Audrey Tang

I think most people would much prefer if we put technology into service — AI in the loop of humanity, not humans in the loop of AI, like a hamster on a wheel. I think this massive acceleration toward zero-sum or even negative-sum racing is bad for everyone, which is why I don't counter autocratic messages on their own terms.

Like, "we need to be following a strong leader in order to counter the threats." And then, "maybe it's okay to give up some liberty because the virus is very scary." If you start on that path, then you're already thinking like an autocrat.

Well, I think that they first and foremost cherish freedom, right? So, the freedom of expression, of thinking, of association, to them, as I would argue for most people in all democracies, is what the job of democracy is about. It's not just about uploading three bits every four years, namely voting. But rather, whenever you have a good idea of how to make a community better, you can voice it without waiting for four more years. So, that's the point of having civic muscle in a democracy.

And so I think they mostly feel that Taiwan maybe is a kind of demonstration, a demo, that we do not need to fear technology. Because around the time they gave birth to me, Taiwan also gave birth to the personal computing movement, the IBM PC. Many of them were made in Taiwan, PC compatibles. And so prior to the '80s, people didn't really have computers. People had terminals. You typed into a terminal. Everything you typed went into this cloud mainframe — a large financial institution or state or whatever, research institution. The system operators saw everything you typed. There was no privacy. And then you were at their whim as to what software to install.

But then came personal computing. And people could compute in private — their spreadsheets, desktop publishing. So, it's like having a printing press for everyone, right? And it's very powerful. And so I think the point they really made to me is that it is this freedom of expression, of association, this communal civic muscle, that is the true backbone of Taiwan's democracy. It is not just about voting every four years. I think this message is demonstrated conclusively, I would say, in Taiwan. And now we're seeing many democracies really taking this to heart.

Yes, exactly. And that's why the work with SPRIND is so important. Because they literally just ask people "What sucks?" And it's very easy actually to complain. It's the most democratic question. Yes, and the trick here is using Civic AI. You can make people feel truly heard, like closing the loop. If the federal government or your state changes some policy because of your input, then for the first time you can have not just broadcasting, as what we did, but broad listening. It is because of these things you said that we did this. And it's thanks to you that now we are asking you another follow-up question. That's truly massive multi-scale listening. It's finally possible and easy.

And so we need to upgrade how the civic muscle works in the age of AI. Otherwise, it's just people broadcasting messages — just, like, slop. People would not even pay attention, because there's no relational nutrition. But if you're truly heard and the loop goes back to you, then people are much more willing to share problems and ideas on how to make things better.

Well, at Computex, which is just now in Taiwan, Jensen Huang called this the reinvention of personal computing, right? The point is that instead of a personal computer requiring you to install some app, type in some commands and set it up and get IT support or something, it should actually be something fiduciary, loyal to only you and your relationships. So, it's a form of personal intelligence, and I think it's a great vision, because it means, just like the origin of personal computing, no matter how many data centres are out there, they're never going to extract oil like our personal data. We're going to till our data as soil. And this soil regenerates itself. And I think this vision is far more preferable to the Tower of Babel. And I'm very proud that Taiwan is now making this possible — to make it really happen for a lot of people.

Well, I mean, even the Catholic Church has changed, right? Since the Industrial Revolution, the church has emphasised the idea of subsidiarity in Catholic social teaching, because at the time they also saw capital accumulating, aggregating far quicker than what unions and associations and co-ops could handle. So, they basically said subsidiarity — the ability for local people to settle local matters using only local tools — is what the church is now about. So, this over-centralisation has changed. Now, the Pope also says something very similar in the age of AI.

So, I think people by and large — like, you're using an iPhone and you're recording, and the iPhone can make a transcript of this recording in airplane mode. Right. It doesn't really need a cloud. Everything stays in your iPhone.

And if you have a Mac computer, you can run, as I do, local AI. Again, using Apple chips, you can run faster than Claude Sonnet, more accurately than Claude Sonnet, and it only serves you.

