If you're a low or median-income person, and you don't want to file your application online, all it takes is to ask your local district office or any of those self-service printers in all those 12,000 convenience stores to print a postcard with the postage stamp already prepaid.
Then, you fold the A4 paper two times, and with the photocopy of the envelope of your bank accounts and sign your name, and presto, you just put it into a nearby post box. Then, something magical happens. It's aggregated into a post office.
The people who are suffering from handicaps of movement are pretty good typers gain employments by typing in those postcards. Very quickly, they get aggregated into the digital websites, as if these small or medium-income people have filed those website applications themselves.
If they have a debit card, and if you're a parent, for example, they can also use an ATM and type their health insurance number and withdraw cash. What I'm trying to get at, is that digitalization doesn't mean paperless, it means to make the possibilities swift and safe.
People feel safer when they don't have to queue in line, especially during times of COVID. People feel that it's safer when they can count the bills at an ATM. If they don't have a debit card at all, if they don't have a bank account, then, at least a check is mailed right back to whichever address they write on the postcard.
The desks on their local welfare office is no longer swamped because they're not even open to receive applications. The point I'm trying to make is that digital transformation enables all the touchpoints to innovate, empowering the people closest to the pain.
They get the freedom to innovate, to solve the issue at hand, instead of waiting for somebody at a central government to type in their forms.
Only by making sure that the underlying bedrock systems are secure and resilient, and offer instead of APIs, like wall sockets, can those startups, those innovations, and some plugins safely and to basically deliver the service in a way that's more pro-social and social, whichever the emergent situation is.
That's my anecdote about postcard and about reducing inequality. My grandparents, for example, very much appreciate that my digitalization strategy doesn't involve abolishing paper forms and post offices.
Yeah, but that's forced digitization, right? The root cause is definitely the virus, not the bits. In Taiwan, even at the height of our only real wave, the alpha variant, the school never closed to the disadvantaged children.
Even when we moved some of the classes online just for a couple of months, the disadvantaged children can always go to the school and participate using the computers and facilities there with proper precautions and support, of course.
It also prompted us to begin this September, this semester to adopt a way for the disadvantaged children to also bring those iPads and laptops home. Previously, they have to go to school because our zero-trust cybersecurity wasn't all the way there. We rely on an internal network to keep them safe.
We've doubled down on investing in the cybersecurity arrangement so that we are now pretty sure that they're safe around the edges whereas, of course, all children enjoy the use of laptops and iPads. If the teachers see them as complementary, we're not replacing paper-based textbooks if the teachers and parents are not comfortable with it.
The disadvantaged children, including medium-income family with five children, they can all take those laptops and iPads home, I think, beginning this September.
Taking this as a compliment.
Yes, it's very clear. It's a really deep, philosophical question. That is to say, how can we design a public service such that people who want to maximize their private profits nevertheless ends up maximizing purpose. It's like the holy grail, isn't it? If we solve that, we pretty much solve everything.
I do have some contributions, but I would say it's better practices, not best practices. I don't think anyone claimed to have best practices in this regard. I've consistently discovered that if the business community are operating under a very clearly defined social norm, then they would not even attempt regulatory capture because it does not pay.
When the social norm is being hidden by the polarization and party politics, then it creates opportunities for the private logic to dominate the public one. I call the model that I'm building in Taiwan a people-public-private partnership that began with the people.
For example, people occupying the Parliament nonviolently to set a norm around the 4G infrastructure adoption from the PRC regime components or people occupying the National Auditing Office to do direct action and bring out Xerox copies of the campaign donation and finance record, which used to be kept on paper only.
The g0v people, the activists, made a game where people can solve CAPTCHA to turn individual cells in the huge spreadsheet back to structural data so that the campaign donation and finance can be republished to investigative journalism as public-open data.
Now, the National Auditing Office, of course, protested this, saying, "You can't be sure it's a correct character recognition," in which g0v responded, "That is why you should publish and structure data yourself."
That creates such a strong social norm that the National Auditing Office actually had to publish as open data. Once they do in 2018, the investigative journalism community discovered that Facebook advertisements were not filed by two, pretty much any candidates in that year's election as a donation or expense in that record.
Which is to say, you can actually pay from outside of our jurisdiction to bypass fact checks through advertisement, to influence the election without being captured by our National Auditing Office.
Then we went to Facebook and other large platforms saying, "OK, our domestic platforms all agreed to conform to this national auditing norm, and it's not a government ask, it's the social occupier's ask. So, if you do not conform to our local norm, you may face social sanction."
Chances are, people will socially sanction Facebook because people already know that it's a problem, thanks to the media-journalism community.
