 with all of us so let me just say a couple of words and perhaps well we want to hear from you so I will not spend too much time so students so I want this discussion to be focused on your questions to the minister so we have so yes recording in progress I apologize so this will be recorded so we can we can I received a lot of email from students who cannot attend unfortunately and so we'd love to see the recording afterwards so we are really honored today to have minister tank with us to be able to answer questions minister tank is a minister of digital of taiwan and I believe one of the really interesting and main actor runs a digital transformation happening now and played really an interesting role in taiwan about that um so my name is flounder mac I am the program director of the global connectivity program which is a program trying to link technology and culture and humanity so we are really thrilled to have minister tang with us today if that is really a central topic of the program so as I said I would keep it short so minister may I ask you to say a couple of words to introduce yourself and just perhaps a little bit of your vision around what you're doing at the ministry and how you see digital transformation certainly I will be very brief because I want to leave more time for the q&a so I will simply read my job description which is a poem a prayer that I wrote in 2016 before right before becoming the digital minister I believe that outlines the main vision goes like this when we see internet of things let's make it an internet of beings when we see virtual reality let's make it a shared reality when we see machine learning let's make it collaborative learning when we see user experience let's make it about human experience and whenever we hear that a singularity is near let us always remember the plurality is here so that's literally my job description while it connects machine to machines I believe digital connects people to people now back to you thank you very much minister so students I will ask you to well put your questions either in the chat or raise your hand I will just start with one little question perhaps to start the discussion which is I know that minister thank you really have close connection with Japan and I would I would be curious about what kind of advice could you give Japanese students or students here that are interested in participating and leading the digital transformation of today certainly um I always encourage students with the favorite quote from Lena Cohen Lena quotes ring the bells that still can ring forget your perfect offering there is a crack a crack in everything and that is how the light gets in now as we're students anything that we try entrepreneurship starting social innovations and so on it doesn't need to be perfect if it's too perfect well you may get a a plus grade but there's very little what others may offer you because you're already so perfect but rather choose something that autonomously link to other people and to other common good so that you're very ambitious and you can only deliver a very small part of the ambition you will look very imperfect but it's that imperfectness that invites people around the world to discover each other share the common values in interest indeed I think it was called Cunningham's law that on the internet the best way to answer a question is not to ask a perfect question but rather to offer a bad answer so that people can chime in with better answers that's my suggestion to you thank you very much minister so I see there's quite a few hands raises so go ahead Seiki why don't you start Minister Tan big fan really big inspiration I watched quite a few of your interviews and there's this one part in particular I was really interested about you mentioned that Taiwan is neither like ambitions or future for Taiwan is an upwing rather than pulling into a left or right right wing yes I would like you to elaborate more upon it and what you know how can Japan also achieve some some sort of similar ambitions if that were the case thank you a really good question now I believe I said that in the context of the earthquakes because we're caught between the Eurasian plate and the Philippine sea plate and every time there's an earthquake the tip of Taiwan almost 4,000 meters grow by a few centimeters now the idea here is that instead of leading toward the Eurasian plate or toward the Philippine sea plate it's not toward any particular direction but rather taking all the sides whenever tension whenever conflict occurs it's natural to engage in a fight or flight response but instead of fighting or like to flee we can actually look at the tension as an invitation toward co-creation and the reason why is that we've already built our infrastructures in a earthquake proof way or fire proof way or disaster proof way and once we're reasonably sure that we have an underlying infrastructure that are resilient that's to say recovers very quickly after earthquake then we can welcome such natural disasters as ways to for the social sector to band together to test people's relationship muscles to build solidarities and so on to view it in a anti-fragile in a positive light I mean Japan like probably more so than any other country can relate to this because you also have earthquakes and typhoons a lot of very important civic technology including the messenger line and many others were built in response to the earthquake and many other natural disasters so I don't think Japan need to steer itself toward this vision I believe we already share this value and vision. Thank you very much Seiki thank you minister. Nihon? Yes thank you I'm very very excited to be here and thank you for joining us today so I've read that you've not only worked on the encouragement of digital use but also worked very hard on the elimination of like digital divine and the gap that's caused by the encouragement of digital use and quite a lot of people are concerned about the digital or technology because that would also have the negative aspect but do you believe that if it is used correctly and if you take the correct measure