 to this two separate lines, but completely complementary, completely intertwined. One is that I'm doing a series of articles for Australian media, financial, tech, societal media, about this whole question of where we're at and is tech the villain or a potential saviour? Are we the villains, ourselves, right? And these other sort of ambitious projects I'm working on globally, which is the new world there. And for our conversation today in this 30 minutes, they will be completely interchangeable because of the very same questions that I ask and you're asking. And so I just wanna dive in. I wanna dive in and I wanna start, there's so many ways I could start with you, but I wanna start with yourself, your self description of your role. Okay, I'm a lowercase minister, I'm a poetician, I'm a person that makes plurality out of singularity. Yes, so love all that, love it, but I wanna really go to the words that I've seen written about you and also that you wrote in, that you mentioned in a TEDx theme because it's so profound and personal to me for a couple of reasons, which I'll explain. So I'm just gonna go to that right now and I'm just gonna tell them back to you, which is when you see the internet of things, make it the internet of beings. When you see virtual reality, let's make it a shared reality. When we say mission learning, let's make it collaborative learning, when we say user experience, let's make it about human experience and when we say the singularity is near, let us all remember that plurality is here. I really, really love it and I gotta tell you that it was an affirmation of stuff that I've been struggling with for ages is because as a writer that has been invested in policy and politics and tech for many, many years, when you write stuff that tries to put human beings at the center of your desire to act, there is a lot of like, man, there's a lot of pushback about that. It's like we don't understand the law or something, right? How do we overcome that and in your experience, like, what advice would you have for me and you were there that we literally wanna put humanity at the center of the tools and services that this technology can allow us to have? Yeah, I think there's a long tradition of confusing the categories. For example, people are talking about incentivizing companies but companies are fictions. They really couldn't be incentivized and on the other hand, people talk about human resource as if we're soil and green or something. Yes. Yeah, right, so I think a profound disorientation around categories is at hunt and which is why I think paying attention to the vocabulary really matters. And I've discovered that many people actually are very keen to use these ideas, this collaborative learning or as I call it, assistive intelligence rather than authoritarian intelligence if you make the analogy close enough to home. For example, when I talk about collaborative learning or assistive intelligence, I often invoke the meta for a fire because first of all, fire is dangerous. It destroys entire cities. Second, the fire is an important part of civilization because it enable batch processing of digestive cooking functions. The AI enable batch process of cognitive functions. And third, we don't actually limit fire use to just a few technicians. Instead, we teach how to use fire responsibly as young as six years old. It's called cooking classes and enable us to share recipes and share the cooking experience together which is the fabric of civilization. Now, with this analogy, people understand assistive intelligence as contrary to the authoritarian one very well. So I guess just a few analogies would help a lot. Let's go a long way. Yeah, I mean, it's really interesting because I think the people that are not leaders, right? When you group with them, when you travel or whatever, you actually find out that we've got more in common than less in common. And it really is about food, love, ideas, feeling good about purpose-driven lives. Yeah, that's right. Do you feel like... Is there a turning point or a tipping point? Not just in Taiwan because I know you've focused on your work in Taiwan but you're also like, you're getting to the heart of global issues east-west as well, right? Do you think we're at a tipping point that there's real opportunity? And I'm not just talking about optimism versus cynicism. I'm talking about in your 39 years, is it something that you feel that we have an extraordinary tipping point now where we can really... Definitely. I mean, it used to be that on the more anti-social side of social media, it travels not only on outrage or revenge or discrimination but also those emotions were triggered by this showing off culture of people looking at Instagram, looking at social media and see a gilded age and period with their everyday life and see a profound disempowerment as opposed to empowerment when interfacing with so many more superficial part of the society. However, during the COVID globally, it's not just in Taiwan but globally, those ideas that grew was about altruism, was about protecting the vulnerable, was about, well, there was some blaming about outsiders and so on but it's not so much about a status competition anymore. Actually, it's considered bad taste to show off during a COVID no matter which status symbol one uses and it brings together on the same urgency the parts of the world that previously wouldn't talk to one another because of time zone, because of cultural differences and so on because everyone is sharing the same playbook that has a variation and sometimes successfully, sometimes for a while and so on but everyone could feel the urgency, the same urgency. So I do think COVID is a really, really big tipping point more so in climate change because for climate change, the continental and the islandic countries sometimes do not feel it on the same time scale but COVID is the same time scale for everyone. So I do think with the hindsight of 2020, probably intended, we're not much more prepared for