There was a whistleblower who quit Facebook. I think she was in the civic integrity team, who said Facebook had to take selected jurisdictions very seriously because the social backlash threat is cogent. It's true. They did reveal as open data in real time all the social and political advertisements during the next election period leading to 2020.
Also, they launched all the campaign donations outside of our jurisdiction as well, at a loss of their advertisement revenue. This is one very small anecdote, but it shows that the government is much stronger when negotiating with a profit-seeking entity.
When the trade negotiation has the people on their side, you can say, "It's our people forcing me to do this trade negotiation." That's what I mean by people-public-private partnerships. Thank you.
Thank you. It's a great question.
I see AI as "assistive intelligence". By assistive, I mean aligned and accountable. By aligned, I mean that this glass is aligned to my personal interest of wanting to see you better, more clearly. Its job is not to replace my eyes. It's accountable in a sense that if it's biased or broken, I can fix it myself. I can take it to the local repair person down the street.
I do not have to pay three million dollars of licensing fee or spend three years to reverse engineer it just so that it does not project advertisement to my retina, which will not be aligned to me, it will be aligned to the advertisers.
A very simple example of an eyeglass as assistive technology showed that we need to treat AI, hold them accountable and aligned, exactly as any other form of assistive technology. If we do so, so that it protects the dignity of the citizens instead of treating them just as users, then it will enhance the possibility of creating better jobs.
That leads to more satisfaction because you can then delegate the part of the mundane task, that nobody want to do anyway, to those assistants. If you do not have the local tweaking control, if the innovation is not open, is not aligned to you, then actually it's the other way around.
It becomes authoritarian intelligence where individuals become replaceable as soon as their data is surveilled, gathered, and their pattern of repetition being learned by the algorithms. All the creativity from the person doing the job disappear, and then become entirely automated.
It's a conscious choice that all the jurisdictions can do. I believe that, for example, GPAI, many international organization around AI, are now converging on such pro-social data coalitions, data altruism organizations, and so on, that has a very specific purpose-based direction for AI-based research and funding.
If we collectively decide to stop funding the dark patterns of authoritarian intelligence, then I'm not worried about it making the jobs even less welcome, and even less enjoyable for human beings. Hope that answers your question.
I think there's a real danger when we speak of the meta-verse or a metaverse, because that, to me is the singularity mindset, that we will have to conform to whatever social norms set by Zuckerberg or some other metaverse-making person.
I think the real danger is in the spontaneity of social interactions being dominated by the prescribed interaction patterns by whichever person creates the rule on top of which the so-called metaverse operates. Indeed, that's what the novel's no crash is about. It's no crash where the word "metaverse" happened. The reality is so bad. It's entirely dystopian.
Nobody wants reality anymore. It's very violent, very fragmented, so people escape to the metaverse because the reality was very bad. People escaped to the metaverse. Then, the rule-makers like hero protagonists who know how to make those rules, gain a distinct, unalterable advantage by being a, what I call OG, original gangster, in the making of the metaverse.
This is a really advanced utopia novel. I don't know why nowadays, people are selling a utopian vision. What I'm trying to say is that the vision of plurality that I have is co-creational and inclusive, which means that is an extension to the plural relationship that we already have, that we can then shape however we want.
We can build our own microcosm, for example, I use shared reality in 2016, to talk from Paris with a bunch of middle and primary schools students in Taiwan. My avatar is an entirely open-source platform.
I shrank my avatar to the same height as they are and towards the schoolyard or whatever, wisdom, and then don't have to look up to me, because I became the same height as they are in a kind of familiar avatar. Then, they can treat me as more like a peer-to-peer relationship. I put myself in their shoes, so to speak.
There was another project where we work with the elderly in Kaohsiung, and then we made their avatar resemble their youth. Then, in the shared reality, they traveled down literally in memory lane and served as guides to the local young people on how the streets looked like during the Japanese era, in Taiwan, and so on.
What I'm trying to say is that it is a shared reality that's defined, including interaction norms by the people who want to share their reality, their ambiance. Then, it's conductive to more face-to-face sharing and more connection between groups of people.
If both sides, instead of end-to-end innovation, need to conform to the norm of intermediary, that, exactly, the same problem of surveillance, capitalism happens, except, of course, maybe tenfold as more serious.
We need to actively resist any singularitarian vision of metaverse and embrace instead a plurality, or as some of my friends say, a Pluribus. Hope that answer your question.
There was a last question?
Make it quick.
Yeah. All my civic tech friends, people who work on democracy affirming technology, see that urgency as a wake-up call. They're now much more energized. Frankly speaking, receive more funding, because of that event.
I'm still very optimistic in the US being an open experiment, admitting to its mistakes and correcting them in the open, at least it does that. In the more authoritarian or closed countries, they do not admit mistakes. Even after they do, they try to stop the people who bring those news instead of the problem itself.