digital will bring almost all positive aspects in our life that's a very philosophical question and I think in Taiwan digital and plural is the same word shuwei and so in Mandarin because digital has numbers right digits as its roots and numerous like plural more than one also is the same word so when I say I'm the digital minister in Taiwan I also mean that I'm the plural minister now the idea about plural which is collaboration across diversity means that there is no single right way to do something if there is a very strong will from the political top down that says oh this is the only way every other way doesn't count then it's not digital it is just a singularity right not plurality anymore and that lead to maybe some optimized feeling for some of the participants but for everybody else involved is literally decimating like taking away 10 percent every time their agency their way to shape the narrative to shape their culture so I do not think that there is a particular right way to make use of technology so that the society collectively can converge on the correct positive outcome rather I believe in the humbleness of design so that people closest to the pain can customize the digital technology to fit their purpose it should be the technology to fit the norm of the society rather than disrupting the society to fit that of the technology and if you take this view then you're humble to the future generations so that the younger the people are the more possibility they have but if you take an authoritarian view on digitalization or I call it digitization there's no awe in digitization then you're leaving awe behind and people in the next generation will not enjoy much agency because it's already predetermined by the authoritarian use of technology so the more possibility there is to future generations I think the more plural it becomes and whether it is good or bad left or right is left as an exercise for the new generation to customize themselves hope that answer your question thank you very much thank you miho for your question none of me go ahead yeah yeah thank you and I'm very happy and excited to meet with you and I'm I really appreciate your cooperation and I had that you learn programming since you are young and you learn you learn pair since you were 20 years old and so I think you are the genius of self-education and also self-education is important for us all scholars to be a lifelong learner so I would like to hear some tips from you to do uh self-education and become a lifelong learner thank you I learned of pearl when I was I think 14 years old that was 1995 and I learned that because I was interested in this game called net hack which is like a Tolkien lord of the rings and many other science fiction and fantasy game wrote into a PC game it's one of the earliest roguelike games so that I played a game I learned about the the lore and I was interested in using the then very new wire web to search about issues related to high fantasy and to wizards and so on and that led me to this website called wizards it's a trading card game of magic the gathering so I started to play magic the gathering and learn English so my first English vocabularies are all magic cards and now as I play more magic the gathering I found that there is this website called mox pearl mox prl that offers the card search and many other important databases back then it's a pump because mox pearl is a magic card anyway and so I learned about that website and then that website is written by a famous pearl contributor and that led me to from chris jensen to larry wall to the early pearl people and so to me it's always team before tech I didn't learn pearl because I want to use a technology I want to learn pearl because I've already read Tolkien poetry I've immersed myself into this high fantasy culture and I want just want to make friends and have something to work with each other so I on the very early days started the pearl mongers group in Taiwan and said that this is like c-pen the gathering meaning that the pearl modules that people share with each other is a kind of trading card game that people play together and build interesting things and mostly it's just about those social relationship muscles that we enjoy being together and the modules that we share and so on that are just like the cards it's just an excuse for us to make friends around the world so team before tech I think is the most important thing when you're learning something by yourself because passion or purpose really makes you motivated on your better days but on your not so good days it takes a community a team to remind you that it doesn't need to be all you you don't have to carry the entire burden but there's very interesting going on no matter whether you're feeling productive or not productive so a engaging team with shared hobbies I think that is very important later on I would summarize that into a philosophy called optimizing for fun or dash of fun and that says we're not optimizing for speed or for performance in our community we're optimizing for this interpersonal fun hope that answer your question thank you very much you can go ahead thank you very much hello firstly thank you very much for coming today I've been a big fan of yours for three years and it's honor to be able to talk with you by the way I have a question about V-Taiwan you made an online platform V-Taiwan where everyone can exchange their opinions about low amendments amendments so on this platform not only you can see yours and other people's position on discussion but also you can see the individual profile of other people's um this is very unique point to V-Taiwan I think but my concern is that people would be hesitate to speak up their honest opinion especially when they talk about sensitive topic because your friends or families would know what opinion you have so some people might believe that the anonymity on SNS such as Twitter encourages people to express their honest opinion then my question is what is the advantage and this advantage to open the individual information on V-Taiwan and why did you introduce the open