So, on quality, on speed, on ease of access, there's really no reason to use cloud models if you're not doing a very complex world simulation or things like that. For personal and communal uses, the local models are more than enough. And so I think it's just awareness. It's not there yet.

That's right.

We were touching upon that just a few minutes ago, right? I think many people confuse content moderation and censorship, whatever, with this interoperability commitment. If you confuse the two, then it all sounds like stifling innovation or something. But actually, interoperability is good for innovation. If people can change from one telecom to another without changing their number, then of course the telecom has to innovate more. If you can switch from Bluesky to W, then of course Bluesky has to innovate more to keep my business. So, the freedom to move in the cyber realm, once it's protected as a human right — most of the other digital rights follow from that interoperability. So, I think it's very good that Europe is also looking into interoperability laws.

But I think many people in the policy space confuse that with censorship, with stifling innovation and so on. But I would say an information superhighway without an off-ramp is just a hamster wheel. It's not going anywhere.

I think for many people in Taiwan, because we grew up with personal computers, we see computers and tech in general as serving our communities first. Whereas here in the UK and Europe, sometimes people correctly fear that the technologies are really serving some masters in the cloud. So, I think it is also about social media. In Taiwan, many people's first experience with social media is PTT, which is like Reddit, but it's run by National Taiwan University. So, it's part of the academic network. It has no advertisers, no shareholders, no extraction at all. And the people make their own rules in self-governance.

But for many people here, when they first encounter social media, it is running in some abstract data centre in some other country, and it wants to figure out what keeps you addicted and keeps feeding you polarising things.

Right, exactly. So, like with PTT and other civic spaces, public squares, the more you participate, the more steering power you have. And you grow the civic muscle. Whereas in the extractive social media, the more you get sucked in, the less control you have over where it's going.

It's actually very easy, because the cloud companies did all the interface design. So, if you switch to Proton Meet, Proton Mail, Proton Drive, Proton Pass, it works exactly the way you imagined it would work.

Yes, so you don't need to personally install Linux or something. There are Taiwanese entrepreneurs in Switzerland — Andy Yen of Proton. And Signal, if you use it, is the same as WhatsApp. Actually, for most of the things that we use, there are European and civic and free-software equivalents that have exactly the same user experience. And so really there's no friction to switch.

Well, I think many people, if they enter a market that already has this social-licence-to-operate idea, are willing, of course, to negotiate and even be good model citizens and follow the social licence to operate. I travelled to India a few months back, and even the Tibetan exile people can use the UPI, the Unified Payments Interface, to transact, to open a business and so on. And that's digital public infrastructure. The point is that the Indian people said to Google Pay, Meta Pay, PayPal, whatever pay: if you want to enter the Indian market, all your QR codes must be scannable by every competitor of yours. You cannot lock anyone in. There's no vendor lock-in whatsoever for payments. And it's just a ground rule.

So, it's not like they say, oh, this is a national champion. No, this is about saying: we regulate you like a utility, and this is our ground rule. And this is what Europe can do, obviously.

Yes, definitely. I think no democracy is an island, not even Taiwan. So, we need to keep working hard and free the future — together.

Exactly. It's not just a shield of chips — or of bubble tea — but also of trust. And to give no trust to your people is to get no trust. It's a very simple lesson. And here in the U.K., we're also seeing, like, the National Strategy Project and so on really looking at Taiwan and taking some of those deliberative polling ideas to work here in the U.K.

Well, I travelled to 28 countries in the past couple of years.

I'm geo-flexible.

Well, actually not more than a couple of weeks in each place. So, I'm going in a couple of days to Gothenburg, Sweden, and after that, Berlin — many, many places.

It's for bio:cap, so in four or five days.

I think it's up to my speaking agent.

During a recent visit to Dharamsala in northern India, I came across a scene that has stayed with me ever since.

Tibetan merchants, who had long found the doors of formal financial services closed to them, can now — with a payment QR code printed from an e-wallet — plug their small shops into India's Unified Payments Interface, or UPI. This is more than payment convenience; it is digital public infrastructure, or DPI, at work.

