Welcome, everybody. Hello. Welcome to the Wisdom & Action Forum. This is very exciting — very, very happy to see you. My name is Samuel. This film was created by our friend Sho at creative studio Liminal Quadrant, so round of applause for Sho. Thank you, thank you so much. What a great, great way to kick things off.
Folks, we're so on time we don't know what to do with ourselves. I'd like to acknowledge country. I acknowledge the Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung people of the Kulin Nation as the traditional custodians of the land on which we gather, and we pay our respects to their elders past, present and emerging.
A couple of quick housekeeping things. You may like to join our WhatsApp group so that you can stay up to date over the next three days — we'll let you know if anything changes; you can check in with each other. You can join using the QR code here, or the link is also in the emails we've been sending you. The wonderful Wisdom and Action team has let you know how to join by email.
And the other thing I want to say, which is very important, is tomorrow's start time — I'm getting the updates in early. Tomorrow's start time: 8:45 a.m. We're going to be here. Amazing Krista Tippett in conversation with Tristan Harris from the Center for Humane Technology. So please, if you can be here for 8:45 for a 9:00 a.m. sharp start, that's going to be a really, really excellent way to start the day.
There's another thing I want to do, which is very important, and I'm very, very grateful to be able to do this, which is to acknowledge and thank our partners. Our major partner for the Wisdom & Action Forum is Clayton Utz — round of applause for Clayton Utz, please. We are so, so, so happy to be collaborating with them. We're so happy that they've come to the table to help us make this possible. And also our education partners: RMIT, B Corp, and Creative Australia. Thank you, thank you, thank you. Another round of applause, please.
And you're aware that you're muted, Audrey. So without further ado I think I'm going to invite Toby Walsh to the stage. Toby is Laureate Professor of Artificial Intelligence at the University of New South Wales and Data61. Professor Walsh is a leading advocate for ensuring AI is developed and used to improve human lives, and has been a prominent voice in global discussions on autonomous weapons — a.k.a. killer robots — and he has been named by The Australian as one of the rock stars of Australia's digital revolution.
How about that. I find that quite hilarious. Yeah, well, I think it's true. And Toby has the official title, but I will also say the Wisdom & Action Forum is a rock-stars-only event. So there are plenty of honorary rock stars in our midst over the next few days. Toby is going to be in conversation with the magnificent Audrey Tang. Audrey is a civic technologist and one of the world's leading voices on digital democracy and collective intelligence. As Taiwan's first digital minister, Audrey helped pioneer new approaches to public participation, using technology to bring citizens, government and civil society into collaborative decision-making. Audrey is known for advocating that technology should amplify collective intelligence rather than automate division. So please, a massive round of applause for Audrey and Toby.
And let's get this show on the road.
Thank you very much. And Audrey, thank you for joining us here today for a conversation. I think it's one of the most important conversations we should be having, and I couldn't think of a better person to be having that conversation with — someone who has been trying to push the conversation from such an early age, and to push it in a positive direction, to see the technology as a force multiplier for good, not for bad. So how it's going to unfold: we're going to have three parts to the conversation tonight. We're going to go back to the past, then we're going to wind forwards to the present, and then we're going to spend a bit of time talking about the future. And hopefully there's going to be 10 or 15 minutes at the end where we're going to invite you into the conversation. So start thinking of some really good questions for Audrey. But so let's begin, Audrey, with the past.
I always think it's good to understand how people got into tech. And in your case, I think it was with the pencil and paper.
That is correct. When I was eight — this was 1989 — I started learning programming by reading the books on BASIC and Logo, but without a personal computer. So I started drawing, you know, QWERTY on a piece of paper using a pen, and then I would wake up every day and type
CLS, Enter, using an eraser, and then start using a pencil to simulate what a computer will print out.How did you run the program? So what was the first real computer, though, that actually could run your code, not yourself? What was your first computer?
I think it was an Apple II. And at the time Taiwan is home to many so-called IBM PC compatibles, so my parents got me, I think, an 8088, and then shortly after that an 80286, using those very large floppy disks, which went smaller over time.
So that was your tech awakening. So would you mind sharing what was your political awakening? Was that the Sunflower Movement? Was that — or was it before that?
It was in fact the same months. So when I was programming on a piece of paper, my father was visiting Beijing to attend a very large student demonstration in '89, and he went back home on the first of June, which is very fortunate for my family. And he also then, after that, went to Germany to pursue his PhD, to cover the fall of the Berlin Wall, of course, but also his PhD thesis was around autonomous self-organizing networks in the Tiananmen student movement. So I got to know many people who worked on democratization using communication infrastructure, which of course did not fully work in Beijing, as we know, but they did bring that knowledge and it worked slightly better in Europe.
And so then let's wind forward to, I guess, when you did start to really make an impact politically. Tell us about the Sunflower Movement and your engagement in that.
So in 2014 Taiwan was facing a real polarization crisis, because as we know, at the time many people in social media — even though we follow the same people — the algorithm, predicting that we will get more engagement through enragement, starts pushing unsolicited information that amplified the outrage, not the overlap.