individual information system thank you um the V-Taiwan platform uses for first the discourse platform and later on the polis platform at pol.is now after V-Taiwan which was a civil society experiment found that polis is really useful it's now a both a civic infrastructure at polis.tw and also a public infrastructure at polis.gov.tw so that any public servant can start a weekly survey the very simple one-click setup they don't have to learn anything more than they start a google survey or a survey cake or something right so basically it's commoditifying this crowdsourcing agenda technology now as in running any surveys it's important so that people do not game the system by just dominating the discussion by creating 5000 accounts right and especially later on the V-Taiwan methodology is used also on the join platform a national platform where 5000 petitions or counter signatures will warrant a ministry or a response and again if one single person can just create 5000 accounts then this is not going to be very useful so we struck a balance between four anonymity which creates 5000 clones and four revealing of personal attributes which will as you said discourage whistleblowing and speaking up speaking truths to power in a power imbalanced situation so we've always converged for a few years now on people providing a sms a number that is registered in one of our local telecoms because when you get your sim card in taiwan it requires identification two photo IDs as a proof it's actually very difficult to get 5000 sim cards if you do the anti-money laundering service will be after you very quickly so we're reasonably sure that each person only have like low single digit number of sim cards and that that is fine right so the platform makes sure that people are authenticated through sms but the photo ID and the information is not transmitted to the platform operator so it's two different agencies one is the telecom that verifies your identity but doesn't know which proposals you propose because you do so over a pseudonym but in the platform join or veto and platforms case we know what you propose but it's under a pseudonym and we do not actually know beyond that you have a valid mobile phone number we do not know your identity so it's as long as those two parties do not collude the anonymity is still preserved but people cannot create 5000 sock puppets i hope that answer your question thank you very much thank you very much yuka thank you minister we have a lot of interesting questions so tetsushi go ahead great um thank you and thank you for coming today and uh my question is kind of related to miho's question uh it was very interesting that uh word digital and plural are kind of the same in taiwan and i'm really interested in education and uh when i saw your interview you mentioned like education in taiwan like not digital literacy but digital competence and i was really interested in the content of that kind of education like what kind of our skills or modally or kind of a way of thinking thus the education of digital competence teach and what is your kind of ambition uh towards education like what kind of a content uh or like yeah way of thinking should be taught in education in your view thank you uh i think in education what we're looking for is um autonomous interaction toward the common good and that is true for both basic learning as well as lifelong learning the often say it's pbl but it's purpose based learning rather than project based or problem based learning that the purpose is the common good uh that uh allies as together and the reason why is that if we focus on the team very on the competence of working as a team uh with random strangers in different time zones in different cultures then we're equipped to see each incoming challenge as an interesting learning opportunity on the other hand if we over identify with individual to individual competition then if the problem that we encounter is larger than a scope that a individual or a very trusted small number of people can tackle then we have this learned helplessness like this is beyond my pay grade i don't want to tackle it anymore but once we have this helplessness response then we stop learning right we stop acquiring new competence we're basically just building our taste in saying oh this is my domain and that is not my domain and within my domain i'm okay to solve it until the solution is automated by a ai and then i feel worthless and feel bad about myself right so basically because of the emerging um um trends of interdisciplinary problems that require interdisciplinary um collaboration so this kind of common good anchors us in the as i mentioned the solidarity the relationship muscles that we built which can be renewed very quickly and is enjoyable uh rather than over identifying on your grades on something require external validation because that changes very quickly and is very difficult to recover once you outsource your intrinsic motivation into something uh that is a extrinsic validation so more learning uh less education uh more co-creation uh and less top-down examination that would be my general idea yeah thank you it was very interesting that the concept of digital competence is so interdisciplinary yeah thank you thank you very much minister i think that's quite an ideal we we are also striving for here interesting case okay go ahead um thank you so much i'm really honored to ask you a question in this format my name is case kikudo nice to meet you um well i've seen a lot of um progress that you have done and it's really admirable thing and within like seeing those progresses i've kind of doubt that what makes you feel like you wanted to do that what is your motivation to do and also that the question or regarding to this um how do you come up with that motivation yeah as i mentioned i i'm just doing this for fun uh and so it i don't require external validation because to me it's it's fun uh it's very enjoyable for me to uh read about like 10 different viewpoints that fight each other uh and go to sleep and have a full night's sleep uh eight or nine hours and then wake up within a hot