Audrey Tang

The other thing, the Global Partnership on Artificial Intelligence, the GPAI, because Japan is a founding member, I wonder if you know which office or whether it will be part of the 500 people, whether it will be part of the digital agency. That is the equivalent of our AI Office in the cabinet.

I see. This is exactly the discussion I was having with our Minister of Science and Technology.

It’s definitely just going forward without the guidelines, if we don’t have the guidelines in place. [laughs]

OK. I think it’s a great topic for our next month’s discussion, where the founding act in Taiwan’s Digital Agency will probably be presented to the parliament by then.

We could talk a little bit about how we envision the interaction on the external side, but also internally, with the science council, with the science minister. That may be interesting for you, as well.

Oh, wow. [laughs] You were also on Clubhouse, I heard?

Yeah. I used Clubhouse only during the New Year’s break, using a fresh iPod Touch as you can see here.

However in order to make it more inclusive, we ended up recommending the use of other cross-platform alternatives.

I’m defining it as “It’s my personal time thing, not a work thing.” Especially because of the same inclusion arguments we received.

I refused to use, way back from 2014, publicly to use LINE for communication. LINE, at a time, has no end-to-end encryption in group chat. I said, “Having no end-to-end encryption means that I can’t possibly prove it’s me saying this and not somebody in the middle.”

LINE in Taiwan came to me, 2016, said that they actually listened to that and implemented into an encryption to small-group chatrooms. Still I’m not using LINE for work purposes; I use instead self-hosted communication solutions.

Clubhouse has no end-to-end encryption, and don’t even have transport encryption. Maybe they will fix that in the future. This is also good opportunity to get people to know that having no transport encryption means that there’s no classified meeting, there’s no group meeting. It means that everyone listens to everything. So this serves as a pedagogical tool, I mean the Clubhouse case.

Yes, definitely looking forward to that.

I’ll send you something from our Ministry of Science and Technology about Taiwan’s AI development. Just general background, but you’ll know the people who could be interested in bringing AI discussions, then I’m happy to also introduce them to our AI-related officers.

All right, cheers. Bye-bye.

Good local time, everyone. Really happy to be here and sharing what we have learned in the past few years in Taiwan about digital democracy. And I will begin with a quite short, fifteen, twenty minutes at most, presentation that walks through first how we counter the pandemic with no lockdown and counter the infodemic with no takedown, and then all the while increasing the power of the social sector through what we call the people, public, private partnership. But I will go through the material very quickly and only revisit it after our Q&A session as part of the conversational format as our moderator have just introduced.

So to me, participatory democracy, deliberative democracy, they are great, but they are too many syllables. So as a poet, I try to use monosyllabic introductions at beginning. So I usually just say it’s democracy that’s fast, that’s fair, that’s fun. So fast, fair, fun are the three principles of conversation in a society that enable us to counter the COVID, for example, last year.

For example, we have a social sector run Reddit equivalent that has no advertisers or shareholders. It’s called PTT. It’s an open source project co-governed by National Taiwan University students and so on, who triaged the Dr. Li Wenliang’s whistleblowing in 2019, actually, COVID-19. Dr. Li Wenliang’s message reached a lot of people in Taiwan after being triaged and within twenty-four hours enabled us to begin health inspections for all flight passengers coming in from Wuhan, because in Taiwan, we enjoy the, according to Civicus Monitor, only open, fully open society in all of Asia, meaning that is, freedom of speech, of assembly, and so on, are total, that a journalist’s word holds the same currency as a minister’s word, actually, rather higher. And because of that, people were able to talk about SARS openly and triage such emerging collective intelligence.

And we add to that a real-time response system, the Central Epidemic Command Center. So it’s actually not cutting-edge digital technology. This is simple technology called call center. So anyone throughout 2020 can pick up their phone and call 1922 and ask to their heart’s content anything about the epidemic. And they can also suggest, like, concrete innovations.

For example, last April, there was a young boy who called saying, “I don’t want to go to school because you’re rationing our mask. All I get is these pink medical masks. And I don’t want to wear it to school for I am a boy, all the boys in my class have navy blue,” and things like that. And because of that, on the very next day, daily 2:00 PM press conference, all the medical officers wore pink, regardless of their gender. And so the boy become the most hip boy in the class, for only he has the color that the heroes wear. And Minister Chen even said Pink Panther was his childhood idol. So also heroes wear.

And so through these two very simple things, like daily press conference that goes live stream and a hotline that receives suggestion from each and everyone, more than two million calls throughout 2020, we enable this very quick response system that ensures the collective intelligence gets into the decision cycle and rolled out every Thursday because we use a agile methodology to all the, like, PPE distribution and vaccination and quarantine policies, and you name it.