this global solidarity. Yeah, I mean, I hear all that and one of the things that I heard in that too was, you know, constantly, and I think it goes to this plurality concept, right? But it also goes to this idea of globalization. So, you know, scholarship and politicization has set out the last 10 years, whether it's been Brexit or whether it's Trump or whatever, the globalization has failed us, right? Right? And, you know, I'm really interested in the idea of plurality and global progress that can be imagined without this division, again, getting back to sort of what our shared values are. And I really loved what you're already learning about polis, polis in Taiwan, you know? The simple, I know there's a lot more to it than this, but the simple act of actually getting rid of a like apply button literally takes out a lot of the noise and a lot of the stuff. So, where do you learn on globalization and what we've learned about it? The pros, cons and the good, the bad, the ugly of it and the way that tech can move forward and not hate globalization, but still progress as a humanity in our specific cultures and countries. Yes. I think there's this word that I use, transculturalism, that I think symbolizes what polis and other processes is all about because this is all about looking at our own upbringing as individuals from the communities that we were detached or distanced from or vilified. But if we can go through this transcultural journey, then we end up learning more about ourselves because of those different perspectives. They are very much legitimate and share the same goals and sometimes offer actually always offer better imaginations or alternate imaginations how to reach those goals also healthier by us, but we were constrained about the one culture that are bringing restrict us to, right? So, this transcultural journey, I think, is what people feel profoundly, no matter whether this is looking at a polis report or looking at us from the VR of the space station and so on that gives a holistic overview effect of things and that's the transcultural experience. Yeah, and you know what? It just reminded me of something that I was gonna bring up later but I actually think it's really important and again, it's very important to the team at New World Fair is what we're really about is I guess understanding exponentiality, right? Exponentiality of systems and technologies putting humans at the center of that. It is actually very, very difficult to visualize exponentiality or to show it at a glance to people, right? And I love some of the stuff that you were saying in a couple of talks that I saw you which is like even with one of the initiatives that you got where people in Taiwan can go, like the budget, the budget thing, 500 PDF fricking pages and pulling in a thing where you can drill down, drill down, drill down, right? What can you tell us about where those visual, like better reimagining visualization techniques can take you and what are you most excited about having seen what that's done in Taiwan? Yeah, sure. Yeah, where you would like to take it because I think this whole thing when in terms of understanding complexity, I would argue that we're not very good at it and but yet we really, really need to be better at it. Yeah, I think it's beyond words, right? Because words are linear. Well, I mean, there's some non-linear poetry but that's not what the government's reports are usually written in. I agree. Right, so if something is by nature beyond words, trying to capture it with words, I mean, it's a poet's job but we don't usually do a very good job at it as you said, right? So much more is needed to immerse oneself in the context. For example, computer games, I'm very excited about interactive games that teach things. I've personally translated quite a few games from Niki Case and they're what they call Interactionable Maker that explains, for example, the epidemiology model. And so in the model called What Happens Next, you can actually try the different ideas of fighting COVID, like social distancing, mask use and so on but it's a kind of sandbox. Everyone can try their own policy ideas and just in a simulation understand exponentiality, literally the basic reproduction value of exponential virus growth, right? So, and I think this does a pretty good job that is it on the chat here of explaining exponentiality. So I think there's three keys. First, it's interactive means that it's fast, right? If you change a dial, you get a response immediately and it considers all the different options. It's not trying to ram a certain idea like contact tracing down the user's throat. It's actually revealing what the epidemiologists have learned in a sandbox and putting you in charge of ensuring a fair response. And finally, it's fun. You can see the comic drawings, the smileys that the different moods of people, suspectable expose and infectious and recovered and so on, which are really beyond words. If you take out all those pretty diagrams and faces and then just with the words, infectious or recovered, it will be much more dull. So the same fast, fair, fun principle also applies here. I really, I really love that. And again, it's so resonant to what we're trying to do in your welfare. One, at least one of our co-founders, Peter Hirshberg, you have met at a number of different conferences before. Don't blame me for not remembering. If you do, you do, that's great. But key to new welfare is we wanna have the heart of it. Some idea of gamification, small and large, right? About how that where people can come to this and it's not SimCity, it's way bigger than that with the tools of today, but how we can literally engage with that and see the results of our choices and what they do. And so you think that that is possible and probable that way? It is probable. I think it does capture people's attention and we do have very successful cases in Taiwan where, for example, there's a social entrepreneur that made a Pokemon Go game, but instead of collecting