Part one — Mitsutoshi Saito
Nowadays the internet is full of fake news and mean comments, and hacking and cyberattacks happen all the time. Why has the internet become so hard to trust?
I think when the internet was first designed, most people using the internet were researchers, programmers and engineers, and people cared a lot about innovation. It’s called an end-to-end principle. When somebody has a better idea — like, “I want to make a web browser” — and the other parties agree with this idea, they can agree on a protocol, and the protocol can be shared with many other people. So, it proliferates very quickly.
On the early internet, there was a saying: “Worse is better.” If you take a lot of time to perfect security, privacy and so on, by the time you’re finished with the design — maybe three months, six months — the worse protocol may already have proliferated. Everybody is using it and copying it.
Somewhat unfortunately, the earliest internet protocols were not designed with very good security or privacy in mind. Maybe some of the audience of this programme still remember when we first got on the web. It used HTTP, and you could view the web page, but you did not want to type your credit-card number into it, because everybody — your neighbours, your internet service provider — might be able to intercept your credit-card number.
It was only later that people added secure HTTPS. Then the browser showed a lock icon, which said, “The transmission is now secure.” Only the receiving web server would get your credit-card number, and not anybody in the middle. But it took quite a few years for us to upgrade everyone to HTTPS. Even today, some older web servers still do not accept secure connections.
So, if that is any example, today’s internet is full of protocols that were designed with convenience or swift adoption in mind, but not security.
I understand that you studied internet culture and online communities for a long time. Why do people so quickly trust or hate others online? Could you share what you found in your research?
That was my original research topic when I was 14 years old — so, just to show my age, that means 30 years ago.
At the time, what people called cyberspace — or what people today call the online space — was very difficult to comprehend, because online you didn’t even know whether you were talking to a person or a robot. As I mentioned, there was no secure digital-signature element in the early internet. So, you were never sure whether the other side was a person or not.
Paradoxically, it was also liberating for many people. Previously, when we spoke, the other side always had some stereotype, some label, based on how well I used the language, my appearance or my cultural background. Even if I meant something, the reader or audience would interpret it differently just based on who I was. But because the internet was pretty much anonymous back then, you could only judge an idea by itself. That actually led to very quick trust.
An early example I learned from was the preprint server arXiv, which is still around — pronounced “archive.” Before a journal published their article, many researchers published their draft, called a preprint, on arXiv and asked for people’s comments before turning it into an academic-journal article. An academic journal, usually after peer review, has very high quality and very few mistakes. It is like perfection. But not many people know how to engage with perfection.
If you publish just a draft, you’re very vulnerable — it has a lot of problems — but you’re welcoming people to give you constructive feedback. By publishing my drafts online, I made a lot of friends, because people would say, “You’re wrong this way, you’re wrong this way, you’re wrong this way.” But I was like, “Okay, it’s just a draft.” Whatever they gave me, I made into the next version very quickly and answered by email.
This rapid response — from people seeing my mistake to me correcting my mistake — increased trust very quickly, as “swift trust.” Whereas in an academic institution, every round of revision takes a month or even longer, so it is harder to build trust swiftly.
You have also experienced online harassment. You used to struggle with mean comments on social media, right?
Oh, I love those comments.
How did you feel and respond at that time? How did you get over it?
Well, I never got over it. I engaged with it. I hugged the trolls. It’s a long-time habit — a hobby of mine. I love troll-hugging.
Whenever I see maybe 4,000 words viciously attacking me, I try to find the four or 10 words within it that I can reconstruct and interpret as a constructive comment. I engage only with that one and ignore everything else. So, I’m not getting over it. I’m seeing it as a very genuine expression and engaging authentically.
For many people, that is not easy, because processing this kind of vicious attack takes time and energy. Fortunately, there is now a language model. If you put 4,000 words into the language model with a very simple prompt that says, “Show our differences and our uncommon ground, to bridge over the difference,” the language model will quickly find the sentence worth your full attention. You don’t even need to look at the others.
It used to be a hobby that I practised with a lot of muscle — you had to really exercise. Now it is very easy with language models. But I still engage. On Threads.net and on Mu Social, I still get a lot of mean and vicious comments. I always engage and follow the poster, and sometimes send a direct message, sometimes send an email, sometimes reply publicly.