So this is another example. We have a civic technologist, name is Howard Wu from Tainan, who early February last year wrote this thing out without asking anyone’s permission, which is a crowdsourced map that displays availability of medical masks in pharmacies. And I look at this app and talk to the head of cabinet, our premier, saying, “We need to trust citizen with open data.” But this is not open data that’s pre-approved by his public servants. This is real-time open data or open API that’s published as soon as anyone swipes the national health identity cards, the IC cards, in exchange for the medical-grade mask in any pharmacies. The real-time count decreased by two at the time. Nowadays, it’s by ten. And everyone queuing in line can check for themselves that this system is performing as expected.

This also enabled evidence-based interpolations, like in our parliament by a previous VP of data analytics at Foxconn, MP Kao Hung-an. And she interpolated saying, “Your rural and urban distribution looks fair on the map, but it’s actually unfair if you take into the time opportunity cost.” And that prompted us to co-create the next distribution mechanism using pre-ordering in convenience stores and so on within the next twenty-four hours. So the idea is that it’s everyone’s business with everyone’s help. Anyone who makes a evidence-based suggestion, then the minister will simply say, “Okay, legislator teach us,” and then we roll it out the next Thursday. So again, a very agile mindset that ensures fairness of all kinds.

So this is the head of the cabinet, our premier. Now, of course, during COVID, people are anxious. There’s a lot of conspiracy theories, disinformation. For example, there was a popular rumor that said, and I quote, “The state is confiscating all the tissue paper material to make medical-grade masks,” end quote. But we detect such disinformation within a couple hours, and always within two hours, we roll out two different pictures, each 200 characters or less, that dispel these rumors by turning the outrage into humor. This is called humor over rumor.

So this communication style, you see the backside of our premier now, and says in very large fonts, “Each of us only have one pair of bottoms,” because in Mandarin, bottoms twin sounds the same as stockpiling twin. (laughter) So this is reminding us that, of course, first it doesn’t make sense to stockpile, and then the South American materials that makes the tissue papers are actually very different from the medical mask material, which are domestic. Because it went absolutely viral, people who see this and laugh about it actually becomes immune from the disinformation. So people gets vaccinated against the virus of the mind.

And this is doubly useful if we have a cute dog, the spokesdog is Shiba Inu, talking about physical distancing. When you’re outdoor, keep two Shibas away. Indoor, three Shibas away. Wear a mask to protect your own face against your own unwashed hand, and so on. Again, in a way that makes this memes, this idea was spreading spread. And once people laughed about it, they get into this co-creative mood. And we’ve documented this part, the Taiwan model in taiwancanhelp.us, which is also a crowdsourced and crowdfunded website.

Now let’s dive in a little bit more. How do we get the sixty minutes on average time, timely response from each and every ministry? And why would a cabinet’s premier makes fun of his own head? Because there was a popular rumor that says, “Perming your hair multiple times a week will start to be subject to one million dollar fine.” Of course, that’s not true. And he said, “I may be bald now, but I would not punish people with hair. It’s just a labeling requirement.” And the premier, as he looks now, says, “If you perm your hair multiple times a week, you will not, you know, damage your bank account, but you will damage your hair. And just look at me for what will happen.”

So what we actually do is like creation of vaccine. We take this disinformation, this popular rumor, and then we bracket it in a notice, in public notice way, and make sure that there’s a very funny memetic payload. And this is empowered by civic tech. The same gov-zero, g0v community that supported the mask rationing map, in this case also supports the collaborative fact-checking so that people in even end-to-end encrypted channel like WhatsApp, it’s called Line here, can long press a message and flag it as spam, as potential disinformation.

And because at any given point there’s maybe only total societal bandwidth for like three popular disinformation that has a R value of more than one, that is to say, going viral. So we focus our energy, the International Fact-Checking Network’s energy, on these, like, trending rumors, and then they fact-check it. This is an independent organization that also fact-checks the administration. But upshot is that once they did their journalistic work, now with the contribution from like young primary school or middle school people, we just wrote this meme out so that people understand that, hey, this is actually something that you can laugh at and then co-create, but then the outrage is spent off, and then people don’t get this into this conspiracy theory field thinking anymore.

And this very strong social sector mandate also enabled us to negotiate with the more antisocial corner of social media, namely Facebook, and many other platforms saying, “Hey, the social sector already pressured the public sector into disclosing, for example, the political expenditure and donations and so on, and the political advertisement on Facebook need to be treated the same, publishing as open data, banning foreign sponsored ones for the investigative journalists to do their work, otherwise they may face social sanction.” And Facebook relented in 2019. And for our presidential election, we then have a market of ideas that’s remarkably free from either foreign interference or specialized advertisements.