And Taiwanese people are already by that time one of the most connected countries in the world, and therefore the most polarized. The president was enjoying 9% approval rating in 2013. So in the country of 23 million, anything he says, 20 million people against him — but of those 20 million people were also very polarized. One side thinks we must be free from China; the other side thinks that we are the free China. And they were really at each other's throats. And so in March 2014 things came to a head when the parliament tried to rush through a trade agreement with Beijing that would open up our telecommunication, publication, cybersecurity sector to investments from Beijing. And of course we think it deserves a deliberation that we didn't get one. So I supported students to occupy the parliament peacefully for three weeks, and we say always that we're not protesting, we're demonstrating — we're showing that it is possible to get half a million people on the street and many more online to actually see each other and agree, instead of being consumed by the antisocial social media like wildfire, to strip away the oxygen and social fabric. We can actually sit around a campfire and have real conversation with people who think differently, in tables of ten. So after three weeks of peaceful occupation, we converged on a set of very coherent demand that the speaker of the parliament simply say, okay, the people's version are better. So let's go with it. So it became one of the very rare occupied movements that converged instead of diverged.
But you see, social media created the opportunity for that to happen, created the polarization for that to happen. And then social media helped you solve the problem.
That's exactly right. We essentially just changed one reward function to the social media algorithm. Previously it tried to maximize enragement, because they want to get people who are users — as in drug users — to be addicted to the touch screens. But we instead say no ideas can reach virality unless they speak to the people who are different from the speaker. So only the bridge-makers get virality. And that's really the only thing we changed. And using this kind of pro-social media, people can, despite differences, find their uncommon ground.
So it's a really difficult line to hold, because it's all around freedom of speech at the end of the day, right? It's all around whose voices get to be heard the loudest. Can you really make those choices? Or, you know, I sometimes think maybe we should just always have chronological algorithms. That's the only way of being fair.
Well, indeed, I'm a big proponent of reverse-chronological following feed, as still practiced by Substack and LinkedIn and many more prosocial corners of social media. And with that said, I think pure chronological feed also creates the possibility for people to simply band in their like groups, in their echo chambers. And there's really no way to easily share the cross-group consensus, to discover people who are what we call surprising validators — people who feel differently. Like in 2015, we had a conversation around Uber. Turns out Uber drivers, taxi drivers, their passengers, people in rural places, all actually agree about the core things like insurance and not undercutting meters and so on. But if you're doing purely chronological feed, there's no way for people to accidentally discover that. So I think two layers. One is the normal chronological feed, and another is more like Community Notes, that allows for shared common knowledge around fact-checking and contextualization. That may be the best configuration.
Right. So what I take from this is that the design of the algorithms is just so important to get the outcomes you want. How do you design the algorithms well to make sure that you get these? Because there's always — you get these unexpected side effects. You get externalities that you never expected, that encouraging likes ends up encouraging people to be outrageous.
Indeed. I think the best way is to empower people closest to the pain. For example, in 2024, again March, we faced a new wave of deepfake scams on social media, and the incentive was so high for the social media to feature such unsolicited deepfake scams — for example Jensen Huang, the Taiwanese NVIDIA CEO, saying invest in this cryptocurrency. And if you click, Jensen talks to you, but it's not Jensen, it's just a voice clone of him running on an NVIDIA GPU. But Facebook and other social media companies take a much larger share if they run such scam ads. So their algorithms are incentivized to run such ads, because higher profit margin compared to small and medium enterprises.
And I don't really think that they carefully design to prioritize scam. They were just kind of careless in designing their incentives. So we sent—
They were designed to make the most money.
Yeah, right, exactly. And so the only way to rein them in is to make them lose money if they run scam ads. So we sent 200,000 text messages to random numbers around Taiwan from 111, the trusted official number, saying simply: tell us what should we do about this together. And a thousand people volunteered, and we chose 447 people as mini-public representatives of the Taiwanese public. And then again, table of ten, small campfire, with only one rule: if you think of an idea, if you can convince the other nine people at your table, your idea becomes the national agenda. But if you don't — if you have a radicalized idea — then, well, your idea doesn't bubble up. So people say, for example, if Facebook runs an unsigned advertisement and somebody loses 5 million, then Facebook should pay for that 5 million, because we did not subscribe to it. It's unsolicited. That's a very good idea. And another said, if they ignore our liability rules for every day they ignore us, we should slow down connection to their video by 1%. That's again a very good idea. So we made them into law in just two months, and throughout last year the deepfake ad impersonation ads are down by more than 94%. The problem is resolved in Taiwan. And that is by changing the incentive, not by censoring speech. We never touch the content of the advertisement.
Yes. I mean, of course we should still have deepfake adverts of politicians — we should be allowed to make fools of them still.
Well, I mean, if it's not financial damage, then it's just reputational damage. And you will need another alignment assembly to discuss that.
Right. Well, let's move a little bit forwards. I mean, you've touched on some of these things. Let's move forwards to when you became, I believe it was the youngest digital — the youngest minister. What did you think when they asked you?
Well, I was the youngest digital minister in Taiwan, and also the oldest, because I was the first, in 2016.
There's a new digital minister who's probably older than you right now.
Slightly, but not by a lot.