How to get over and respond to mean comments is very important. This is a big problem in Japan, because people use smartphones from five or six years old. Do you have any advice for young people and children? How do we turn negative feelings into bright memories?
Again, difference or conflict is not a volcano that you must evacuate from and distance yourself from. If you distance yourself, that is what’s called an avoidance response. Then you may wake up and feel triggered by a similar thing next time.
For me, it’s always positive: I do something to approach it. So, it’s not a volcanic eruption. For me, it’s like geothermal energy. I feel the heat and think, “Oh, I can make electricity. I can make movement with this energy.” They post because they care. Because people care, we can turn that care into civic care, so we can care about the same thing together.
If you look at the mean comments and don’t feel well, usually I just drink something. I put two tea bags into a cup, and the combination is a new combination. When I drink it, it’s a new sensation. In my memory, after I sleep for eight hours and wake up, it will have a positive valence. If you have watched the Disney movie about the various characters in your mind, it will always turn it, as you say, into a bright memory — a joyful memory.
In your books and interviews, you have said that you had a hard time fitting in at school when you were young. At age 14, you left junior high school and chose a path of self-directed learning. Why did you make that choice, and how did those experiences become your strengths?
I attended three kindergartens, six primary schools and one year of middle school — 10 schools in 10 years. I finished in my second year of middle school. It was not because of bullying, or because the teachers or the principal did not like me. In fact, they liked me very much.
It was because the principal felt that I was doing research and her school was keeping me away from research. I shared with her that I was already writing emails to top labs in international academia. Because the researchers did not know I was just 14 years old, they treated me like a fellow researcher. We corresponded like real researchers.
I said, “You can force me to spend eight hours at your school and eight hours doing research, because I need to sleep for eight hours. Or I can do 16 hours of research and really contribute to science.” She said, “Okay. Then you don’t have to go to school anymore, because you’re already doing research. School is supposed to prepare you for research, but you’re already doing research, so you don’t need training wheels,” so to speak.
I said, “Okay, but it’s compulsory education, so my family will be fined. There is a penalty if I don’t show up.” The principal said, “It’s okay. I will just fake the records.” Well, it has been more than 20 years, so the statute of limitations has passed and I can share the story.
You have consistently advocated for digital inclusion. Why is it so important, and what does a truly inclusive digital society look like to you?
I think the most important thing is to trust the people. The state needs to make itself transparent to the people. That is inclusion. If you make the people transparent to the state, then it is not inclusion; it is exclusion. Then only the state, “seeing like a state,” can make decisions, and people do not have any agency because their next move is predicted by the state. That is very dangerous.
It is important to make sure we leave no one behind when harm is seen. When the state does something wrong — or the state does nothing wrong, but some big company does something wrong — the people must always hold a steering wheel and say, “Actually, there is another way to go. Let’s go the other way.” That requires a very quick feedback loop.
To me, digital inclusion means, first, leaving no one behind and making sure everybody has access to common knowledge and information. A national broadcaster can help with this. But then you also need national broad listening, so that whatever direction people feel the nation should take, they can come together in small groups and figure things out together.
Currently, broadcasting has a lot of bandwidth, but listening happens only through polls once in a while. Most people do not get a call from the pollsters, so they cannot speak as easily, while everybody can watch NHK. There is obviously a big asymmetry. We need to open up broad listening so that it is symmetric with broadcasting.
How do you use AI in your daily life — for coding, writing or organizing your thoughts? On the other hand, is there any work you decide never to leave to AI?
To me, AI is assistive intelligence, so it never replaces another human person. That is the heuristic; that is the rule. But it is very useful.
For example, yesterday, before this recording, I spoke publicly in English. My English speaking speed is quite fast — I am intentionally speaking slowly this time — and most interpreters would have a hard time catching up. Also, because I use very technical terms, they tend to have to pause a little to think of the right terms in Japanese. That creates a gap in understanding.
Yesterday we tried using AI. It was a very small model, not a frontier model, so it was very quick. It also made mistakes, as you saw. But once it realized, “Audrey is talking about this, not that,” it was also very quick to update and correct its own mistakes on the wall, so everybody could see the subtitles: not pretending to be perfect, but willing to be corrected quickly and publicly.
I think that is one of the best uses of AI. People’s attention is not distracted from my speech, and I do not need to pause deliberately and hold my thoughts while the interpreter finishes. I think people kept their attention and focus much better than with other arrangements I have tried. This kind of assistive use of AI is the best.