And this is a really good example because Hong Kong situation was shaping up to be a deciding factor in our presidential election, and this is a actual disinformation campaign that’s being spread there. And so the fact-checkers unveiled that this alternate caption on the right is actually based on a real Reuters photo, but the alternate caption is probably sponsored by the (laughter) state organ, the central political and law unit of the Beijing regime. But we didn’t take anything down. We rather put a public notice so that people understand the framing anytime they share it, and therefore develop things like the antibodies of the mind.

And the same applies to the, like, voting. The voting is rigged rumors. Again, we counter this by inviting YouTubers to come to the counting process, and they have different apps in each different parties, but it counts the counting process in real time. So people choose to receive information from their affiliated party. Of course, there’s four major parties, but all of them are working with the same crowdsourced accountability mechanism that detects anything like invisible ink or whatever in real time. So again, the conspiracy theory have no room to grow. Their trolls also have no room to grow. And this I already mentioned, this disinformation about medical mask is countered very quickly by people going to the pharmacy and checking for themself in more than 100 different tools based on the same open API.

So this part, I would like to say that we treat the infodemic as the epidemic, making sure there’s broadband as a human right, the digital competence, not just literacy, media competence classes in middle school and primary school, so they can check all the presidential candidates’ forums and debates and so on. And then we innovate to flag the trending disinformation and also ban, like, precision advertisement fields, money fields, more antisocial corner of social platform conversations. And all this is to create the necessary condition for digital democracy.

And as Dr. Tsai Ing-wen, our president, said in her inauguration speech 2016, she said, “Before we think of democracy as a showdown between two opposing values, but now democracy must become a conversation between many diverse values.” And to me, this symbolizes this thinking that instead of letting 49% of people feeling they have lost every four years or two years, depending, by uploading three bits of information per voter per four years, which is very low bandwidth, we would indeed see democracy as a type of technology and increase the bandwidth of democracy.

So this is literally my office where I hold my Wednesday office hours, and it’s in the middle of Taipei, heart of Taipei City, called the Social Innovation Lab. And we invite all the social innovators to present their work like for self-driving vehicles, even before we have laws for self-driving vehicles. But there are tricycles, they’re open source, open data from MIT Media Lab, so people modify it to fit the local community’s needs, thereby co-domesticating with AI so that people can see AI as assistive intelligence instead of authoritarian intelligence, and therefore build effective partnerships.

So a lot of our work is to make sure there’s a institutionalized way for such co-creation to happen outside of the election cycle. For example, every year we have the Presidential Hackathon where we invite people to innovate digitally, like building assistive intelligence to save water because we are facing a water shortage this year. We had no typhoon last year thanks to climate change. And so they use AI system to detect water leaks very effectively. And while they only have the budget to try it out with the social sector in the Keelung region because they won the championship. We give out five of those awards in the Presidential Hackathon.

It’s a trophy that’s also a micro projector. If you turn it on, it projects Dr. Tsai Ing-wen handing you the trophy, saying that whatever you did on a local small scale in three months, the president promised that it’s as good as a executive promise and will make it into national level policy with all the budget, personnel, and law required within the next 12 months. But where is the democratic mandate? Well, it turns out each of the five winning teams all need to go through incubation period where we make the social, private, and public sector partnered data coalitions.

So we collaboratively make such, like, air boxes, this is a good example, where people in primary school measure PM 2.5 air qualities, write it into a distributed ledger, and then show that people even as young as seven years old can be good data stewards and contribute to environmental sensing. And because we are a very open democracy, we can’t beat the environmental activists, so we must join them. So the government dedicate the resource to make such climate sensing community and networks a reality. So it’s almost all with collective intelligence or assistive intelligence, and more often than not, it’s assistive collective intelligence that solve one or more of the global goals using this co-creation.

So I mentioned like choosing a small area to experiment, but how do we discover people’s needs? Well, we go on social innovation tours using the video conferencing so that I’m the only facilitator that travels. But the 12 ministries in the central government in the Social Innovation Lab look at the rural places and where I facilitate the conversation, so they respond to the people’s need in the here and now, and make sure that the ministries do not copy each other, but rather co-create with each other in a idea of sandbox where we try out such solutions for like six months, three months, and so on, and see whether people likes it or not.