moment that says oh actually you know they have this thing in common right so so i really enjoy this process of turning uh tension turning uh opposition into co-creation uh and every time i think of something like that i was like truly blessed and my few joyous uh to share uh that actually you know the people against marriage equality the people for marriage equality they all care very much about long-term relationship that's the common good and then let's unite over that and so on so so this really cheers me up and because this is entirely internal i don't require anyone else to tell me uh whether this good idea or this is bad idea instead uh anyone who offers a very different viewpoint i feel blessed because i can then learn from them for something else that i have not yet uh synthesized into co-creation so to renew my own spirit it uh suffices to simply look around the internet and see people doing attacks on the policy that we're making uh because that is the invitation for us to engage them on their own terms to the parts of their ideas that are authentic and really represents something that we have not yet thought of or experienced and so that really keeps him up all right thank you so much um i just wanted to ask another question which is really um kind of related to what if the topic which you are focusing on are the thing that you really don't want to face with for example for us as a student we might have some obstacles and we we have less motivation to it how can you come up with motivation in that situation sleep uh just go to sleep uh and sleep for a sufficient number of hours uh what looks like tension or obstacle uh feels just downright easy uh after a sufficient amount of sleeping uh i think this is pretty scientific there are a lot of papers uh about this particular phenomenon and i don't put a upper bound of my sleep i think because i just returned from italy uh to taiwan i think in the past 24 hours i slept for 13 hours and that is entirely fine and i'm now feeling very good so uh whenever i feel there's something that i cannot face that is a real obstacle i'll just sleep on it and my colleagues all know i don't rush to decisions i always say yeah let me just look at those evidences i'll i'll sleep on it and the more complex it is i sleep longer yeah all right thank you so much thank you okay suki i can uh go ahead hey good afternoon minister thanks for taking the time to talk to us today uh so my question is relatively straightforward so while taiwan is at the forefront of digital democracy not everyone in taiwan or the rest of the world is digitally literate how then do you ensure sort of accessibility in digital democracy when this is the reality yes my own grandmother my father's mother is around 90 years old and she knows digital probably only as line video that is to say we regularly talk to one another over line video i go to visit her every couple weeks and the intervening weekend we just do line video she doesn't carry a smartphone uh with her because the words are too small for her but she's very interested in digitalization and have always a lot of ideas when i roll out new policies my grandma is my focus group i always test by her and her friends now the the trick here is that we always find someone who plays the role of a assistant though which is also part of my idea why a i need to be assistive intelligence because just like the hearing aid that my grandma used or the eyeglass that we wear a good assistive technology honors the person's dignity right aligns with my vision literally my vision instead of pushing pop-up advertisements to my retina it is accountable in a sense that if it breaks i get to fix it or take it down the street for the repair person we don't have to pay like five thousand dollars in the a or sign a agreement or something right so it is empowering people closest to the pain or the lack of eyesight as the world now if we structure our technologies like that then people who are not digitally very well connected and always find someone that is just slightly better on the letter to help them so for example when we introduced musk pre-registration we made a point of having the pharmacists of the convenience store staff and really anyone who are a little bit more of us on the digital technologies to work with the kiosk or the automated systems so that the automated system take away most of the chores but the elderly people can always walk to the convenience store near their region literally just a couple minutes walk at most and then present their health ic card and then the staff takes the rest inserting in kiosk taking care of the payment and so on but because people of my grandma's age they can still learn all right neuroplasticity and all that once they learn that you just click here here and there and you can pay by cash at the counter and then you get your musks and so and well they feel empowered because next time they can take their friend to the same convenience store and then don't have to bother the staff they just go you know you insert the card here and do here here and here right so it's not about a lot of experts and people who like rely on those experts it's about this very gradual ladder of expertise that everyone can just connect a little bit more to their original community helpers assistance and then empower themselves to become a coach to another so then this goes viral and people take pride in helping each other the same goes for countering this information online for many civic technologies if you make it easy enough for people to tutor one another then even very old people eventually pick up something and they feel quite secure that this is both swift and safe thank you so much thank you interesting uh Izumi go ahead yes um uh hello i'm a little bit nervous but at the same time i really i'm really glad to like have this opportunity to ask you a question so thank you for coming so i would like to ask a question also about our collective learning and i was surprised to learn a new concept of digital competence confidence instead of digital literacy and you mentioned that learning is easier