 Can I just call you Audrey? Yeah, of course. Just Audrey. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. I guess we will have another interview or from KBS. Yeah, I don't know whether it will be simultaneous or not. So I asked not to. Oh, you asked not to? Yeah, sure. We used the time to help. Of course. Of course. I just wanted to run your group five weeks before fact-checking. Yeah, go ahead. Go ahead. So you're the youngest minister in Taiwan? At the moment, but not historically. Oh. There was a minister of youth affairs. Jenny Jun, when she went into the cabinet a few years ago, she was 34. So right now you're the youngest? Right now I'm the youngest at 35. And your first transgender minister in Taiwan? In the world, actually. You never went to college? Yeah, I dropped out of junior high school when I was 14. 14. And when did you start your first company at the age of? 15. 15. I could cook out the case. 16 years. And your IQ is 180? That's a rumor. That's a rumor. My height is 180. It often gets confused. So what's your real IQ? For adults, the IQ test only gets to 160 above which the wise test cannot reliably test. So I am 160 or more, but I don't really know. I've tested twice and there's no way to know. And you started your Silicon Valley start at the age of 19? That's correct. What happened to the company? Well, it's still running. It was like an angel investment by a lot of Taiwanese companies. And then we continued our part of our operation in mainland China and part of it in Taiwan. And it's still running, but I no longer, I know we're in charge of it. That's a very impressive record. Yeah. Yeah. Of course. Go ahead. Take it like this. Here. Oh, baby. Sorry, sorry. That put into my jacket like this. Thank you. I mean, after we take our chance, he was really interested in your philosophy. Have you ever come up with a human homeless? Yeah. I'm sure, you know, because recently you mentioned the deliberation as a keyword. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. The thing was deliberation is that it's magical because when people enter in your high quality of deliberation, everybody walks out changed. And then people respect each other and they will become immune to the rumors, to the propaganda after deliberation. The problem with deliberation is too. First, it's messy, meaning that every time you run it, there's no established way to get high quality deliberation. And second, it doesn't scale, meaning that if it's 20 people, maybe you can get deliberation. If it's 200 people, it's impossible. If it's 2,000 people, people just start shouting at each other. So basically, listening, the key to deliberation, does not scale. Meaning that if it's more people, it actually loses its magic. So we use ICT information communication technology to scale the experience of listening. That's our main contribution. I mean, that process, you actually adopted the notion of listening. Yes. Right. So could you elaborate more about your program, your software that has been developed in order to gather public opinion? Yes, of course. So there are this very important principle in the idea that we use the internet to deliberate on people's feelings, not their suggestions, not their decisions. Because if you jump into suggestions, people will not reveal the feeling they have behind the suggestion. So even though five people suggest the same thing or they vote the same way, maybe they do it out of different subjective feelings. So what we have crowdsourced before was people's feelings, for example, around one concrete issue, like your own private car and you don't have a professional driver's license, but you use this app and then you get a stranger on your backseat and you drive them somewhere and you charge them for it without mentioning any company name. Yeah, exactly. And then our software is an open-source software. Basically, ask people one yes or no question and based on their yes or no question, they get clustered. So after you answer a question whether you think insurance is important, whether you think it's public safety, your avatar moves on the screen so you can cluster with people. And this interface has two very important things. First, it shows your Facebook and Twitter friends first. So you can see if people having very different idea than you, they are not anonymous enemies. They're still your friends. It's just you haven't talked about this over dinner, right? So it's not your enemy, that's first. And the second thing is that in Internet forum, it's very easy for these two polar sides to dominate all the discussion and these people are silent, right? Because they shout. Yes, but the thing here is that you can press consensus and see there's nevertheless, 91% of everybody agrees the importance of checking of the driver's credentials of protecting the passenger. So there can be consensus among disagreements. And so this after you answer a few yes or no questions, you can also type in your own feeling and then which then gets voted by other people. So what we say before the deliberation was that if by the end of the process, we have a set of agreements more than 80% of people agree on something, then we agree to use these supermajority consensus as our national agenda to negotiate with Uber and with other texting. How do you gather people's opinion? Like you said, you didn't listen to their suggestions. You didn't listen to their national opinions. You just