But how do we listen at scale and find out whether people like it or not? Well, for self-driving vehicles and the 5G spectrum allocation for the local 5G sandboxes, as well as this is the original one from 2015 about UberX. Some people call it gig economy, some people call it sharing economy, some people call it platform economy. We don’t dwell on these abstract conversations. We ask what people feel about the fact that there’s some unprofessionally licensed private vehicles picking up strangers and charging them for it. Now, of course, there’s no right or wrong about feelings. You may feel happy, they may feel upset, it’s all okay. But with this pro-social digital public infrastructure, which is called Pol.is, it’s open source, we make sure that the ideas that reflects people’s common feeling, what we call rough consensus, translate into the agenda of a face-to-face real-time deliberation that’s also live streamed.

So the experience is like this. Someone says, “I feel passenger liability insurance is very important.” You may agree or disagree. If you agree, you move toward me. If you disagree, you move farther away from me. But there’s no reply button, so there’s no way for trolls to grow. And after three weeks of such conversation, we always see that ideological or divisive statements are there, but people don’t spend calories on it. And then the rough consensus as revealed by the Pol.is conversation, these are the statements that then we hold ourself accountable to deliberate with the stakeholders as the agenda that we understand that everybody can live with it, right?

So this is the consensus statement that drives the multipurpose taxi. So the law is now that Uber is a legal “Q Taxi” fleet, but it also enable platform co-ops and Line Taxi, many other taxi company to not undercut existing meters, but also work in a way that reflects new innovation like surge pricing and so on. So this is like KPI measurement progress, but it’s also crowdsourced. This is crowdsourced agenda setting. So the upshot is that with this way, people discover there’s far more in common when we look at things like a rough consensus than we originally imagined in a more antisocial corner of social media, so that we can find common values and deliver on innovation that fulfills those common values. So that’s my opening, and I look forward to the discussion.

So, do I just answer them in reverse chronological order because I’m a reverse chron? (laughter) Or do we first move to Ben?

Right. So, and I really am a reverse chron, so I will (laughter) do it the reverse order. So I think, theoretically, when I say plurality and when I say social sector, it means that literally any civil society organization can run such deliberation spaces. Just like non-violent communication, open space technology, facilitated dynamic facilitation, and things like that. These are not monopolies, but these are technologies. These are social technology just as social science is science.

We make sure that people who are civil society organizations, for example, during our occupy of the parliament in the Sunflower Movement in 2014, there’s more than 20 NGOs that occupy the parliament together, and each one occupying a corner near the parliament. And all we did is making sure that it’s a safe space, safe not only from police, because people counter surrounded the police, but also safe from disinformation and from rumors. But from that point onward, each CSOs take their own open space technology conversation, their own facilitated dynamic facilitation without any centrality of it.

And that in a large amount is thanks to the wide availability of broadband, so there’s no marginal cost in live streaming people’s speech all the time. And there’s also a reliance on free software, like Discourse and later on Pol.is, and so on, which could be easily self-hosted and then just forked. If a group of people doesn’t like the way it’s governed, they don’t have to convince some central authority in order to change the way that a deliberation is done. They can just take the deliberation, because it’s all open data anyway, into a clone or a fork of a conversation and bring it into another direction.

And so in that sense, people are in a non-rival situation when it comes to those mini republics. If you don’t like a particular way that a deliberation is done, you can always fork into a different mini republic until it feels more cohesive and more sovereign. And chaotic and swarm-like that it may feel like from my description, it actually works. And with half a million people on the street, many more online, I think we’ve proven quite conclusively to all the major parties in Taiwan that, well, this way actually works. We can scale deliberation at scale, and we did deliver the cross-strait service and trade agreement deliberation into five very concrete demands, not one less, and all of them gets accepted by the head of the parliament.

And so I think my main suggestion is just to make it very simple to start such kits of conversation in a very small mini republic, maybe as small as like 20 people or even five people, and then just scale out and deeply instead of scaling up, on the first principles.

And for developing societies, as I mentioned, the toll-free number, the TV or radio daily live streaming, these are appropriate technology. I wouldn’t call them low tech, by the way. (laughter) They’re appropriate technologies for the people there. And the memes, well, they are digital, but we also have young people just drawing them or printing them on posters or graffiti on walls, and things like so. So the nature of memes is that it’s adaptive to the format. So I’m never prescribing any particular broadband requiring, like, video conferencing as we’re doing now. We only do that when the people are comfortable with that. So we bring technology to the people. We never ask people to come to technology or to fit the way the technology works.

And that address the psychological fear, uncertainty, and doubt of technology because people feel just like the very cute self-driving tricycles that I showed middle of my presentation. People feel that this is something like a shopping cart (laughter) that they can also just modify. It never runs very fast. It never run someone over. So instead of the, you know, platooning trucks or things that looks very scary, people feel that self-driving vehicles is something that they can co-domesticate, and this feeling of participatory design also very important.