Hala Hanna

When Taiwan offered you the role of first digital minister, you famously wrote a poem as your job description. It is as much a prayer as it is an incantation. Would you read it, and tell us how it manifested in practice?

And you have been able to enforce those laws on the tech companies?

Is this part of the advising work you are doing with governments now?

You are doing this work with California and Utah. Can you say more?

This is your vision of democracy as a social technology whose tools can be updated.

Do you feel any tension between these practical applications of tech and democracy, and Taiwan's role as one of the largest microchip producers?

It is interesting because sometimes friction is good for us. It gives us the moment to think, to switch from system one to system two. I always think of pistachios. They come with their shell. Maybe it is cheaper to sell them without the shell, but opening them is part of the fun, and it slows you down.

We were talking about PPM, and I wonder whether the numerator is now supercharged with AI. Is there more slop?

That alternative vision is certainly more enticing than much of what we have been seeing. What is at stake if we do not get there?

So against the risk of superintelligent AI, you favour horizontal collective intelligence, so we all take off and take a nap.

I am going to take that down and put it in the blog.

One question about that. How do you make sure that when you say, "consider all views," there are some views that are not worth considering? One of our colleagues is Navajo, and if you look at what is published on Navajo topics, it is not exactly accurate, fair, or equitable. Is there a tweak there?

I love when you talk about humans in the loop of AI, and how that metaphor does not really help us. Can you talk about that?

That reframe changes everything.

You have said the risk of extinction from AI is probably like pandemic or nuclear risk, and therefore more of a global coordination problem. You have also said you believe we will have time to align. Why?

That makes me think so much. I also love the parallel you made with AI and Plato's cave. My understanding is that what is online is only what we have been able to perceive. It does not capture the full experience, and then we use that as the data.

Help us clean our cache.

There is a thread running through everything you say. You are talking about technology, but you are not really talking about technology. You are talking about what happens to us, Homo sapiens, when our relationships to each other are mediated badly or well. When tech moves from fracking our attention to hacking our attachments, the relationships themselves are at stake. You say your unit of care or analysis is the relationship, not the person. Can you talk about that?

Say more about that last idea.

I just realised that ChatGPT, at the end of every query, asks: would you like me to...

Claude does not.

One could argue the world only got Audrey Tang because you were able to transcend so many things — gender, systems, formal education — in ways most of us cannot. I do not know what made you who you are, and we would not want to replicate some of it on children. But how do we raise more Audreys? I have two boys, so this is a selfish question.

I was wondering whether the fact that you spent all eight years in government transcribing everything was a continuation of publish before perish.

Oh man, okay. Well, one day maybe, instead of ten emails, you will get some royalty.

Okay, I am going to give you a few choices and you tell me — resilience or anti-fragility?

Hope or courage?

That completely changed my perspective. And many things. Thank you so much.

I had a joke that I did not make. It is "Audrey's way or the Huawei."

There you go.

I could talk to you for another two hours, but I will not do that to you anymore. Thank you.

Live long and prosper.

Well, Audrey, we are so glad the coin landed right.

Now, everyone, remember:

Let's light up campfires rather than wildfires. Let's till the soil. Don't drill the oil. The fog of war is not the weather. The steering wheel belongs to all of us. Get 8 hours of sleep. And let's be good enough ancestors.

I'm Hala Hanna. Thank you for listening to The Solve Effect.

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