People really do work out social norms of “How can we co-domesticate with self-driving tricycles?” People may use them as trollies, shopping baskets that follows people around. They may look at it as not a transportation device in general but rather a recreation device, or tour guide. There’s people who want it to be used that way.
When it’s used as transportation, people feel like it’s best give…For example, in the middle of the night, the metro has stopped, so maybe it could be serve as a kind of software-defined metro and things like that.
The point here is when it was really slow in speed and couldn’t really harm anyone, people just experience with these creatures knowing that they can work with students in Taipei Tech and change any part of the hardware and software, and essentially co-create their sandbox proposals to the site in Taipei City.
I think in a couple month, Taipei City will start its first genuine self-driving vehicle sandbox.
In a couple months. That’s the self-driving bus in the Xinyi bus lane. It incorporated a lot of learnings that we have here about how to read the traffic lights, how to yield to first elderly people and then children, instead of in Boston, which is first children and then elderly.
Yeah, a little bit different. That’s what I mean social…
That’s right.
Right. That then also influenced, for example, I think in the Love River in Kaohsiung, other than…
…also doing solar-powered self-driving boats.
I think self-driving vehicle is a really good example, because the private-sector investors know, if within the one year of safe sandbox experiments, the society doesn’t like the idea, then it will be like reverse lottery, because they will lose a lot and everybody gain a little bit of understanding. [laughs]
If they manage to work with the society to, through participatory design, a way to co-domesticate, to integrate into society, then their envisioned mode of transportation, including the religion involved, will become the official ones.
It incentivizes people to invent social innovation, not just industry innovation, by working with the people.
Certainly.
It’s a large part of it. I haven’t been showing you the exoskeletons, which is a little bit more sci-fi. [laughs]
No, she’s not really Kuomintang.
Neither is Simon Chang, for that matter.
Yes.
Everything.
He promised to the people that, if he becomes president, the e-petition threshold, which is now 5,000 people, will become 3,000, making it easier for people to do e-petitions.
When William Lai ran against Dr. Tsai in the DPP primary, his agenda, again, is that, “Dr. Tsai is doing very well on open government, but I will do a national open government plan,” and so on. It turns out we are now doing a national open government plan. [laughs]
Not at all.
This is like a ratchet. If people get used to the idea that they can do, say, participatory budget or the e-petitions, there really is no politician that will risk saying that, “Oh, let’s go back to authoritarianism.”
There’s a running gag that Audrey Tang, Digital Minister, can use her brain…
…to amplify psychic energy, right? [laughs]
That’s right. Freddy said with a completely straight face that, “We know that you can block it with really heavy metal.”
By heavy metal, he mean lead. He mean lead.
He said that, if you listen to heavy metal music and just exercise your neck, because they throw away their hair all the time. Exercise your neck, your neck will become very strong and muscular. Then you can don the lead helmet, which will block electromagnetic waves, and completely in a straight face.
Which is really funny.
Of course, that reflects a social tension. It reflects a social tension that, somehow, with algorithm or with whatever, people’s thought could be manipulated without their being even aware about it.
Tinfoil hat, of course, doesn’t quite work. They only amplify electromagnetic effects. [laughs] Physically, it doesn’t work.
Of course. Then the idea that algorithmic dependency, like the social media, AI-based, I will say even parasitic feed that people feel that their emotion is being somehow manipulated by artificial intelligence, algorithms, and so on, that is a real fear.
That’s reflected in those jokes. It’s not personal. I never take it personally, but that is something that people are gradually becoming aware of. It’s the same in the US. After the Cambridge Analytica, there is now presidential candidates that centers around her campaign based on this idea.
No, because I think people understand very clearly that by transparency, we mean making the state transparent to citizens, and nobody’s against that. People are afraid that citizens are being made transparent to the state. That is the direction that people worry.
I make it really clear to all my visitors and so on that they of course get a chance to edit the transcript, that they of course don’t have to abide by this, particularly if they want to talk with my colleagues instead of me.
It’s only under events and meetings that I chair that has this protocol. I think by and large people understand that I’m not representing really anyone. I’m just presenting my own idea about this in the conversations.
I think after three years, there’s less worry about me doing the reverse kind of transparency, but there is, of course, a lot of worry about, say, Facebook, or other global multinationals are doing this kind of surveillance.
I think nowadays, it’s not about open government. The term open government is safe. It is not linked in any way to state surveillance. State surveillance, of course, is still something that people worry about.
Yeah.
Right. People keep evoking the martial law era returns to remind each other that we must not go back to that era.
Not necessarily a bad idea. [laughs]
These two work closely together…
…and collaborate. Really, it’s a mutually reinforcing relationship, because the more that internal discord is being sown by internal or domestic people, the more of a opportunistic window for the foreign powers to interfere and to essentially amplify those divisive ideas.
There is a very public report about what Russia did to the US election. You will see that they are not actually getting any side. All the sides of rhetorics, but just making, radicalizes them, to make them more polarizing.
I don’t think radicalizing them, per se, is a problem, because from the report, we can see that they were doing pretty narratives in the community building phase. Genuinely pretty good things to build trust and then abuse that trust.
I think attribution matters insofar that it teach people how to do attribution. A full attribution, done publicly, is an educational material in media competency. That is to say, because in Taiwan, broadband as a human right, everybody can start a live stream any time.
Everybody is media, in that sense, but people don’t generally have the full training of a journalist before they can just push a button and become media. Full attribution is useful insofar that people learn that whatever information source that they receive, it’s good to ask the right set of questions as a journalist would to do the due diligence, source checking, and fact checking, as a journalist would.
If the journalist doesn’t share their tool kit, it makes a, like people nevertheless will just spread whatever information that they heard. If the journalists do share the tool kit and allow more democratic, participatory fact checking, for example, with institutional media, then they collaboratively doing attribution.
Everybody learns something about how journalism works. I think it’s great education-wise, but I don’t think it is, by itself, useful as just purely us versus them tool.
It’s solved exactly as how spam is solved. Spam is never really “solved.” If you look into your junk mail folder, they are still there.
