Of course, yes.
Mm-hmm.
That’s not the case in Taiwan, no. The reason is that in Taiwan, we don’t say computer scientists as engineers.
Whereas other places may call these people software engineers, in Taiwan, we call them program designers, and so it is seen as a design thing and not a engineering industrial thing. Because of that, there’s always equally boys and girls, or even sometime more girls than boys in the program design profession.
I think it’s maybe because of this translation advantage that it is always seen as a field that does not have as much gender bias as you mentioned on other industrial practices.
When I said retreating into cyberspace, I don’t mean into a kind of soloist virtual reality. I mean into the social fabric that is being developed around cyberspace, real communities, and artists, and poets, and people who make culture, but they were alone in their community because maybe they are the only ones practicing that art in their neighborhood.
Through the cyberspace, they can find like-minded people, and doing co-creations together. That is how Wikipedia is done, right? Just by individual writers banding together in cyberspace to make an encyclopedia.
That is a very creative notion, and I think, as a creator, if I had to rely on the immediate vicinity, the like-minded people will be very few. Because of cyberspace, it is a very vast community, easily in the tens of thousands.
That is what I mean by retreating from a relatively isolated physical space into a much vaster cyberspace.
No, I will say that, because of the cyberspace and the friends I met there, I very early on started couch-surfing. In 2005 and 2006, I visited maybe 12 different countries, 15 different cities, held hackathons in each.
I have never met the person that I stayed in their home. They just offered their sofa, their home, because we work on something together online. It’s a radical trust to random strangers. My families have a very strong heart. [laughs]
Then it is actually, I would describe as, my tribe, my kinship. As I said, cyberspace is a gateway into more face-to-face communication opportunities not limited by your immediate vicinity.
Yes.
Yeah, whatever.
It’s whatever. It’s whatever. I like to know people as the value that they hold, not the types, class, or roles, because these change with time. The values stay more stable and is refined over time. That’s how I treat other people, and I would like other people to treat me the same.
Instead of following a social script determined by gender, I’m much more interested if you ask me about the values that I hold. That is what I mean.
I don’t care.
I just whichever toilet is closer.
I don’t think people care so much about me being post-gender. It’s entirely normal. I think it speaks tons about Taiwan’s inclusiveness, tolerance, and also the vibrancy of the Taiwan pride community and the LGBTIQA+ community that our president, for example, supported marriage equality from the very beginning.
She is not seen as anything weird or out of normal. It’s just she is seen as more progressive than her counterparts in other parties, maybe. It is not used as a way to cast the kind of labels you alluded to, attack, or anything like that.
I think Taiwan really is a pretty mature society in the sense that people respect each other for their different gender orientation, identities, and whatever. I think that’s the best news I can give, is that the everyday life in the cabinet doesn’t care that I’m a post-gender.
I don’t have a political adversary.
I don’t belong to any parties.
I am not attaching to the cabinet. I’m working with them. I’ve worked with two cabinets, each belonging to a different party.
Yes, of course.
I’ve went through two puberties myself. My natural testosterone level is between that of an average male and the average female. That means that I can relate to people’s first-hand experiences more.
That I have this emotional palette that I can feel the range of first-hand experiences and emotions when people say something that they experience. For example, during the different, this is the idea of intersectionality.
That if they felt that they have felt the male gaze as they were a young lady, developing in the puberty and so on, I also had that experience as well when I went through my female puberty.
Things like that, little things like that, allows me to maybe empathize with people more, and also feel people’s different positions more without regarding automatically half of population as the other population.
There’s no binary categories in my mind that says, “Oh, this is my party. This is the opposition party.” I cannot even think this way. I don’t have those categories saying, “This is my agenda. This is the other agenda.”
I cannot think that way. Because of that, I am more able, I think, to take all the sides.
OK.
Back in 2020, people did not expect that it’s actually very easy, once that we have 5G network, to have people understand that, even though we have different positions, we can very easily build common values if there is a mechanism to do so.
My part is like a digital peacekeeper. We made a space where everybody can share their reflections on what the problem is, and instead of talking about how to fix it, we first have people share what they mean by fixing it, what they feel about fixing it, and so on, so that we have a common map of the issues at hand.
Very quickly, people understood that there are certain pathways that are very thin, that are very difficult, but that’s the only way out of the weighty problem.
Certainly. Back in the ‘20s, people had this idea that we have direct democracy on one side and representative democracy on the other, and they’re fighting each other, instead of complementing each other.
In Taiwan, starting from the 2010s, we’re starting to prototype a new political system where, instead of these two systems competing on fixed resources like budget and things like that, we have them work in conjunction with one another, with participatory democracy set the agenda.
It’s like the first diamond in design thinking, which is, by the way, required reading for everybody educated in the ‘20s. For the first diamond, it’s participatory democracy. For the implementation – that’s the development and delivery – that’s representative democracy.
Once we fix on the same structure, and everybody understood that this is a “how might we” question, that is the thing that democracy is supposed to produce, it became very easy for all the different democratic systems.
It could be liberal democracy. It could central democracies. It could be authoritarianism, to converge on this new political system.
The digital helped us a little bit by making sure that people, when we are having face-to-face understanding, listening, and so on, these could be amplified, so that people can enter the same empathy space.
Previously, before digital, it’s easy for a room with 20 people to end up, if you have good facilitation, agree on each other’s values. These 20 people cannot bring that feeling back to their comrades, back to their communities, and so on.
Digital helped a little bit by putting us in each other’s shoes when we’re forming the common understanding. Around the year 2025, quantum really helped a lot more.
With quantum, we can now have people enter the space adjusted, tailor-made to their personal feelings, so that they can voice all their fears, or their doubts, or their misunderstandings, or their uncertainties and participate in a tailor-made virtual conversation.
With everybody trying to not convince them, but also, just listen to them and provide a good overview effect, feedback, so that people can feel that the Earth itself is talking to them. That became only possible after quantum computation.
Yes. Around 2020, we introduced this idea of Internet of Beings. It is not just people, like adults, humans, that participate in the democracy, but gradually, all around the world, people starting including rivers, mountains, animals, and so on.
All the different species capable of sentience, as well of collection of environment that could be translated into an avatar that speaks on behalf of them. All these were included in the participatory deliberations that we talk about.
Of course, on the final decision and implementation in the ‘20s, because of technological restrictions, these are still mostly human, but including the environment, the social, and future generations in the first diamond is already helping a lot in the ‘20s.
Of course, by the ‘30s, we now have pretty good sentient quantum simulations of future generations, as well as of the environment, so that they can also participate in the second diamond, although this is somewhat experimental at this point.
The market has been expanded, so that it is not just about trading services or products, and so on. We use this simple idea called quadratic voting, making sure that people understand that each of our strength of preferences is best if we just share our private assessments of common issues with the community, because that ends up resulting in the best possible outcome.