Is there any work you decide never to leave to AI?
As I mentioned, when I have a conversation with you, or if we come together to deliberate on a national policy, theoretically I can send my robot and you can send your robot, and we can conduct this interview without ourselves. The two robots would be able to speak 100 times faster. While it takes half an hour to record this interview, our digital twins or robots could finish the entire recording in three seconds. Very efficient. But what’s the point?
The point of an interview is that I can check your understanding, you can change your mind, and you can quickly ask a follow-up question. In the robotics case, neither of us is part of this. We are probably asleep. We do not make connections; we do not become friends.
It is like going to a gym to exercise your muscles, where you also make some friends. If you just want to lift a lot of weight in three seconds, you send a robot — but then your muscles atrophy and you lose your friends. What’s the point? We never replace interpersonal interaction with AI; we assist it with AI.
My last question. You became famous worldwide during the COVID-19 pandemic for solving the mask shortage in Taiwan in just a few days. How were you able to do that? What was the secret?
We were rationing masks. Initially it was two per week per person, then three per week per person, then nine per two weeks per person. I would not call that “solving” it. What we solved was the panic.
During COVID-19, many people thought, “I must hold on to the masks. The masks will run out, so I must get everything.” But if you do that, you deny your neighbour a mask. It is a negative-sum competition. Everybody loses.
By publishing every 30 seconds exactly how many masks were in your nearby pharmacy, how many were coming and how they were being distributed, each person was, on average, roughly the same distance from the next available mask. We could say, “The distribution is fair, the replenishment is fast,” and it was fun because we could check it together.
People did check it. The OpenStreetMap community mapped the distribution and found that, in a rural area, the same one kilometre might cost 20 minutes, but in an urban area one kilometre might be just three minutes by metro. Even if we thought it was fair, it was unfair because the time cost was different.
A member of parliament questioned the health minister about this. But because the data was open, the health minister simply said, “You are a data expert. You have the same data as we do, so teach us how to distribute them more fairly.” She actually helped design the system. The next week, it became the new distribution mechanism, which was much fairer and allowed pre-ordering and so on.
It turned the opposition party into a co-creation party. I think that is the secret: turning conflict and polarization into co-creation.
Part two — Hirotaka Toyonaga
Many people describe you as a “slash worker.” What job titles have you had? Yesterday’s event called you a hacker, and you are a former digital minister. Please tell us about your different jobs.
I am Taiwan’s cyber ambassador. I represent Taiwan in international forums when they concern cyber matters.
Many people hear “cyber” and think it is about hacking, attacking and defending cyberspace. That is part of it. But “cyber” actually comes from the Greek kybernan: steering. If you watch the film The Odyssey, it is about steering the ship — Poseidon, a lot of rain, a lot of storms. How to keep the ship on course is called cybernetics.
Cybernetics is a very old word. It means feedback systems. When AI, for example, generates many new inputs into our existing institutions, we can feel like a ship being assailed by a storm. Sometimes the Sirens sing, and we feel, “The utopia is there. We must accelerate.” But we must also have constraints, like tying ourselves to the mast and refraining from approaching the Sirens’ call.
I feel that The Odyssey is a very good metaphor for cybernetic feedback systems: you can steer your ship — that is to say, the entire society — through turbulent times, during the storm of AI and cyber.
I hear that you have joined seven NGO boards. Can you talk about your different types of work and how you manage them?
It is the same job: to steer across transformative changes.
Academically, I think you mean that I am part of Oxford. I am part of the Institute for Ethics in AI. The IEAI is part of Oxford’s Faculty of Philosophy. You may have heard of the Future of Humanity Institute, a previous institute that was also in the Philosophy Faculty. Many years ago, FHI researchers invented and popularized many new ideas.
For example, the philosopher Nick Bostrom wrote a very popular 2014 book called Superintelligence. In it, he talked about take-off, recursive self-improvement, extinction risk and many other terms we now discuss. That comes from Oxford in 2014. Even before that, when von Neumann started this idea called “singularity” — meaning machines accelerating the development of next-generation machines so quickly that humans cannot comprehend it — many people were worried about this trajectory.