kind of capture their feelings or their innate tendency to a specific policy. So how do you gather the information? No, we just ask people to start the sentence here with Wujie, which is I feel that and that's it. So we're not passively monitoring. We're actively asking people to write their authentic feelings. And then this is a open-ended survey so people can feel anything. Within the process, people might really disguise or didn't want to show their feelings. So you might have to ask them twice or three times. That's right. You can change your positions anytime here and then you can state more nuanced feelings because we only take as binding things that you manage to convince everybody. So if it's a disguised or if it's a non-authentic feeling, if people don't share it, it doesn't have any effect. So people are basically competing to first convince people who think like them and gradually to convince people who doesn't think like them. And we only take the supermajority as the agenda. So how do you call that the system? This system has a name called Polis, P-O-L-D-I-S. Is it how to develop? Is it really taking a lot of resources to develop? Well, it is actually a community effort started by some Seattle hackers. But it is open source so everybody can contribute. So I also contributed to its development and it was contributed usually by people who participated in a occupy or a protest movement before. So like after the Occupy Wellington, the New Zealand people would join. And after the Occupy Wall Street and Madrid, every time after the Occupy people start thinking, OK, democracy can take another form and then these people will join this development. So the big moment for you in Taiwan is in 2014 or so? That's exactly right. So we started this development before the sunflower but we were not many people, 100 or so. But after the sunflower, it was just exploded in interest. Okay, yeah, I should look at the camera. So you don't have to look at the camera, you can just look at us. Just briefly, so is this platform are you using for the Taiwan government? That's exactly right. Give me just one example of the latest initiative that you got the idea from this platform. Well, the most high profile, of course, was the Uber case. But we also used the same for the Airbnb case for internet sales of alcoholic beverages and so on. And just today, Uber announced that they will bind themselves to the consensus that's made here. And they will change their business model starting tomorrow to play by the rules that was set in this deliberative fashion. How many people participated in the Uber survey? In the Uber survey, thousands of people participated but only around 1,000 or so logged in so that we can see their avatars. And they have answered more than nine questions so we can determine their position. So it's about, yeah, I would say about 1,000 active players but about 9,000 or so peripheral players. Actually today I'm interested in two of the initiatives from your department and one of them is the eSports. I heard that your department is planning to replace the mandatory military service to playing computer games. Is that right? Can you tell us more about why you are doing this? Right, so first it's not about computer games. eSports is a sport. It just happens so that the stadium they use is a virtual one, not a physical one. But the point here is the computational sport aspect. My favorite argument in this conversation is that I think Go, the board game, is now an eSport. Because most of the competition and training happens online and also because machines now play better than humans. So this is mostly for two human beings to enjoy each other's company and play for performance. And in this sense it really is nothing different from other eSports. So as for the alternative military service, it is true that it's already the case for Go for Wachie players in Taiwan. They can have alternative military service if they win some international or national competition awards. The same applies for any other sport as well as symphony conductors and other cultural performance. So eSport as let's being a cultural performer in which has international competition as a one shouldn't really be discriminated against. That was just the basic idea. So we're not actively promoting it. We're just saying, you know, this is like other sport. And the other thing that we used during the eSport thing is that we have on our PD's website a accountability trail where you can have this QR code. That lists the entire decision making process for how exactly this policy was formed. So starting from the public hearing down to the classes, down to the military service, down to the, you know, national tax breaks and so on. We have all the ministries and all the decision makers in our internal meetings taken as a transcript with real-time transcript. And everybody after editing it for 10 working days agreed to publish it to the general public even before we have set our direction. And this is very important because then everybody, the eSport as let's all the stakeholders look at our conversation deliberation records and let us know over the Internet where we have missed where there's legal precedent for that and so on. And so they were contributed and I quote them on the next meeting and so on. So everybody knows that's when all the three lights here goes from yellow, which means it's in progress to green, which means it's