You're still the youngest, then.
Yes, so far. And in 2016, when people asked me — when the HR people in the cabinet asked me — what does a digital minister even mean? I said to them that digital in Taiwan means shùwèi — means not just digital, but also means plural. So I said actually I'm a digital minister to steer away from singularity, which is over-concentration of power, machines becoming super-intelligent and leaving us all behind, toward plurality, which is technology to foster collaborative diversity and swift trust in the society. So I wrote my own job description, which is a very short poem.
A poem, you said.
Yes, it's very short. I can recite for you. Goes like this.
Tell us — share the poem with us.
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. And when we see user experience, let's make it about human experience. And whenever we hear that the singularity is near, let's always remember the plurality is here.
Lovely, thank you. I think we should make that constitutional — that every minister has to compose a poem that describes their job description. In terms of the plurality though, as I understand it, that's even how you ran your office, right? You didn't actually have a hierarchy. It was a very open democratic ministry that you were running.
That is exactly right. We have secondments from pretty much all ministries. And in each ministry we also have a satellite team called participation officers that is in charge of not broadcasting to people, but broad listening from people. In 2020, when the pandemic hits, many people predicted Taiwan, because of our vicinity to Wuhan, will not survive the first wave. Well, we only lost seven people in 2020. We never locked down in the three years, mostly because we run a very tight feedback loop. Anybody can call 1922, the rapid-response line, and suggest what to do next and what are we not doing well. And the people's ideas — like privacy-preserving contact tracing, visualization of mask availability, and so on — became national law and infrastructure within like a week or something. So the ability for us to listen broadly, I would say, is one of the best ways to counter against the unknown unknowns as posed by the infodemic, by the pandemic, and now by deepfakes and other malicious AI swarms and whatnot.
So I want to take you back to the day that you were made minister. I can imagine the door shuts in your office. I would be sitting there thinking, what the fuck have I done? How am I going to be able to achieve anything? Because government is notorious, you know, not embracing technology, not wanting to change. What was your strategy? What was going through your mind?
I call myself a servant to the public service. I was a national tech support — the OG DOGE. And the tech support, again, is not about disrupting as in breaking things, as in taking away bureaucracy. It was instead saying everyone in our society should have almost like a shared reality of the what and the how of policy-making, not just the what of the policies made. So to be very concrete: any 5,000 people joining in the online petition can force a ministerial conversation. If people feel that the tax-filing software takes too long, like three hours, they can propose how to shorten it to three minutes, and we made that happen. Very young people like 14-, 15-year-olds, even before they can vote, they go to our national participation platform and say we should go to school one hour later, because study shows one more hour sleep gets to a better grade than one more hour of study. That's a very good idea, and so they've got that as well. We ban plastic straws from our bubble tea, our national drink, boba takeouts. That was also driven by 16-year-olds. And many of them, like I was under 35, became what we call reverse mentors — cabinet-level advisors to ministers — who are under 35, to ministers who are over 35. But it is the younger people, like a Pygmalion effect. We expect them to steer the national direction, and they went ahead and did that.
So what would you consider to be the greatest legacy of your time as minister?
Well, I would say that our 14-year-olds, according to the ICCS study a few years ago, are now the top of the world when it comes to — they are not just civic knowledge, but civic muscle. Way before they turn 18 they feel that they understand why the politics is doing what it is doing, and they feel that they can set a national agenda and steer the country to a better place. According to BTI, more than 90% of people in Taiwan think democracy is fairly good. And so even if we're still pretty polarized ideology-wise, we turn that polarization into fuel, almost like a geothermal engine — so not a volcanic fire to evacuate away from, but we can tap, harness that polarization into energy, into democratic renewal. I would say that's the legacy I'm the most proud of.
And can you see that in voter turnout these days?
Yeah, definitely. We're still maintaining a very high voter turnout. But even setting that, like more than 70%, aside, it is the in-between elections — not just a low-bandwidth participation of one referendum vote, one bit, one presidential vote, maybe two bits and so on — but rather like every day there is an e-petition, there is a participatory budgeting, there is mini-public, citizen assembly, as I mentioned. Many, many participation happening in a way that trains the civic muscle in all high schools and in all long-term care centers and cultural centers in our Indigenous nations and so on. So this horizontal takeoff — that is to say, people seeing technology strengthening existing community bonds and linking together the disparate communities — I think that is the real democracy, where the real swift trust is happening, and the voting booth is included but not a particularly prominent part of it.
I was going to — I really appreciate that you want democracy to be not just once every three years or four years, whenever you vote. But I would share one thing with you, one thought with you. Actually, I'd be interested to know what you think about this. I think I've grown to think it's a fantastic idea. I originally thought it was a terrible idea, which is that Australia has, as you may know, compulsory voting.
Yes.
When I arrived in Australia 20 years ago, before I became an Australian citizen, I thought, what a terrible idea. You force people to vote. And then over time, I've discovered it's one of the things that actually makes the democracy work better, because you have to appeal to everyone. You can't appeal to the extremes. You have to actually capture people's votes, because everyone, almost everyone, is going to be turning up to vote. Would you agree?