Pokemons, it's about refilling your bottle in a drinking fountain and saving plastic use. And the notification is about reminding you to drink when there is potential heat damage and this gold coin that you collected could be spent on this local social enterprise agricultural projects, which then introduce the idea of reducing carbon footprint by consuming near home and so on and also the green transition. But all this is, of course, very pedagogical, but this is in the shell of a Pokemon Go-like game and people play it because it's fun, not because they want to save plastic, but after playing for 50 days, they save a lot of plastic and reduce a lot of carbon footprint. Yeah, and that sort of goes to a bigger question. So at what, you're 39, I'm 57 in about five days and I'm Australian, you're Taiwanese, et cetera, et cetera. I'm a wordsmith. You're a software thinker and bigger thinker than that. I'm not buckling us. So we've had life experiences that take us elsewhere. I want to ask you what you think about the idea of tech and how tech has presented more rule versus the wisdom of crowds. And what do you think about the work that you're doing in Taiwan that seems to me to be about more about you can get the wisdom of crowds, not the mob rule? Yeah, I think my conception of a collaborative learning assistive intelligence is that these are the tools that strengthens the people-to-people connections so that we work better together because a lot of AI research is replacing human beings or augmenting one single individual so they can do the work of 10,000s not really communicating with that 10,000, right? So it's different ideas of tech and tech is never neutral, tech has a agenda. And so when I said I consider democracy to be a type of technology, this is a agenda. This is saying social technology, technology that enable communities to work together better and make listening as skill possible so the more people you get, the more wisdom it generates. That's a position, right? And I do understand the other position which is, of course, authoritarian, concentrating the data and decision-making power and so on. And there is of course some attraction at that otherwise we wouldn't be at peak centralization when it comes to social media now. Yeah, that's right. I mean, one of the biggest myths on the standings of all the internet and how it evolved since what I would call the commercialization of the internet post 1998, 2000, 2005 is that everybody likes to think it's distributed to a certain extent it is but it's massive centralization in the hands of a few. Definitely, yes. And I mean, I've read a few articles recently describing our work, one is a pretty good one about, I think it's on the Atlantic of how to put out democracy's dumpster file. And so the time is, there's how to fix the internet kleptocracy that profits from this information polarization and rage. And in that article is a comparison of the number of people using Polis or join platform and so on which even with 10 million visitors it's true that people only contribute when there's a emerging issue that they talk about. But they of course spend more time on Facebook and Instagram and friends. And but I think one of the perspective I want to offer is that it's not really in competition with one another. People spend time in town halls, in national parks, in public libraries but it's by far not what they spend most of their time. It's the time that we dedicate our quality thinking to public life to be one with our community and have a conversation with the community. So by nature, it couldn't be 24 hours a day. It could just be about the things that we care about and that's entirely fine. What's not fine is that people are missing the digital public infrastructure and using the private infrastructure designed for, I don't know, it's like a nightclub, right? For gossiping, addictive drinks, private bouncers and use that as a town hall, that's the problem. But if we have digital town halls, digital national parks, I'm not saying that it should supplement or replace because it's definitely on different domains and I'm not against Facebook and so on but we really do need to look into this re-decentralization. I mean, I absolutely agree with that and there's just so much to talk about that and I hope to have that opportunity with you in time to come. You know, and so, but I have to ask you, I mean, this is the journalist in me. I have to ask you, like when you've got all these debates in Europe and Asia and Australia and even the US about whether we break up Big Tech, whether we call it a utility, utility, whatever, where do you think we're going wrong in how we compartmentalizing those problems? Whether you think we're right and whether we're wrong because it's messy, man, and not to mention that like all good intentions, like the world is paid with good intentions, right? So regulatory control of breaking up stuff like Google or Facebook or decentralized, these centralized authorities, there's a lot of unintended consequences that we can, that some of us can see, right? Where do you stand on that? My staff just reminded that I need to run because the president is visiting in like two minutes from now, but the main idea here is democracy. The algorithm that sorts the newsfeed is actually fine if people co-create it. The ideas that's the section 230 is there to prevent and do control by the states to how the community regulates. Would be fine if not for the peak centralization. So I think that what we're missing really is just a way for people to participate in the governance. And if we can solve this participatory governance issue, then most of the issues that concerns this externality managed by the state will probably go away automatically. This is what we call people-public-private partnerships or social sector-first approach. And I really need to run. Sorry about that. And we can follow up on emails and such. We will. We will. And thank you so much and have a fantastic day. You too. Bye. Bye.