resolved. We have resolved this policy case and it's one piece of the puzzle is the military service, but there is also the educational aspect and also the industrial aspect. So these are a complete picture. This is not just one isolated policymaking. So what are the two most popular eSports game in Taiwan and how far you have to perform in order to replace the military service? Right, exactly. There are 10 criteria spots. So, of course, if you win a Olympic level competition that kind of automatically qualifies, but even for sports like LOL, there is actually no like frequent Olympic level competitions. So the next thing of course is the the alliances between the different countries. So we set a basic criteria that says it has to be regular and it has to have at least this many people in its regional and this many people in its national level and so on. If you qualify for that, there's a few competitions for LOL that qualifies for that. If you win the first three places or so that also qualifies and then after that it was about the national level competitions, which still has to have some kind of structure. So this is a three tier system, but still only the professional players get to continue their work during this kind of alternate service. So we're not rewarding video game players. We're rewarding professional athletes. Another initiative I'm interested in knowing is that your country is starting to educate the children about how to identify fake news at school starting next year. Can you tell us why you think it's important to educate that? I think it's important that we don't use the words fake news because I think it is a disservice to journalism. There are rumors which are viral, which means people who spread it doesn't bother to check, but it's not necessarily false or fake. Some rumors turn out to be true. The point here is that people need to learn to do basic source checking, fact checking and balance of diverse set of opinions and so on. Basically critical thinking and independent thinking. So in our curriculum, we call it information technology and media literacy. So this idea is not about spotting quote fake news unquote, but about being able to make decisions and make opinions of oneself during a learning experience so that people don't guess way one way or another based on rumors. That's the basic idea. The other thing of critical thinking is being able to listen and change one's mind or opinion when new facts serve surfaces and again, this is kind of against human nature. So we need to get started very early on and say, you know, standing to be corrected is actually a virtue. It is not about losing face or anything. And this is the other aspect that I think are very important. So starting how what age would Taiwan age? So the entire K-12 system that is to say starting from the first grade all the way to senior high school because this is not a class. This is one of the literacy that needs to be merged into all the classes. So all the classes, the teachers and the textbook makers and schools need to find some way to find media literacy and critical thinking into the way they're teaching and not just taking it as a class as a examination. I was wondering what was your reactions in your country like when you were first appointed? You're the number one, you're the hacker. So people may be worried that, you know, how can hackers be working for the government? Hackers can attack. Hackers are usually seen as somebody who attacks the government. Like lawyers. Yeah, or maybe lawyers. And number two, I mean in South Korea, we had a high government with a show who come out of closet and it was a good public interest gender. It would instill huge outrage. Did you see experiencing of those outrage in Taiwan as well? Well, not at all. Because first I started working with public service in 2014 after the Sunflower Movement. So for many career public servants, I'm already very well known as one of the people who helped them to communicate to facilitate conversation with citizens. So in many cases in people in administration, they call me kind of a understudy minister already for a couple years before I joined the cabinet working for the previous minister of cyberspace Jacqueline Tsai. So what I'm saying is that if people had some outrage or whatever it already happened 2014, it's not waiting after I become a cabinet minister. That's the first. The second thing about hackers, I think in Taiwan, because cybersecurity is very, very serious matter, people put a lot of understanding into it. So they don't really have this like magical thinking that thinks hackers are somehow magicians. They understand this is just one kind of technology and technology is just like any luxe minis or whatever has their pride, has their professional code of conduct and things like that. So just like when people know a lot about law, maybe they exploit a loophole of law and become very bad lawyers, but they don't have to be right. They can become lawmakers that makes a better kind of law that is not going to be exploited. So I think it's much the same. I understand information technology, but it doesn't mean that I will exploit its loopholes. It means that I will set up system that doesn't suffer from the same kind of loopholes. Since you're at the hacking competition, is it getting more important these days for the government to foster more hackers? Yeah. Yeah. Very early. The first thing I did after