It's a great bridging mechanism. I totally agree. We're also experimenting in Taiwan not just with electronic budget participation, but also priority-setting participation. We also experiment with what's called quadratic voting, which is each person not only has one vote but have 99 points, and they can allocate across like 200 or so of projects. But the trick is: one vote costs you 1 point, two votes 4 points, three votes 9 points. So it's 99 points. You cannot actually vote 10, because that would cost 100. So people will have to discover the synergies. And just like compulsory voting, I would say that it again prioritizes the bridging voice, the overlapping voice, not the outrage.
Lovely, lovely. So anyway, we're sort of moving forwards in time. So I want to bring us into the present. It's hard to be in the present and not think democracy isn't doing too well at the moment. The democracy index, the number of functioning democracies in the world, is lower than it has been for a very long time. Many of the democracies we look at do not seem to work too well. I mean, the biggest one across the water, across the Pacific, seems to be struggling especially. But many other democracies — we feel the polarization that you talked about, we feel the tensions, we feel people really dissatisfied with politics as a whole. How do you read the current time?
Well, across the Pacific there are, last I checked, 50 labs of democracy. And some of them are becoming frontier labs. I'm talking about the state-level democracy. Just last month, California legislature is now going through — and I think it's out of the committee now — a bill that will make something like the Taiwan model, the e-petition model. They call it Engaged California, into a permanent fixture of their executive branch. They already use this kind of bridge-making algorithm to listen broadly, to overcome, for example, mitigation and prevention of future wildfire in Los Angeles. They also engage their staff within the California employees to make sure that state employees can introduce AI in such a way that strengthens it instead of taking away human judgment and human trust.
And they are now using it to figure out how to impose duties on the AI labs, frontier labs, housed many of them in California, so that they can not just replace human work, meaningful work. They have to somehow preserve and advance apprenticeship, belonging, care and dignity. So again this kind of direct digital democracy — Taiwan is no longer the largest polity. California and Japan both are much larger than Taiwan, and are advancing democracy. So while I agree with you that people are dissatisfied with traditional partisanship, once every three or four years election cycle, I would say that's just a kind of legacy version of democracy, and a new version of democracy upgrade is coming.
You talked about, you know, one of the really important forces that we have in play today, the social media that we have. How do you see that? I mean, there's a growing tide in many respects against social media. There's a number of lawsuits that have been — some of them which are now being settled. How do you see the trajectory there? What do you see that we should be worried about still? And how do you see the positive there?
Yeah, I think it's really, really nice that people are now seeing that we cannot just fight social media from individual action. It's just not possible. Although I found a lot of personal success by turning all my screens grayscale. But—
Audrey — that's right. But Audrey, that was the lie that we were sold for climate change, wasn't it? That it was a personal matter. It wasn't the big oil companies and so on that needed to make the change.
That's exactly right. So now people are finally seeing it is the PPM that matters — and not just carbon parts per million, but also polarization per minute that is steadily rising in the antisocial corner of social media. So as soon as we shift from this, like individual grayscale, putting away our phones, switching to touch screens with stylus and not with our fingers — I mean, life hacks that people can deploy — but just like climate change, these are insufficient, and really the only way is to start measuring PPM. And once you measure, you can internalize the externalities and really make those companies pay, like the fridge-makers of Freon back when the Montreal Protocol was signed. The protocol became what's called technology-forcing regulation, because it says essentially in a few years if you continue to make fridge that destroy the ozone, you will be dealt with like a crime against humanity and environment as you are. Right. So we're now finding ourselves at the Montreal Protocol point when it comes to social media.
I mean, the uncomfortable truth here is that brains can easily be hacked, and we now have technologies that can do that at scale and with precision.
Yes, and just like ozone, brains can also heal. It's called neuroplasticity. We can also figure out how to, exactly. Yeah. Because I'm a very competitive sleeper. I sleep for eight hours every day. And if I get sufficient number of hours of sleep, I literally feel my brain renews itself. And so whatever pessimistic or stress-inducing news I got during the night, if I sleep well, I wake up thinking, oh, actually that's fuel. We can turn polarization into energy.
You're a very optimistic person, Audrey. That government information campaign to get teenagers to sleep — that government information campaign to get teenagers to sleep for an extra hour has obviously sat very well with you.
Yeah, exactly. Yeah, that's the direction. We need to become the kind of society that's not just that a decision-maker sleeps better, but everyone sleep better. And I really think that it will heal the social fabric if we can reorient technology toward that.
Ladies and gentlemen, there's a good takeaway at least from tonight, which is you should get eight hours sleep tonight. I want you all to follow that tonight. But you've got to be here at 8:45, right? So get to bed early, right? Otherwise you won't be here on time. So we can't leave social media and the present without talking about the interesting — I would say, I hope you would agree, wonderful — experiment that Australia's playing, which is to put an age gate on social media. How do you see that experiment unfolding? What's your take on what Australia has done and led the way with its world first?