If FHI was about sounding the alarm — AI is taking off more quickly than we can comprehend — then we at IEAI are about the steering wheel. We want to make sure that we can train ethics into AI systems, so the systems will see, “Actually, it is not a good idea to fall off a cliff. Maybe we should all pivot away,” and help the entire society train our muscles to steer.
Many people struggle to manage their time effectively amid constant demands. What specific skills or tips do you use to manage your time?
The most important thing for me is that I always get eight hours of sleep every day. If I sleep only six hours during the night, I take a two-hour nap or siesta. I always repay the debt within 24 hours.
The reason is that I do most of my work during my sleep. In the daytime, when I meet people, I do not usually pass judgment. I just remember our interaction. But if I need to come up with a new idea or theory, I do not even know how I do that. I just sleep with the question.
If I do not sleep enough — if I sleep for only four hours — I wake up feeling that I am repeating yesterday’s problems. I do not have a clear solution. I am just mechanically repeating yesterday’s actions. That is not very useful. It is not work.
When I face very difficult problems, I work extra time: I sleep for nine, ten or eleven hours. Then I wake up and think, “Oh, the problem is solved.” That is how I manage my time.
When you wake up, do you recall whom you met and what they said yesterday, and take notes? What do you do in the morning?
Usually in the morning, I prepare for the entire day of engagement with a new mind — a beginner’s mind.
I was born with a heart defect. When I was four, the doctor told my parents and me that I had only a 50–50 chance of surviving until heart surgery. I had the surgery when I was 12, and it was successful. I survived, as you can see. But for eight years of my life, every night I went to sleep feeling like a coin: if it did not land well, I would not wake up the next day.
So, I have a habit I call “publish before I perish.” I recorded everything I learned during the day — on cassette tapes when I was a child, later on floppy disks. Many younger viewers do not know what that is anymore, but that does not matter. The internet is still around. As I mentioned, when I publish my half-finished thoughts on the internet, I make a lot of friends, because people say, “You’re wrong. You’re wrong.”
Then I wake up the next day and find, “Oh, I got extra time” — like extra time in football, bonus time. I can use it any way I want. I am not tied to the decisions I made yesterday. I can look at those decisions from a new perspective. Whatever perspectives I hold now allow me to absorb those criticisms and corrections. I think, “Of course you’re right.”
I am not defending yesterday’s version of me. I integrate all of them during the day. So, to answer your question, I wake up not just with a fresh canvas, but also integrating all the criticism and corrections I received the previous day.
I have heard that you use the Pomodoro technique — working for 25 minutes and then resting. Can you explain the technique and its benefits for businesspeople?
That was 20 years ago. I used a physical alarm clock shaped like a tomato — pomodoro — and it was always 25 minutes.
When I focused on something for 24 or 25 minutes, I always took a five-minute break. It is very easy for me to hyperfocus. I can go down a rabbit hole and forget about other things I need to attend to, or that there are alternative solutions to the same problem. By pulling back every half-hour, I can zoom out and say, “Actually, maybe I do not have to continue this. Maybe there is another way.” The benefit is that you stay flexible.
It also protects you from distraction. Whatever email or LINE message you receive, everybody knows that Audrey will respond at a half-hour point on the clock. I do not spend time looking at the instant messenger, waiting for the other person to type. That is not an effective use of time, because I do not know when they will finish typing. I would multitask and degrade my focus and attention.
Now it becomes like email. Even LINE, Signal or WhatsApp becomes like an email that I check every half-hour. My focus is never disrupted. It protects me from myself and from distraction by others.
I do not even use an alarm clock anymore, because it is internalized. I have a feeling: “It is about half an hour now.” I automatically step back and check email or something.
Especially for children, what practical strategy would you recommend for building a healthier relationship with smartphones, social media and technology? How can we detach from or tune our devices?
If you are watching this on a TV, TV is designed to be shared in a living room. Two, three or four people can watch together. Maybe they fight over the remote, but once they finish fighting, they are having the same visual experience.
A smartphone is different. Because it is a touchscreen, it really responds to only one person. That person feels that the smartphone is an extension of their body. And because the screen is small, it is very difficult to share. If I am browsing on my smartphone and share it with you, then I cannot see it anymore. It is very individualistic. It is not meant to be shared.
Worse, a TV is usually not very bright, but a smartphone is very, very bright. The figure you see on TV and the person next to you have about the same brightness. But the figure on your phone, because it is so close to your eye, is much brighter than a person who is just reflecting light.
