function so if you if you have a question for Minister Tang don't be shy about raising your hand right now let's go over back to Slido in the meantime and you know the issues of radical transparency of openness seem also to bump up against conventional concerns about data privacy we've covered those in the class a good deal I wonder if you can say how you how you square that circle how on the one hand with with media competence that you're just describing radical forms of transparency in inclusive ways do you nevertheless find ways to protect data and ownership even for parts of people's digital lives that they don't necessarily want to be open and transparent to others certainly so when we're in a public square whatever we contribute to the commons are voluntary and in the social innovation lab which I just show you a minute ago people come to my office out with the understanding that everything what I said to them will be on public record however if they relate something about a power imbalance in their work or they saw something wrong and they tell an anecdote about their friends who wish to remain anonymous and so on I fully respect their wishes so while it's true that we publish the entire transcript to the the internet I think the say it function is the I'm just pasting a link here you can see that after I become digital minister I've held 1600 meetings with 6000 people in 300 000 speeches nevertheless if the people wish to remain anonymous and or if they wish to just censor themselves whatever they said in extreme cases transcript become a monologue of just me talking and people can take out any part of it that pertains to say privacy or trade secrets or whatever else so this link in particular is a conversation with the senior leadership team of Microsoft with all the usual suspects and they want to protect their privacy I guess because they're a privacy conscious company or something and so they decide to to censor everything that I said from the senior leadership team but you still have this one side transcript from my side so you can still like sit out whatever they have asked but in no way compromise this review is zero bits of their information because I give my visitors 10 days to just scrub their transcript so if they notice some part of my speech that reviews their trade security or private details they can tell me and I'll always reframe that so that it becomes non-identifying let me just push one more dimension on that so I understand the the principle there about when people show up in a public or in an interaction with you in your capacity as minister these are strong expectations about transparency for citizens to inspect what you do and to be able to participate in ways with equal information flows but you know it's often sometimes said that for COVID responses for example the expectations of either freedom or privacy here about employers or companies or worse the government surveilling us for the sake of public health spills over into other forms of surveillance Edward Snowden style and in that respect you know undermines our liberty and compromises our privacy even when there is a public warrant for it so so what I want to push on is just to get you to say something more specifically about if you see trade-offs or tensions it does Taiwan or in your head do you simply wait the interests of the public over and more heavily than the interests of individuals to determine for themselves what they want to share and what they don't whether it's for the COVID response or for the purposes you were describing or do you think that it's not a it's not just a weighing of the of the values or a different balance but but you there's a you know an understanding about public and private that's different from what I've described mm-hmm yeah I don't think it's a trade-off because if you frame it as a trade-off there's there's no winner it's essentially a knowing situation I think Ben Franklin says something about that right deserving leader liberty or safety and so what the Taiwan model shows essentially is that basically liberty is a form of like self-expression and privacy is respected when everyone who voluntarily participate in a social relationship or transaction gets probably the same or overlapping norms and just act within those norms and so just one concrete example of during COVID we did what we call participatory self-surveillance that doesn't require the state or the capitalist to be the awesome I right and so in Taiwan we require people to register to the business they visited their contact so that when a local outbreak happens we know who to contact with the contact tracing now we didn't communicate that very well I guess because back in last April there is a professional hostess in the hostess bar part of a nine life district that gets diagnosed but on the first day she didn't want to review the contact numbers for the fear that her patrons will be re-identified which would violate the privacy norm in those parts of the nine life district and this is a classic trade-off situation and Taiwan is not the only jurisdiction facing that pretty much the same week Japan is facing the same thing and later on Korea faces the same thing but our response is very different instead of threatening to put people in jail or finding the business or ordering them to close and essentially driven them underground as some other jurisdiction did the US did during prohibition and fostered an unaccountable underground economy and therefore have a lose-lose situation we instead invited basically publicly challenged without imposing prison or fine saying that you know all we need is a way to contact people so we don't really care who they are and also we don't want their contact numbers the business owners can retain those so they brainstorm and in just a couple weeks adjust it to basically have scratch pads so anyone visiting the night clubs and or whatever have to maybe get a pre-pays and called maybe a throw away proton mail or whatever email address and they file that in make sure they could be contacted but that's between the business owner and them and nothing more and they keep those shards of papers like literally 28 days or four weeks and after no outbreak for those four weeks they shred whatever that was 28 so it's like a one-time path but it's not really a one-time path but you can think of that way and so because of that what we're seeing is that it preserved the privacy norm there because the patrons understand this will not get aggregated by the state or the local government it will not get into you know the surveillance capitalism world which will be really bad for the people who will be frequent there and so because of that they become part of the solution not part of the problem and then the nightclubs and the drinking pubs and whatever gradually reopened after just a few short weeks after they invented this way of what we call a real contact system this is just one anecdote but there is a philosophy behind it this is basically saying privacy is about norms norms are good for co-creation and if we involve the people who participate it's including host and hostesses in a hostess boss then they do the right thing but if you give no trust you'll get no trust yeah yeah I mean I myself have never been to Taiwan but hearing you describe it now puts it even higher atop my wish