A few years ago we banned all small screens, touchscreen or not, for young people in schools. But we complemented that with providing one laptop per child, or large tablets. And we always use technology in shareable screens. So in classrooms kids learn about programming, about generative AI or whatever, always with other people. So again this is like a campfire that lights, illuminates our differences and allow for small-group conversation, and it's never the kind of wildfire that leaves young people shadowboxing with the outraged, caricatured version of some other people. So I think as long as it's coupled with something that is prosocial — instead of banning all media, you ban just the antisocial corner, the antisocial use of social media, and then you have good pro-social communitarian media — I think that's very good. And in a way that doesn't compromise privacy, that would be even better.
Good. So I've got this Orwellian slogan now in the back of my mind, which is, you know, small screen bad, big screen good.
Yes, and also scroll less, sleep more.
But of course, I mean, there's, as usual, a narrow line to be walked between, you know, how we implement it, the privacy implications of how we implement it. And then, you know, the arguments that people put forwards that young people have to at some point be exposed to it. And maybe we're emotionally crippling. Maybe this is disadvantaging them for the moment that they will have to deal with social media.
Indeed, which is why I think pro-social media is a must. Not a nice-to-have. Imagine in Taiwan if we just ban screens altogether from schools and everybody goes back to, I don't know, pen and paper, not even calculators. Of course Taiwanese students wouldn't be able to retain our like number-three to number-five place on OECD PISA. Right. So of course we have to use technology in education. But again, the technology needs to serve the public interest, and therefore we need to have very clear rubric, including the PPM, polarization per minute, and measure what the technology is doing to social cohesion in such a fabric.
So Audrey, I'm going to promote you now. I'm actually going to make you CTO of Facebook. You probably don't want to have the job, but I'm going to insist that you have the job. How are you going to make it more pro-social?
Well. I would continue on the work of Community Notes, which was already imported from Twitter, now X.com, the algorithm that we deploy in Taiwan that surfaced the unlikely consensus from Uber supporter and taxi supporter, and has inspired a new wave of bridging systems including Community Notes. So if you look at X.com and other social media, you see a context — that context, that note, are done by people on both sides that kind of red-team each other and finally found something they can all live with. And in X.com, they're already getting Grok and other language models to draft such notes. So instead of something that comes too little too late, they would now attach almost immediately when Elon or somebody makes a controversial post. And so I would immediately take that to Facebook, and then also change the feed so that we can say, dear algo, I want to see bridging posts first. And then the language model will be able to translate between, for example, climate-justice language and biblical creation-care language, and ensure that both are now seeing each other kind of eye to eye. And they see that they are doing the same object-level actions. And we have worked with the New Pluralists Institute in the US and Google Jigsaw to show that the US, after they get into the social translation, in the social layer, actually more than 97% of people agree on the core ideas, and even the most controversial ideas get almost 70% people support. So again, the polarization is largely an illusion, a function of the high-PPM feed design. So just having a better information diet goes a very long way.
Can I make one other suggestion for your redesign of Facebook? Get rid of the infinite scrolling.
Yes, I think that is a big part. And the good news is that people are going toward conversational interface now. I think across all age groups people are leaving infinite scrolling in droves, which is, I guess, a good thing, because at least with the conversational interface we can have people look at each other's contributions through translation, instead of the infinite scrolling, which is almost at peak slop now. There's no relational nutrition anymore, because a huge amount of it is machine generated synthetic media.
So what — what are your favorite words — one of the favorite words I've heard in this conversation today is consensus. I mean, it's clearly very important, at the heart of much of what you've tried to do. But what happens when people are really divided? I mean, there are some topics which just divide people. And it's impossible to imagine that consensus will emerge. How do you deal with situations like that?
Well, as I mentioned, Taiwanese people are extremely divided on our relationship to Beijing. I remember when I first became digital minister, there was an 8,000-strong petition to change our time zone away from plus 8, which is Beijing time zone, to plus 9, which would be Japan time zone, and moving us closer to Australia. And another 8,000 people petitioned to keep us in plus 8. Of course, we cannot strike a compromise.
A half an hour.
Yeah, yeah, exactly. That would be a compromise and leave everybody much worse off. So it's like the downwind, not the upwind, of political solutions. So we deploy the bridging algorithm, inviting the leaders from both petitions in the same room. And we figure out actually they both want Taiwan to be seen as more unique in the world, to have wildly different cost-benefit ratio analysis. So we calculated exactly how much it would cost recurringly for the time-zone change, and say, okay, if we're ready to spend this money on making Taiwan seem more unique in the world, surely there are better ways. And so they start brainstorming, and we say, oh, actually, let's give a Gold Card visa for people who contribute to open source for more than three years. Let's give them free residency and universal healthcare. Very good idea. It doesn't cost much. Let's house the international human rights conference, the RightsCon, to advocate for our friendliness to marginalized groups, so on and so forth. So all together, this actually spent less than the time-zone change, but both sides are much happier. So my point being: consensus is not just finding the plus-0.5-hour compromise. It is actually stepping back a little bit and saying what is the rare undiscovered common ground about the shared values, not just the shared instrumental actions. And once people elevate from this utility-based instrumental conversation into a more care-based conversation, then people can actually see each other much better, and also entertain their neuroplasticity and heal the social fabric.