rather than to be taught so what is what is what can teachers what can teachers do for teacher what can teachers can do for students or what is the teacher role in the fields of collective learning thank you yeah i've encountered many good teachers and professors especially after i drop out of school so that we are at equal peer-to-peer relationship because i'm not um oblique to show up to their class but almost immediately after i drop out of middle school i started attending uh undergrad and grad level classes now the uh professors they don't say that oh you're not my paying student and so but actually they treated my research interest very seriously and started working together now i think the the idea that the teacher is teaching something to me motivates me less than the teacher is a researcher or a learner themselves that are very interested in some unfathomable problems because if it's very easy to distill into standardized answers then i can just learn it online i don't have to listen to a teacher the online teacher you can rewind you can slow down you can speed up you can play many times uh like real person will probably get angry the first time you do that right so it's always preferable if there is already a standardized answer or curriculum it's always preferable to to do this like entirely autonomously but on the other hand the curiosity the um the feeling that every time we talk about something something unexpected spontaneous may happen well that is the best so the professors and teachers that i kept a working relationship after i drop out of the middle school all have their very interesting research agenda and they're interested in not just explaining to me but also making sure that i have some room to contribute there as well so again there's a crack in everything that's how the light gets in my encouragement to teachers is also to share your immature research agenda to the student so that it can be driven by students own curiosity and adds to that your own expertise thank you thank you minister so i guess it's something i will have to reflect upon myself too indeed uh lana go ahead thank you for coming here i'm really nervous to ask question but i have a question about future so nowadays our quality of life has been improved or improved thanks to the technology however looking to the status score in detail that situation is kind of a step right like even the data technology has been developed we cannot choose our parents in the first stage so so like because of that in the future that like opportunity could be really like divided between the person who had the money or not so do so i have a question about that like do you think that problem will be solved by data sciences in the future yes um i think this is a very good question but it's uh one of the few question i heard uh today that cannot be answered in a very short fashion this really requires an hour long seminar but i will try to answer in in very broad brushes first of all as you pointed out the current generation of data science tools rewards aggregation of data and rewards investment into the tensor gpu hardware again that is concentration of capital in order to deliver good results this is the the true thing on the other hand so is the healthcare like really expensive machines for ct for mri and so on that it has the same pattern or the same goes for the transportation like building a high speed rails that's also very capital intensive and requires lots of centralization power and so on but in each of those cases in taiwan at least and also other social democracies the state has said that the basic minimum acceptable standard for universal healthcare for universal transportation for universal communication need to be like this so that in any place in taiwan if you cannot get 10 megabits per second for our video conference like bandwidth if you do not get that for just 15 euros per month then it's my fault like literally the digital ministry's fault you can help me to account and people actually do and so once we have this social norm that says even though it requires a lot of money to invest in the spectrum into nowadays the starlings lower earth orbits and so on is very capital intensive but we see that from a rights framework as in this is a human right rather than from a privileged framework in the sense that we want to optimize efficiency of allocation of resources we always say for these social core of our nation this is not about efficiency this is about equity now there's also other parts that's not covered by this thought the universal healthcare for example does not cover at the moment cosmetic surgery right but it does cover dental surgery so each community need to agree upon some sort of norm beyond which it is for the free market to explore but below which is essentially a human right framework and that's overtone window that the window changes once more research becomes development once more development become commodity once commodity become open source in a maker economy then we can move more and more things into this socialist core that is very broad brush and I really don't want to generalize because it's not the same in computation technology communication technology in educational uses of digital and in industrial uses of digital it's all very different so I will not generalize more but as much as I can generalize that is basic thinking thank you thank you thank you Lena so we have a thank you again next go ahead sorry I just have there are many questions I would like to ask about choosing some of them it's not it's been difficult but yeah I was I was always thinking like how can Japan like implement some of the innovations that Taiwan has been implementing over the years you know from these digital innovations and one question that I often have is that within Asian societies I feel that's though there's rigid hierarchical hierarchical structures especially from our daily life and from within our workplace and how does like the Taiwan government or the people try to promote this like participatory stance and allow for new ideas and innovations to take effect as