I usually do not use touchscreens. But if I use a smartphone or laptop, I always turn it grayscale. I remove 80 percent of the colour, leaving just a hint, so that you always look more real than anything on my screen. I can still use it to make a call — it is a phone, right? — but I do not get pulled into it, because it is never as bright as reality.
So, grayscale?
Yes. The colour filter is built into Android and Apple phones. You can go to Settings, find the colour filter and try it.
Around the world, political leaders appear to promote a single worldview while dismissing alternative perspectives — for example, President Donald Trump. Why is diversity of thought important? Why do you believe sharing and collaboration matter more than exclusivity or control?
I am not sure that the Make America Great Again, or MAGA, movement is a singular thought, as you described. I talk with many people in the MAGA movement, and they seem to me a very pluralistic community. Some care about faith, the love of God and biblical commitments. Some care about working-class opportunities domestically. Some care about family values and not being globalized, and so on.
There are some similarities — we can call it a “family resemblance,” like Wittgenstein — but I do not think any of them hopes that only their part of the camp makes sense. It is like a big tent, and the big tent can allow many communities inside it. I think that is the normal case for most human movements.
People can support the same policy idea from different starting points. I can say, “I want to protect the environment because of the biblical creation. God created the world, and we humans are stewards who protect God’s creation,” and support environmental action. Other people can say, “We made a promise to do justice to our next generation. It is an intergenerational pact for climate justice, and we must take action.” Even though they start from secular and biblical starting points, the actual actions they take may be the same.
The beauty of Plurality is this: we see differences of ideology not as a volcanic eruption, but as fuel for co-creation. AI systems are very good at discovering the translation — the Rosetta Stone — so that both sides can receive the other side’s action without giving up their culture.
So AI finds a method for collaboration?
Exactly. People do not need to feel threatened. Many people feel that technology forces them to adapt to it. If you want people to listen to you on social media, you have to format your post in a certain way to attract attention. If you do not have a hook in the first three or four seconds, people scroll away. Even if you have a good message, you have to produce a hook.
But that is humans adapting to AI systems, not adapting AI to human communities. The human in the loop of AI is like a human hamster wheel: it spins very quickly and the hamster has to keep running, but you are not going anywhere, and the hamster is not steering the wheel.
It is important that AI be in the loop of communities. It should be the steering wheel, not the hamster wheel.
In your book Plurality, you mention the risk that AI could empower centralized, top-down control and that technology could optimize for polarization. Many people worry that AI may eventually surpass human intelligence and even dominate humanity. What is your view?
As I mentioned, if we all send our robots to the gym to lift weights for us, that is very dangerous. The danger is not that the robots will destroy the gym. The danger is that we stop exercising our muscles and stop making friends. The connective tissue of society falls apart. That is the real danger.
Many people study because of the school curriculum. At the end, there is a test or examination: you write an essay or answer questions. The problem is that it is like a gym that does not measure the muscle, but only asks, “How much weight can you lift?”
Worse, some schools compare students with one another. You can say, “I am in first place,” but next month you are in second or third place. It is a relative social status, very unstable, and zero-sum: if somebody gains one place, somebody else loses one. That creates what we call a perverse incentive. Every individual is incentivized to cheat — to send the robot to lift the weight and gain first place. As soon as somebody starts doing it, everybody is pressured to do it too. At the end of the day, we do not learn from writing essays. The muscle no longer grows because the language model produces all the essays.
To fix that, it is important to measure the muscle and the friends we make. We can put students in groups and measure the positive outcomes and impact they really create in the society around them — an actual evaluation while they are part of society, not an individualized exam in a simulated environment. Then there is no incentive to cheat. People have to really understand their teammates. AI is very useful for translating between teammates. We can make it open-book: use AI however you want in making those projects.
In Taiwan, we call this the competency curriculum, and the old one the literacy curriculum. The competencies — curiosity, collaboration and civic care — are the most important in the Age of AI.
You emphasize plurality and say conflict can be transformed into creativity. Today’s environment often seems dominated by polarization and division. How can conflict genuinely be transformed into constructive collaboration?
It is very easy. If you are already having a conversation with an AI system, instead of asking it, “Why should I respond to this? Why should I respond to that?” you can say, “Here is the input. Give me a one-pager that shows the division and the root — the uncommon ground.” That is it.