So before we open the conversation up to all of you, which we're going to do in a few moments, let's go to — I promised to talk about the future as well. We talked about the past and the present. Let's go forward to the future, and to your dreams and aspirations. How do you see artificial intelligence in particular? Because that's the topic du jour, and is going to be a big part of our digital future. How do you see that especially contributing to our digital democracies in 10 years' time, 20 years' time? Paint us a picture of what that world could look like.
Certainly. I think we the people are already the superintelligence. We have this latent ability to self-organize, not just within community, but across large distances in different communities. We have this innate ability to empathize and to do collective action. And so I think language models in particular can translate not just languages, but also cultural and ideological distances, like the climate change and the biblical creation care. We have seen many successes in Taiwan and now elsewhere deploying this. Like in Japan, there's now a new political party, the Future Party, Team Mirai, that explicitly runs plurality, the language-model-based social translation, as their way to have a covenant with the future — to translate the interest of future generations who cannot vote yet with the current generation so they can agree with each other. I think that's a very beautiful thing. Previously it was very difficult to do that, to close the loop, to make sure everybody feels that my two cents actually changed, moved the needle in this direction. And I understand it in my own language, my own culture, exactly how my contribution made sense. Previously we had to speak really good bureaucratic English or bureaucratic Mandarin in order to know exactly how your ideas changed your polity. But now this can be done almost with no marginal cost. So I'm very optimistic about the judicial use of language technologies in narrow models — not a super-giant model that consumes electricity to fold proteins and fold laundry and for a lot of other things, but rather specific small models that foster this kind of inter- and intra-group cohesion.
You're such a beautifully optimistic person. I'm struggling about asking you this question, because I don't want us to finish in too negative a way. But what do you fear, though? I mean, that was a positive vision of the future. What do you fear we could get wrong with artificial intelligence?
When I was flying to Madrid from Taipei yesterday, I was watching the monitor, and there's a small line underneath the airline cabin monitor. It says, and I quote, "stow and latch your monitor during takeoff and landing." So my main fear is that we would be stuck in doomscrolling and forget to stow and latch our monitors during the takeoff of artificial intelligence in the society. Because in that case, then AI would amplify the distrust, the hate, the ideological dunking of each other. And we will lose the ability to coordinate intra-group and across group. And the next pandemic or infodemic or cyber attack or bioterrorism or whatever will leave very difficult-to-recover damage. So I think still stow and latch our monitors during takeoff. It's very important. And then we can think about where are we landing.
That's nice. Thank you. Audrey, I think that's a great point to enlarge the conversation and bring the rest of the audience into the conversation. So I'm going to invite the audience to ask questions. I believe there's a microphone so that Audrey could hear your question, so I didn't have to repeat it. So please put your hand up and someone with a microphone will come around and give you one. At the back there, I can see.
Please introduce yourself. Tell us who you are. My name is Greta Thomas. Audrey, in fact, you actually appeared on our podcast in about '21, I think it was, to talk about Taiwan's amazing response to COVID in your role as digital minister then. So thank you for that. My question is based on a documentary a lot of us here today have just seen. When it comes to the AI race towards AGI, it's kind of like a nuclear-weapon race. What are your practical suggestions for what the global world, but then also us as individual citizens, can do to make sure that this all evolves in a constructive way.
That's a great question. I think it's very similar to the situation around the pandemic. Well, first of all, don't panic. Because when people rush into decisions and policies during a pandemic, it usually backfires, and actually the solution may be worse than the problem. So don't panic. That's number one. Like, scroll less, sleep more. But that aside, I think one of the main constructive things we — especially in free and open societies — is to advocate the use of what I call Civic AI, or bounded, locally answerable models, where the data is treated as soil, so we can regenerate it. If the Taiwanese Indigenous nations — there's 16 of them, 42 languages — feel our national sovereign model doesn't do the Indigenous nation justice, because the entire pipeline is open and the local data is not extracted, so they can always retrain and make sure that the alignment happens to their community context within like a day or two, instead of having to wait for a year for some extractive companies somewhere else on the planet to finally hear their plea or something. So the refocus on locally answerable bounded models is happening now. And the more we say data is not oil, data is soil, the more steerability we have on AI's impact to the society. So just think of the deepfake-scam case that Taiwan has successfully drawn the red lines. We used small language models accountable to the Taiwanese population to draw the red lines around the large deepfake models, the malicious AI swarm, and you can repeat this exercise to pretty much every aspect of AI's impact to the society. And in doing so we exercise our civic muscle. Our community gets stronger, so that as AI scales toward even larger capability gains, so does our governance. And this kind of scalable governance will then take us in a global horizontal takeoff, instead of a vertical takeoff that blows up and leaves everybody behind.
I love the suggestion, and not to panic. A little-known fact: artificial intelligence started on June 18, 1956. That was the first day of the Dartmouth summer school, the first meeting held in the art of intelligence. June the 18th every year is International Panic Day. I'm not making this up. We said it's a day for mental health, actually. You're encouraged to panic and get it out of your system. But it seems appropriate, I think, that the first day of artificial intelligence was International Panic Day.
Yes, so panic together. I think that's the point: to make it common knowledge, and then turn that into collective action.