you have done so far thank you first of all I think the the equity-based thinking is important right when we introduce the one laptop per child idea that basically make sure that students become co-creators in their curriculum in their agenda in that they can participate meaningfully in middle school and especially in senior high the what kind of classes that the school will create so just like the undergrad level studies but implemented on the junior high and senior high level so the laptop is not just a screen for the teacher to push content through but rather it is a creative canvas for the student to co-create to make into possible newer materials and curriculums for their classmates but also for everyone around Taiwan so this is a rather powerful idea in that equity can be furthered by this crowdsourcing of materials and crowdsourcing of creative commons materials from our students and so on they become co-teachers co-creators so to speak so this is the basic idea now I would also say that to further this idea of creative commons it is important not just to involve the basic education but also lifelong education as well so we have a lot of endeavors where the local elderly pairs with the young people maybe on the Pokemon girl narrative that improves the open street map and Wikipedia are telling the story in their own one of our 20 national languages or Mozilla common voice where they can contribute to the mission understanding of their own language and things like that and I think in the Japanese context this is quite familiar right I've visited many regional revitalization projects or the strategic zones and so on and they all have this focus on not just preserving by revitalizing the local culture and the connection between the elderly people and the young and if you focus on this intergenerational solidarity then it I wouldn't say weaken but it make more flexible the hierarchical like senior arts culture that both Taiwan and Japan have the other hack that I often introduce is the idea of a reverse mentor so that in Taiwan we have a system where people younger than 35 around 35 of them gets invited to be advisors to be advisor of the cabinet of the ministers and we call them commissioner or use counselor and so on it's exactly way you and exactly the same word as we use for legislature for senator and so on and so because we respect senior arts in our hierarchy but we respect official rank even more right so now the younger people like maybe early 20s once they are a way and a commissioner a legislator ish thing not really a member of the parliament but member of the smaller parliament within the administration then people start treating them with respect and they treat with self-respect and they feel they have a real duty now to make something that's tangibly feasible not just critiques but rather constructive criticism and co-creation so one of the earliest champions of e-petition when she turned to 17 started a successful petition in the movement that bends plastic straws from our bubble tea takeouts Wang Xuanru turned 19 when she became our commissioner for national action plans during committee toward open government and so then I refer to her even though she's just 19 as Wang Wei Yuan from that point on and then she just tours around different high schools and so and to introduce this idea that it is that your contribution instead of your age that defines your relative social rank or possession and when the career public servants many in their 60s and something consistently refer to these very young people as Wei Yuan as essentially senior official then we build a culture where it's focused more on your contribution rather than your age as commissioner Wang Xuanru have said thank you so much thank you interesting thank you Q&A go ahead yes it is a great honor to be here minister I'm a big fan of yours and I have two questions here first three last year you were invited to the summit of democracy by US president Biden that was the online platform international conference and you attend out of conferences via the internet how do you evaluate those types of conferences secondly they're regarding Taiwan's democracy especially with digital technologies how do you protect Taiwan people from cyber attacks and other intervention by host countries where the people in this democracy thank you both very important questions indeed in the past couple years because of the pandemic I've been invited to more and more senior level meetings prior to doubt people know me as a teleworking ministry I've attended via robot to a UN Geneva meeting in Taiwan but for this kind of video conference we always meet with just middle-ranked people who are younger and more comfortable with video conferencing they're truly senior decision makers senators and so on it's not that they didn't use video conference they did use video conference in their youth it's just video conference really bad experience back then so they just don't want to use video conference when they achieve the position of seniority that's for for people who can who must be and you know to to bear the lack of good quality communication now for the pandemic times a lot of software including the software we're using rapidly improved so that it's now not bad at all to have a video conference with each other in fact you can see each other rather clearly it was not a high latency as before a lot of assistive intelligence machine learning went into place so that when we like just now we lose your voice from the second to the other the machine actually completes the sentence for you that there's quite magical use of machine learning right so with these technological advances that strengthens people's connection rather than replace people it now becomes okay for the senior people to relearn video conference and they clear the cash in their man mind it was not as bad as before so they're willing to engage more so that went to the highest level to the UN assembly level meeting the summit for democracy as you mentioned the future of the internet declaration I listened to Fodorov of Ukraine like relating their experience