Around the world, a growing number of displaced people are kept outside formal financial systems; they have little choice but to eke out a living in the grey economy. In India, the state lowered the barriers to participation, allowing people to build on the trust and community ties they already held.

This is the reminder the AI era needs most: Meet people where they are, not where a platform wants them to be.

Many worry that AI is assuming the shape of a "digital coloniser." A handful of tech giants control compute, models and platform rules, while the rest of us simply rent intelligence. Once a platform pushes an update or adjusts its pricing, even a business may find that its own workflow has been quietly "extracted."

Underneath this entirely reasonable anxiety lies a deeper question about how we understand the nature of "data."

Treating data as oil leads to one logic: extraction and concentration. I prefer a brighter picture: Data is not oil, it is soil. AI models are crops, with the key questions: Who tends the data ecology and who mends the system in the event of an error.

Taiwan's richest soil lies on the shop floors and factory floors of every trade. The owners of many small and medium enterprises, or SMEs, carry irreplaceable tacit knowledge. When a senior technician states that a machine "sounds off," that wisdom is usually understood only by those who work alongside the machine. That touch, that judgement, is the core capability Taiwan's SMEs have built up over decades.

The problem is that much of this knowledge is lost as the masters retire.

If AI remains under the control of a few large platforms, SMEs are left buying solutions designed by others. But imagine public infrastructure for data innovation, model-training frameworks, interactive interfaces and evaluation benchmarks, which any workshop could use — the same way UPI is available to any merchant with an e-wallet.

The masters need not surrender their trade secrets. They can instead calibrate the model according to their own standards, turning it into a site-specific "machine apprentice." For perhaps the first time, those judgements that are almost impossible to express in words can be fully passed on.

And this raises another important question: Who is given a voice in the Age of AI?

The people who actually make AI work in real settings are rarely the tech giants; they are the ones a community already trusts. An experienced nurse in long-term care can speak the language of a senior's breathing, and understand instantly when something is amiss. That kind of judgement, formed deep inside a relationship of care itself, is invaluable and can only be learned over time.

For AI to truly take root in every industry and profession, what matters most is not just real-time interaction, but whether its introduction earns genuine trust. This is our opportunity: we can become pioneers of Civic AI.

The real challenge in the Age of AI is not about racing to refine the largest model, but working to best till the data soil — so that every hand can sow, steer and share in the harvest of inclusivity and prosperity.

Thank you, Roger. Thank you, Bo-Jiun. Thank you all for joining us — and thank you to the Taiwan Studies Seminar Series for hosting this event at St Antony's.

Today I would like to share one very simple argument, in three movements. First: free software teaches us repair. Second: AI currently threatens repair when it closes the loop of repair. And third: Civic AI should be judged by whether it increases a community's capacity to care for itself and for others — the civic muscle.

But I want to start not with mathematics, but with something very personal. I was born with a heart defect. When I was five, the doctor told my parents that this child had only a 50/50 chance of surviving until corrective surgery, which I had at twelve. My parents were advised that I should take it easy. This memento mori moment is the reason I adopted the mantra of publishing before perishing. That is probably not the low-stress lifestyle the doctors ordered, but I took on the habit of recording everything I learned during the day — first on cassette tapes (some of you may still remember cassette tapes), then on floppy disks, first larger ones and then smaller ones and finally the internet, which I am sure you are all familiar with. So, before I went to sleep each night, feeling like it was a coin toss, I thought: I do not have time to perfect my work, so I have to publish whatever work-in-progress I have.

That is how I encountered the light of the free-software community. If you post something perfect there, people just say "okay, it's good," and move on. But if you are wrong on the internet, you make a lot of friends — the light gets in. Everyone jumps in: this is wrong in this particular way, that is wrong in that particular way, and together they shed new light into whatever project I am working on.

That light speaks to my favourite singer-songwriter, Leonard Cohen of Canada:

Ring the bells that still can ring. Forget your perfect offering. There is a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in.