joining the cabinet was actually recompile the Linux kernel to add secure computing to our internal government information security facilities, which is the system that we use every day. And then we then invited penetration testers, which are security experts who try to attack the system and to find a loophole so that we can res assured that when we are using the system we configure it properly and so on. So we take this very seriously and we believe that a active penetration testing and forensics and all these tools enables us to have a clear understanding of our information technologies infrastructure and its limitations so that we use it in a responsible manner. Otherwise it's just all voodoo and hearsay, which is pretty much the worst case because then people will take some countermeasures that then cause side effects and so on. So I think a clear understanding of the cyber security landscape is for everybody's benefit. What about the growing intergovernmental or allegedly intergovernmental cyber attacks? There's allegations in North Korea, attacks in South Korea, for example, there are allegations of cyber terrorism between China and the United States. Does that make us more important to have more hackers in the government? Yeah, I think just like with any other terrorism, the impact itself is actually low. The thing that they hope for is to provoke some mysterious fear and then have people overreact and the overreaction actually causes more damage than the initial attempt at the cyber terrorists or real world terrorism. So it's like a mosquito trying to, you know, get onto a bowl and then to break things into a store. So the whole idea is to have a calm and clear understanding and have cyber security experts explaining in a very clear accessible manner what exactly is happening. And then people would not panic and they will not clamor for things that will actually cause more damage. And I think literacy again is the most important thing here. So that connects with your education about the media literacy and just one more about, I think there's a lot of Taiwanese people who believe that rumors are circulating in Taiwan, maybe behind that there's China. Do you think that's one reason that Taiwan should increase its education and media literacy? Well, in Taiwan there are many ideological camps, there's pro-unification, there's pro-independence, there's everything in between. And I think these camps are more than sufficient to generate credible rumors without being remote controlled by any other places or any other groups. That said, I think it is important for people to get inoculated against this kind of virus of mind and deliberation, as you already mentioned, I think is the key for the inoculation. Because any effect, fact-checking or whatever after a rumor has already spread only has a containment effect. But if people have already considered carefully even the position of people they don't disagree with, they already have some kind of inoculation in the mind so that they will not fall victim to rumors. And I think really this kind of early stage prevention is the key here. So just by getting people to listen to the ideas that they don't like basically develops their immunology system. I think your view on this fake news, I only use this term because that's what my readers are familiar with, it's very refreshing. Could you comment on the US President Donald Trump about how the way he communicates with the public, do you think the way he names some of the news media as a fake news outlet, what do you think about them? Well, when Twitter first got invented, people use Twitter in the way that's very direct and make full use of the 140 characters. Taiwanese people use Twitter more like regular blogging because in 140 Chinese characters, you can say a lot. But in English, not so much. So I think there's a distinct style difference in the ways that we use Twitter versus a English speaker use of Twitter. They had to be very brief and basically just say even just one idea or half of an idea. So as things developed, because I was in developing social media networks, we see a lot of very creative uses in Twitter like multi-part tweets, like the tweets that are complementing each other using hashtags and conversation communities and so on. So they built a community structure out of those very short forms of communication. But Donald Trump used Twitter the way when it was first invented, used it as it meant to be. So it's to me also very refreshing. I learned a lot. What do you learn from his way of using Twitter? So basically have self-contained messages. Self-contained messages that doesn't rely on context. Can you elaborate? Can I elaborate? Well, I think that was pretty self-contained. The idea is that if I have made a very long speech and where each sentence depends on the context of the sentence before and after, then when any one of those sentence gets taken out of context, it will be turned into something that I don't already mean. But if I make all my messages self-contained in short, then there's no danger of being taken out of context. So this is the basic thing that I learned. Not necessarily from Donald Trump, but it is the idea of Twitter at this beginning. I don't want to take all your time. I want to ask you my question. Your career path is quite very impressive and so much special. So I heard that you learned programming by yourself after dropping out of Udo school. So