using digital in a geopolitical event in a war and so and so and I feel although not quite co-presidents not quite in the same place I do feel the non-verbal messages very clearly so I think this is a good thing that we've now cleared our cash in our minds and we embrace video conferencing more now the other question I think this is not just about the technical cybersecurity which is easy if you think of it as a like counter pandemic kind of way where people make good habits right just like fighting the virus it's important to wash your hands thoroughly I see many people wearing a mask keeping social distance and so on so can basic very basic cybersecurity practices always use multi-factor authentication keep a backup in at least two physical places in three different backups in choosing the software keeping them up to date but do not lock in by any particular vendor prefer open and free audited assured open source software these are just like washing your hand right you probably have heard this countless number of times but if we make it a community of practice where people just do this quite visibly not individually but quite visibly and become a coach then most of the cybersecurity attacks can be mitigated by the defense in-depth system incorporating those good habits conversely if we do not have good habits if we over authorize in a proprietary system the boss the CEO although they do not use any of those day-to-day function we just give them super user privilege and they keep the same password never used two-factor authentication then even the best cybersecurity firewalls and so I will fall very quickly because they do not have good cybersecurity habits and so I don't think this is technology alone technology like the zero trust framework and so on wex precisely because for me a passwordless cardless authentication is also easier so it's safe and is also more swift if you force me to use like 20 digit uppercase lowercase exclamation mark as my password and block the paste function so I cannot even use the password manager actually it lowers the security it doesn't increase the security so good habits I think is the very good first step thank you so much and that's yeah go ahead okay I'm so excited to talk with you because you were one of the greatest hackers and I left your books yeah and my question is about the democracy of Japan I think the democracy of Taiwan is so successful because of the open government the idea of open government yeah but in terms of Japan the digital ministry was organized in recent years but this ministry doesn't seem not to work well so in this case do you have any ideas about the specific obstacles or how to solve them and especially uh is it possible to introduce open the idea of open government in Japan thank you yeah um well I am not intimately familiar with the day-to-day operation of your digital agency but I do believe that in the introduction of the my number uh the unique idea of the citizens and so on they took a very incremental approach that is to say not forcing everything to use that idea especially not commercial transactions but rather just incrementally for healthcare for simply fine the procedures while very clear on leaving no one behind like not taking away the existing benefits and so on just because people do not like to use that my number uh system right away and so on and and I don't think this is bad I think this is actually pretty good in Taiwan we've coexisted many of those measures people still now can when they file their taxes can still go to a tax office desk and do it all out pen and paper it's just most people now just use a phone right and they just authenticate very quickly and they don't need to remember any password and anything as I mentioned the sim card already authenticates them and so on so most people use these automated ways or if they need some help they go to convenience store if their tax is below 1000 US dollars they can also pay via cash to the convenience store again very convenient so all sort of letters for people to be on but if we just pull out the lower most letter of like doing this the old-fashioned pen and paper way if we pull that then the legitimacy just crumbles because people would say you're not excluding people so I believe Japan is taking the same approach and although exponential looks like really slow at the beginning I do hope that it will eventually go exponential and instead of sacrificing the legitimacy as we've seen in many other jurisdictions they'll want to push through by a minor majority by a small majority the idea of national ID card or something and then the next party goes into power like in the UK and then everything else goes back right so so rather than that like going back I would rather that the direction is firm and then we go initially more slowly so I don't think there's anything wrong with the leaving no one behind approach this is not a racing competition after all so this is the first thing and the second thing is I think there's a lot of participation on a local or community level in Japan there's a lot of room for people to contribute to their township to their perfection and things like that what people look to Taiwan and see this as like very amazing is that we also have this national level participation platform national level participatory budget presidential hackathon and things like that but in terms of land mass and population I mean Taiwan is just one larger municipality in Japan so maybe it's not a fair comparison to say that you have to do this on a senate level on a congress level but rather focus on the perfect or municipality around the norms I think that works rather better in Taiwan because our high speed rails allows for the northmost Taipei station to travel just 93 minutes to reach the southmost Gaoshuang station it feels like a small perfecture even though it's 23 million people but usually it only scales as much as the norm scales the resonance between people that when we upload a picture when we type something people can assume that this is common knowledge what I'm referring to but in very different perfectures