list to experience because what you describe sounds so fantastical from an American perspective with not merely are there issues of lack of compliance with contact tracing but merely showing up in public with a mask as of course you know being reports was a technology here has often served a polarized society rather than to create norms of trust and co-creation and reaching a point where playful settings of co-creation is the norm in public space among citizens sounds a happy distant future to this socratic I invite you to the future and check it out yourself I paste this goad card link you can apply it overseas and get a free pass to the Taiwan society even during the COVID more than 2,000 people visited this way that's more wondrous every minute we speak Mr. Minister Tang all right we've got just under 10 minutes left I want to make sure that other folks get a chance to interact personally with minister Tang if they wish so please raise your hand if you've got a question I've got many more but I've been the mouthpiece for the most part so far please get into the conversation I'm going to leave a pregnant pause here for first people to get in I'm just making some instant coffee all right there's a hand Thena go ahead hello thank you so much for talking to us it's a real pleasure I was just wondering what you think or any examples that you can think of that is the worst possible way to deal with misinformation that you've seen here in the US yeah a really good question it's a seminar topic okay so what I think is feasible and what we've seen in the more polarized democracies is to begin with things that are broadly speaking people could relate to for example in Bowling Green Kentucky they run a public consultation using Polis the same software we used to cross those rough consensus on the lack of UberX or Airbnb qualities so they make sure that only the rough consensus the resonating ideas get print get visibility rather than on the more anti-social corner of social media which to me are like the nine life district you know with additive drinks and private balancers and things like that I mean Facebook and so on and trying to you to convert that into a town square well no right tough luck so anyway so the point is that if you do have digital public infrastructure like Polis and as evidence by people in Bowling Green Kentucky who actually did a consultation with no preset topic so basically agenda setting instead of getting people to comment on particularly agenda and then you suspect you have an agenda you just begin saying what about a civic town hall that's really unconstrained you just do do whatever and then people actually come to trust one another more because they could see no matter whether they identify as Democrats or Republican or whatever they all have the same priorities in the Bowling Green Civic Assembly homepage you can see that everybody cares about the art in STEM education so people see that the STEM need to become steam and it's bipartisan actually it's non-partisan it's trans-partisan meaning that everyone feels very strongly it need to be done yesterday but people didn't know that they actually agreed on those things before they all care about universal broadband access more diversity more choices in telecom operators in broadband suppliers again that is a non-partisan trans-partisan issue and so on so once people see the picture from Polish and this is the actual Bowling Green picture and this is I think one of the most important picture that people can see during a democratic process so this picture looks like this and then this reads divisive statements so that you know polarized ideological statements this is a Bowling Green conversation and these are the rough consensus like things that people probably agree on and then sorted by the consensus you see the country statements that people do agree on like steam education like the diversifying of broadband access traffic flows shaping and like it need to be improved especially on the Scottsville road okay anyway so I'm just reading that report so then people get into the feeling that we are a polity after all this public rough consensus get reflected to the people's minds and this powerful picture just like humor triumph over rumor this overrides people's self-identity of thinking half a population is somehow known people right and so just getting them into this coherent blended coherent volition moment for a few times and then people develop their own agency to work across the party or ideological differences so that's this like cheap and cheerful like no cost way of starting a public communication just talking about the traffic flow on Scottsville road super James go ahead thank you so much thank you so much minister Audrey oh yes my question is how do you balance between automation and job security in Taiwan right so in in Taiwan I call AI assistive intelligence just like I I call collective intelligence CI so they give us ACI I guess assisted collective intelligence and by by saying assistive this means that we hold the same expectations as we will hold any human assistant right that the basic ideas of alignment like this glass actually showing me things more clearly rather than more blurry or pop up advertisements goes without saying and accountability goes without saying when you frame it in an assistive way and so by framing this as ACI what what do our assistants do well like Francis I guess she helps making this communication possible enable human to human communication connecting me to the people who otherwise I wouldn't have the bandwidth to to communicate and so basically a good human assistant actually Francis a professional diplomat from foreign service so I'm just kind of using this as an example and not really saying that foreign service is some sort of AI but anyway what I'm trying to say is that just like that the foreign service does not take over Ministry of Interior or really any other essential function of a state but rather enable collaboration between previously less trusting parties then this makes collective intelligence more possible so if we frame AI this way this is strictly speaking improving the capability of people to co-create together which needs a lot of amplification because we all have this wet wear hot coded Dumbass number that we don't function very well with more than 150 strong links right so some sort of assistant intelligence is needed anyway video conferencing is actually one part of it right so so if we develop AI in our national agenda in the AI ethics and so on strictly toward divisions of a assistive collective intelligence then the ideas of human replacement just just go away because that's not what we're interested in that's not why we spend taxpayer money to we don't design incentive structures for corporations working on those things that take away job security and so on All right well we're a minute shy of 6 p.m. on Pacific time and and I guess 9 a.m. at your time in Taiwan on behalf of the entire group I want to express our gratitude to you at an early hour of the morning for making time for for for us and for our questions as I said at the start you're an inspiration to me and and I hope to to many others on this call and in our class as well I thank you so much Minister Tang it's been a delight and and so illuminating thank you live long and prosper bye