what would be the reason? I learned programming when I was eight years old. So that was seven years before I dropped out of Udo school. Would you like to translate? English, okay? That's great. So, yeah, I started very early on to take an interest in mathematics and I started reading programming language books when I was eight. And they described a way for people to very quickly get results of mathematics without having to do all the calculations by hand. And there's as much less error prone. So I got very interested, but I didn't have a computer. So I basically just took pencil and paper and drew keyboard and typed on paper and then wrote what a computer would say and so on. So basically drew a paper computer. But this means that computational thinking is one way of thinking. It doesn't depend on the machine. And if one structure, one thought in some way, some part of the thought process can be automated. So for me, it is like learning a music instrument without having access to the piano or to the oboe instrument. So the idea is just to learn the idea of melodies and chords and so on so that people can play this kind of music. And after a few months, I actually started programming on a real personal computer. And then I found that those notes that I learned as programming languages actually makes melodies that are shaped spaces around the spaces in which people can interact with each other. The first programs that I wrote are computer games where people can play with each other against each other and so on. So that also characterize how people behave around each other by creating a space of people's interaction. So this is a very special kind of instrument, I would say. While learning it, it's just like learning any other music instrument. The notes it creates is actually a new kind of space where people can interact. You are a civic hacker when you are 33, right? What kind of activities did you focus on and what were your goals at the time? So I'm always a civic hacker. I started working on Internet human right and freedom of speech movements at least since 1996. That's during the Blue Ribbon campaign and so on. So yeah, I'm always a civic hacker, I would say. And the primary thing of course is the sharing of the knowledge and making the process of sharing also a common knowledge. So as early hackers, we all believe that the tools that we use to shape our lives is more and more taking over the role that was initially taken by loss. So more and more we're living in a case where algorithms, where computer code already determine what is possible and what is not possible even before the legal code kicks in. So the problem being that computer code was not transparent and people using the computer code doesn't really know why it went to here and has no freedom to modify it or to distribute its modification. So I would say that my core concern is still this kind of Internet freedom with software freedom being one part of it, but also freedom of speech, assembly and other human rights. Thank you. The last question would be, why do you think security, cybersecurity matters the most in the era of the fourth industrial revolution? Right, the security matters a lot because if people are still using Internet for freedom of speech and of assembly, people must know for sure not just blindly trusting that a speech they make on the Internet will not be used against them. So if the Internet becomes a technology that oppresses people, then when people are going to have assemblies or have expressed their freedom, they will go back to pen and paper or to face-to-face meeting and the Internet will lose its original liberating promise of getting people who feel that they are alone and they don't have people who think like them into communities. But basically, if we don't do our job right on security on the Internet, the Internet becomes a fragmenting force instead of a community force. And if it becomes a fragmenting force, people will have a lot of small intranets, like a balkanization of Internet, and each intranet will have an exclusionary policy that excludes people who don't think like them. You will not foster a cross-community dialogue and others will become a much more fragmented space where people live essentially in their own realities. And that is as undemocratic, as nonhumane as we can imagine if we extrapolate this transfer. So I think the utmost importance is to get people to still see Internet as a secure place by having the literacy of telling insecure communication with secure communication and keep to the secure communication methods, and so that people can still form communities where it still becomes possible to talk with strangers, to learn from strangers. So this is another question about security because we have now a self-proclaimed card and AI records so many things. And he would like to say to some more examples, why is it specifically more important security needs in AI and self-proclaimed cards? So security, this word in English is very interesting because it describes both a property of a system and also a state of mind. I feel secure versus a secured system. So in Mandarin Chinese, in the language that we use, we say the meaning that at ease, a calmness with information. And this is important when I'm sitting in a self-driving car, for example, because if the system is mathematically proven, it satisfies a lot of properties, all the engineers, everybody vouch