different municipalities when this no longer is true then it's harder for a platform or for open governments to abstract over the issues over those very different norms hope to answer your question thank you thank you thank you very much I think we have time for perhaps if you if you may minister I think just a few minutes together so may I ask I would be curious to see these questions from teachers faculty members that would like to jump in I think that would be I apologize to all the students that have raised their hand there's a lot of questions but I would be curious to so is there any faculty member that would like to jump in yes thank you very much thank you very much for being with us today my name is Shogo I'm teaching development studies and sustainability education in AIU my question is about your emphasis on diversity and plurality so in my field in sustainability we talk about diversity along with efficiency because when we have too much of diversity the operation control system is simply too much so I'm just wondering how you are taking the balance of diversity and efficiency in the in the field of your digitalization operation thank you thank you so plurality is about collaboration across diversity so it's not about diversity alone the polar system that vtaiwan and later join uses is unlike a letter to the president where people individually write their ideas to the president there is just no way for the president to read all the letters to the president rather this is more about like posting a short letter to the president but to everyone else and everyone else can say oh I agree with that sentiment I disagree with that sentiment but this is not voting things up or down this is making sure that people can see where they are in terms of positions now we say the president or rather the minister only consider the top 10 agenda not the most upvoted but the 10 that is upvoted across diversity no matter which aisle you are in you have to convince every other group of your ideas or it to be even considered by the minister or the president so in that schema it doesn't pay for you to mobilize 5 000 people who vote exactly the same way because it doesn't increase the plurality that is to say it doesn't increase collaboration across diversity rather you're motivated then to think of very nuanced ideas that speak to the common value rather than to the issues that cause polarization or controversy so this is a pro-social rather than antisocial arrangement of science and we only review carefully the 10 things that are most pro-social the things that everybody can resonate with and this gives a chance for the minorities to develop their appropriate social technology for their ideas to resonate with the larger group because they do not get flooded by the larger group in the visualization so I hope that answers the question we never think about efficiency but we think about effectiveness and effectiveness is determined by the collaboration the degree of plurality degree of collaboration across diversity thank you very much thank you thank you very much minister may do you mind if we push perhaps one more question yes thank you for coming today I'm teaching academic English here in ARU and I'm thrilled to have you as a guest speaker I teach so many students who struggle with the English language and then I'm sure that you use English for communication international settings and it's pity that I see so many students giving up on sharing their wonderful ideas simply because they're concerned too much about their English language ability do you have any message to these students who want to shut down themselves a bit and so that they're not sharing their ideas well it's enjoyable if you don't have to do it right so I usually just when I enroll in a different culture like in Japan I of course rely on the interpreters but I also make sure that whenever there is a interpretation situation going because the kanji is very similar right so I look at the machine generated captions and learn at least a little bit of what's being conveyed what's going on so there's two layers of this one is that for most English is sufficient if you can read and comprehend and listen and comprehend it's not that much about speaking or about writing and whenever you speak or write if you use your native language you express yourself more fully you can pair yourself with a good machine translation program and then you can look at the resulting English to appreciate the word choice it uses I use DPL most of the time and they use like very idiomatic phrase so I often like just translate back and see if that actually means what I think it means so there's many exploratory tools in English like the word vector many word vector visualizations that can you can let you type in a word and see its meaning embeddings it's nearby words and things like that and it's not your obligation to create new expressions in English but rather you can just see it I use Japanese or any other your native language and then just see the result and appreciate like looking at a new conversation or an art and so on I think that increased the fun of things because after all nowadays we can rely on machine translation and professional interpreters for more than 90% of our communicational needs what's important is just to keep a healthy perspective toward English instead of associating it with something painful we can associate with something beautiful hope that answer your question thank you so much yeah thank you so much minister I think we agreed on one hour so I feel bad for going over time I wish we could well if you have another hour we can continue the conversation but that would be perhaps pushing a little bit too much I would like to thank you very much for your time today this was a fascinating discussion I would like to thank all the students for the brilliant questions and brilliant articulation of that thank you again thank you so much for your time thank you so much I really enjoyed it's really good questions Leflon and Praspa thank you so much so I just 200 students I would like you to feel a kind of a feedback for