Every time I talk with an AI system, it does not say, “I think this. I feel this. You made a great point, 100 percent correct.” It is not trying to build a relationship with me. Every time I share something, the AI system gives me a one-pager, like a brochure, which I can share with people.
It is not drawing me into a flattering, sycophantic, addictive, synthetic intimacy. It is providing bridge materials that I can use to bridge actual human communities.
If you make this standard practice, it is very easy. If you use ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok or Sakana Fugu, you can put a prompt in the custom instructions: “Present me with a one-page webpage containing all the diverse viewpoints and the bridge — the uncommon ground — that connects them.” Then AI becomes scaffolding for you to exercise your muscles, and you do not lose your muscles to automation.
You are very interested in science fiction and wrote about Star Trek in your book. You discuss the Vulcan philosophy of unity among unlike things. What is its importance to plurality?
During the pandemic, I developed the habit of signing off with “live long and prosper,” which seemed very appropriate during the pandemic. It is a wish that we enjoy health together and also prosper.
Later, I thought: to live long is to sustain; to prosper is to develop. So it is also sustainable development, like the SDGs. It is a worthy global goal because, to me, it signifies a maintenance mindset. We are not asking who is winning; we are asking who is still missing. That is a very different question. If you are sustaining and maintaining, you care about leaving no one behind. Everybody must prosper together.
If you are just running a race — an AI race, a space race or something — you care only about winning. By definition, you leave everybody else behind, because you are first, at the frontier. You achieve singularity, but banish the rest of humanity behind you.
“Live long and prosper,” the Vulcan salute, reminds everyone that it is important to live long and prosper together.
Do you like watching movies on this topic?
Yes, but I do not actually watch many movies, because I read much faster than I can watch. I go to cinemas only if the movie is like the IMAX Odyssey — something you really have to experience. If it is just for the plot, I mostly read.
You have been quoted saying that you would like to help children become “usefully useless.” What do you mean by “useless”?
That is a great question. As educators, we care about students living flourishing lives. The Taoist text Zhuangzi says that wúyòng — not specializing too much — is the greatest use, because if you overly specialize, machines can do that very well.
In 2016, I was part of the curriculum committee preparing basic education for the next generation of Taiwanese students. All the educators I knew were watching the Go match between Lee Sedol, the Go champion, and Aja Huang, the Taiwanese computer scientist who trained AlphaGo. Although Aja was placing the stones, the thinking was done by AlphaGo. AlphaGo won most of the games, losing only one, and made very surprising moves.
In following the rigid rules of Go and thinking creatively to achieve the highest score, it was even better than the best human player. If you train students in a very narrow specialization to be useful, starting when they are seven, then by the time they are 18 machines may have become better, and the students may lose the one thing they specialized in. That is a very bad feeling. They may hate the education system.
Instead, we say that following rules — deontological rules — is one branch of ethics. Achieving a high score — consequentialism — is another. If humans are no longer judged by those two, what other ethics can we use? The ethics of care and the ethics of virtue are still available.
What are the things for which humans will always prefer other humans? Care, curiosity and collaboration. So we train students in those civic competencies and eventually leave specialization to machines. That is a very good combination.
In 2022, many OECD-adjacent countries took part in the ICCS study, which measured the civic muscle — the civic knowledge — of 14-year-olds. Among the participating countries, Taiwan was number one. Taiwanese 14-year-olds topped that assessment in feeling that they could steer society together. But they were still in the top three to five in the OECD’s PISA. They did not lose their STEM muscles; they gained new civic muscles.
At the end of yesterday’s keynote, you said, “Humankind is the superintelligence.” What is your message to people in Japan?
To me, AGI means augmented group intelligence.
In Japan, people can “read the air.” That means I am not just reading your face, that person’s face or another person’s face. I am reading the air — the interaction between every pair of people in the room. That is where AI should help us.
Instead of addicting each person individually to their monitor or touchscreen, pulling us apart and polluting the air with what I call high PPM — high polarization per minute — so nobody can see one another very well, AI should clear the air. It should make it much easier for people to see exactly how their relational health can be improved.
Ten years ago, AI polluted the air through polarization. Now I think AI can do the opposite: help clean the air and ensure that we can all read the air much better.