for it. If their proof carrying code and all those advanced verification mechanisms cannot translate it to the language that everybody, common people, understands, they may achieve the mathematical definition of security, but there is no psychological or sociological definition of security, a feeling secure. And for me, feeling secure is the goal and this is just the mechanism, the instrumentation for it. On the other hand, there is a lot of what we call security theater, which means that not going through the rigorous mathematical proof, but just to enact some theater and trick people into believing, into feeling secure about something that's actually not very secure. And if you go to those security theaters, for this is a lot like rumors, if you get a lot of security theaters, people lose the ability to tell a rigorous system versus a non-rigorous system. And I think this is of utmost importance because if people cannot tell a rigorous system versus a non-rigorous system, people will not ask technology what they want to feel secure. People will just blindly accept whatever the vendors push to them and this creates a false sense of security. But then when cyberterrorism or other attacks happen, people will panic because they did not know that their system which they rely on doesn't have the property that they imagine that they have. So again, I think as the AI and IOC technologies becomes part of not only our life, but become part of ourselves. It is very important just like the medical knowledge enables us to know what is happening with my own body. My extended body also needs the same kind of self-introspection and knowledge so that I can feel at ease with an extended part of my body. For many people, their phone or their smartwatch is already part of their body. Can we have time to ask a couple more questions? One more question is on these answers. Like you just mentioned, the autonomous car. The producers of the autonomous car will always say that this is safe. But it could be like you mentioned as a security vehicle because we do not know that autonomous cars are really safe or not. Because we cannot really tell that technology is so complex that artificial intelligence technology cannot really interpret it through people's daily language. And perhaps you could understand it. So how can we assure that the autonomous vehicle is really safe? Right. First we can do it through simulation. You can invent some simulation scenario and try to put the algorithms in and see if it behaves the way you think it should behave. And this is how actually we test real human testers. So the human testers describe the situation to human drivers when they're taking the driver's test and see whether they have the goods. And this is essentially the same that we put the pilots also into in their cockpit simulations. So basically, I think as the spirit of Turing test, if AI can handle all the situations that human can imagine and throw out of it at the simulation, then we can judge it based on how it thinks and explains itself under simulation scenarios. But at the moment, there's still always somebody behind the wheel to take over when the machine feels that they don't have the confidence to handle the situation. So another very important thing is the human machine handoff. We need to have augmented reality system projected on the window of the car to have the driver know what the AI is thinking about the situation and not just very low bandwidth SMS like messages because that would be too late. So it's very important to have this copilot mechanism between the AI pilot and the human driver for the foreseeable future before we can even think about going into fully autonomous driving. Can I ask you some, do you mind talking about some personal life? Go ahead. What was your family's response to your decision to go through the transition from man to woman? Could you tell us about your plans for your family? What do you have a plan to start a family like that? Well, my family is really non-rigid as far as gender seroton goes. My mom was very expressive and was raised in a very androgynous manner, and so they don't tell me what a man or a woman should or shouldn't do. So instead of transition, I would say that I am just post-gender, a post-genre meaning that I don't think there should be things that only one gender should do. I don't think anything that is declared this way is discrimination. So I'm more against discrimination than against any kind of particular gender identity that's the first. So when I developed this kind of thoughts when I was an adolescent, I think they're thinking of a more philosophical stance rather than a psychological thing. So I think they're pretty friendly and we keep dialoguing. When I decided to change my name, I made sure that my new name is OK by my father, and that he also thinks it's a good name before I changed my name into it. As for family, I already have a family. It's just not human children. I live with seven cats and two dogs and have been living with them for 10 years now. So it is a very large family. It's just not human children. And I do plan to continue living with them. So two cats and two dogs. Two dogs and seven cats. Seven cats. Oh, wow. I have two cats. Yeah, I consider them my children as well. Yeah, exactly. Okay, yeah. Any final things? It's good. Okay, thank you. Thank you so much. It's very interesting. Thank you. It's a pleasure for me as well.