If anyone is panicking, I believe we actually have some equine therapy on tap. So you can go and receive some support from the wonderful horses that will be outside. Okay, another question. There's a question in the middle there, and one at the front.
James Chen Moody. Thank you so much. I've got two young boys — or not so young anymore, 14, 16. It's really interesting to see the anxiety of younger people. And I think there were just some recent studies showing that young people are — they used to be the most optimistic, and they actually are starting to become less optimistic than other generations. And a lot of that seems to be to do with jobs, to do with what AI is going to do. So what would you say — I love your take on these things and your optimism. What would you say to young people these days around what the future is going to be, particularly around careers and work and how that's all going.
Yeah, that's a great question. I would always say that younger people know more about the future than we do. So please lead the country and we will follow. That's what I always say as minister to our young people. And in 2016, when we were doing our curriculum redesign, that was also the year of AlphaGo. So we also saw Move 37, done by, well, a Taiwanese researcher who could play pretty good Go but not quite at professional level. So he trained AlphaGo to play at a much better level. And we learned from Dr. Aja Huang and Demis's work that very soon AI systems will be able to excel beyond humanity when it comes to the utilitarian — that's to say, score better on the Go board — and the deontological, that is to say, to follow the rules of Go. And it's not even close. But we do not have to chase the horse, so to speak. We can ride a horse, right? So we change the curriculum to say we shift away from literacy, like memorization, the rote test that Taiwan and East Asia are famous for. We discard all these together, and then say only three things are going to matter now, and they are curiosity, collaboration and civic care, and nothing else matters. Which is why the emphasis on civic knowledge, civic competency and media literacy shifted to media competency, so people can produce meaning together. So the point here is that the future of jobs will be created by positions that emphasize apprenticeship, belonging, care and dignity. And if students and young people over-identify with the deontological following of rules and the utilitarian gaining of individual competitiveness, then of course they will panic — rightly so, because machines are going to take over that. But if they learn to ride a horse and focus only on the civic-care parts, I think they are going to have a much more fulfilling life.
Audrey, I'll try and answer the question again in a way that I think you would like, love even, which is that our superpower was not our intelligence. Our superpower is our society.
Yes. I think the intelligence within a brain is overweighted. The genius is always just a small fraction of the genius, which is a genius of the collective of the organization. And AI systems can serve as connective tissue. We don't have to be just mitochondria of the artificial organisms. We can invert that situation and achieve what many people are calling symbiogenesis, the growing of our seniors with AI systems.
That's a positive future. There was another question in the middle I saw.
Hi Audrey, thanks so much for your talk. So my name is Rosham. I'm here, and I'm very interested in what you're describing as this new kind of like democracy 2.0, because it seems very participative and forward-looking. And I would say that, I guess, what we're used to for democracy and government here is probably the opposite of that. I'm curious to know whether Taiwan has always been particularly progressive, and this is why it's taken root there, or whether it's something that has changed. You were also maybe democracy 1.0, and what led you to become democracy 2.0?
That's a great question. I would say that the Sunflower Movement in 2014 was really a watershed moment. In 2013 or earlier, if you ask a random person on the street, there would be like, you know, I don't want to hear about politics, participation doesn't work at all. It's elite capturing all the profits and all the decision-making power, and what can we do with it. So I think this is a very common refrain in the 2010s in Taiwan, especially among younger people. But what the Sunflower Movement have shown, however, is that we do not have to topple anything. In the words of Mr. Fuller: we do not need to destroy the old system. We can just make a new one and render the old one obsolete naturally. So the beauty of the Sunflower Movement, I believe, is that it shows just by participating in a social-media-like interface, just by showing up in a video-conference-like interface, just by participating in a group-chat-like interface, almost magically, it results in better mutual understanding and better policies. And they are very transformative. So people who were in the street — half a million people — or online participating, it creates a peak experience that people then afterwards, whether it's on Uber, Airbnb, Bitcoin, whatever challenge of the day is, people instantly say, oh, let's go to this kind of digital democratic platform. So all it takes is just one peak experience, one success story. And then you can then ripple it out in all the high-school classrooms and many other places.
Audrey, it's hard not to wonder if Taiwan's somewhat troubled history and the threats from outside Taiwan are not also contributory factors here.
Well. In a sense, yes, because Taiwan, as you know, is the youngest tectonic island on earth — we're only four million years old. So it's literally plate against plate. Every day there's three earthquakes somewhere in Taiwan, small ones, but still earthquakes. But Yushan, the tip of Taiwan, was pushed up from — almost 4,000 meters now, I think reaching 4,000 meters, by half a centimeter every year — because of this plate against plate. So I think, yes, there is this existential opportunity in Taiwan that we have to innovate. Otherwise we get absorbed by the authoritarian regime that loves to say democracy never delivers, only leads to chaos. So we have to prove them wrong. But also, I think the fact that we celebrate diversity and see them as fuel — the conflict as fuel — plays a very large part in it. Because had we only tolerated diversity, then we would not be able to withstand the earthquake in 2014, like both literally and also metaphorically.
We have time for at least one more question. We have one at the front, please. Introduce yourself. There's the lady at the front.
I have a microphone here. Okay, we'll come to you afterwards. Two questions. Oh, sorry. Thank you. Kate Chaney. I'm a Community Independent, and in the work that I do in my community, I find there's real value in building consensus and understanding — for people to sit across the table, look each other in the eye and hear each other's perspectives. How do you replicate or deal with that in the digital democratic tools that you're using in Taiwan?
You have a very high-resolution camera, as we're having now over video conference, in the synchronous participation. So in Taiwan, broadband is a human right. No matter how rural you are, the remote islands, high up in Yushan, you're guaranteed to have the kind of bandwidth, and we have a universal service fund to ensure that telecom will invest in places where it doesn't make economic sense to do so. So this sounds very basic, but this really is the guarantee that no matter where you are in Taiwan, if you're mobility-challenged, if you need real-time transcription and translation in sign language, which is part of our national language, and so on, you have affordable, almost universal-healthcare-level access to all these communication services that close the distance.
But I want to push, because I think Kate's question is a fantastic one, because there's something about being with people in person, like we are tonight. Sadly not with you. But we've got the next best thing. That means difficult things are easier to decide and reach. Sometimes I know the only way to get this resolved is to go and be with that person.
I agree. I totally agree. And so I think — and this is an idea that I'm calling techno-communitarianism — which is to use technology to facilitate the existing in-person communities that we're all part of, like sports, fashion, food and faith also. In Taiwan, the more highly educated you are, the more likely you openly practice some spirituality. I am Taoist, which is 25% of the Taiwanese population. Buddhism, another quarter. Christianity, Islam, folk religion, animism, and you name it. And because there's no dominant religion, it has become a kind of favorite pastime without carrying darker connotations to talk about faith and religion. So once we use technology to foster not just intrafaith gatherings and convenings, especially for younger people to participate, but also interfaith communications, including with atheists, I think this then encourages people who would otherwise retreat into the wildfire of energy-consuming antisocial media into the in-person pro-social gatherings. So in a sense, the prosocial deliberation is almost just an excuse for you to get into this mode of conversation. And then next Sunday or Saturday or whatever, you can apply it to your own community gathering.
Great. Now we'll go back to that gentleman. Sorry to interrupt you.
Gentleman who was just about to — hi. I'm really curious around applications, and I want to talk to that a little bit. I've spent quite a bit of time working with young people in schools, in universities. And part of the dilemma that we face is it feels like the industry is telling us one thing about what the jobs of the future are and the skills that we need to learn. But when it comes to education, we have limitations on what we can apply. And so my question is: how do we find the right balance of applications and ensure that the future generations get what they need, without the risk of, say, abusing those applications, or having them fall behind as a result of a ban.
I would say that as long as you're not vendor-locked in, we should be free to experiment with pretty much any technological application in a group setting. Because even if those technologies may carry downsides, the group setting is the only setting, in a peer-to-peer way, where the young people will nonetheless be exposed to those harms, with other people, and panic together and figure out how to overcome it. There's just no other way. Right? So I think the group-setting experimentation with technology in a way that does not lock people in is very important, which is why in Taiwan we work on procurement rules to ensure that the data again is soil, not oil. So the personal data is not extracted outside of Taiwan, outside of their communities, but the community, including classrooms, own the data, and they run, for example, AirBoxes that measure air quality and water quality, noise level, and so on, and learn about data stewardship, learn about distributed ledgers, learn about collective sense-making and then decision-making. Maybe start some referendums together. Some schools actually did do that — water quality. And all this stems from the fact that the data for them is regenerative, is soil, not oil. So if we make this the procurement standard, if the teachers in the classroom learn to work with this kind of censorship-resistant, open, private and secure technology, then there's just no wrong road. You may be zigzagging a little bit, but that is good exposure for the young people. What I mostly worry is that there's some top-down edict saying only this solution is good. And then you sacrifice all your kind of communitarian sovereignty in the service of the solution of the day. And it turns out that it's not a good solution. That is the monoculture, the singularity, that I want people to be wary of.
And Audrey, you've been hinting at it, but I'm sure you're trying to sing the praises of open source.
Well, in a sense, I'm singing the praise of interoperability, which nowadays includes data and source code, but we're also in an age of agentic engineering. So I think source availability is one part of it, but the larger part of it is the care — the commitment to be continuously attentive and responsive and responsible to the various downstream applications that we as builders and technologists simply cannot anticipate. If we think that we're somehow above other people and extract their data as oil, then we will want to move fast and break things. But if we see that actually we're caretakers, and we're also caregivers through technology, then we think in data soil, in regenerative technologies, which include open source and open data, but more importantly, it carries a more caring maintenance mindset. So training the next generation of public-interest technologists in this ethics-of-care tradition, I think, is equally important as source availability.
Well, I'm afraid we've run out of time. It's been a fantastic conversation. It's been fantastically informative. I've learned a lot sitting here asking you questions. It's been fantastically optimistic. I'm so, so energized by your optimism. So thank you so very much, Audrey. I look forward to seeing you again in person.
Thank you, Toby. And scroll less, sleep more.
Thank you. Bye bye.
Oh my goodness, what a way to begin.
