With the rapid adoption of artificial intelligence worldwide, what safeguards do you believe are the most urgent to protect democracy and human rights?

Certainly. So, when AI systems are developed today, usually they’re trained to align or to be loyal to some single individual. It could be the leader of that company, it could be a leader of a state, it could be the user, but optimizing for the preference of a single individual actually might make that individual more polarized or less connected or otherwise less horizontally aligned with other individuals. We have seen it with social media, we have seen it with the infinite scroll, and with now Sora joining the infinite scroll, I’m sure that there’s a lot of thought being put on by people around the world on how can we actually foster human-to-human coordination, cooperation, instead of just the maximization of individual preferences.

And so when we train AI systems, currently in Oxford, I’m working on what’s called 6-Pack of Care, which uses a different logic. Instead of maximizing any single number, which is the utilitarian logic, we’re making sure that it’s good enough to some communities, making sure that community can steer, and can tune those models to improve the relational health of the community itself, instead of any particular individual outside or inside the community. So, if people are interested, please feel free to check out the website. It’s at 6pack.care .

Looking back on your previous job as the first digital minister of Taiwan, how could Taiwan’s experience with digital democracy be adapted to other countries, especially where the governments are much less open than in Taiwan?

I think it’s important to remember that we were the resistance. We were the half a million people on the street in 2014. But we did not just protest. We demonstrated that with broad listening, with bridging ideas, instead of engaging through enragement, we can give voice to the uncommon ground, the ideas that previously weren’t seen as common knowledge between the warring camps, but rather made the bridging bonus through deliberation and generative polling. And so that was in 2014. And we did not require or even wait for the government to implement such measures. We implemented such measures as part of the civic tech movement, g0v. And so because of this, around the world, what we have seen is that there are pockets of good where people started from the margins, from the most vulnerable voices. And then the government said, okay, maybe these kinds of methods actually produce, instead of NIMBY, Not In My Backyard and MIMBY, Maybe In My Backyard, if I do this, if I do that, and so on.

And so to your question, I think it’s a two-step process. First, the civic activists must demonstrate, not just protest. We must show that it is possible to connect people who are otherwise very polarized on very concrete ideas, very concrete proposals, as Taiwan has shown with Uber, with marriage equality, with many other topics. And then second, we need to build alliances with the career public service, with the bureaucracy, because they actually also know how to resolve this problem. They just need an air cover and a pre-commitment from the political leaders. Which is why here in California, we’re working with the state employees in the digital democracy platform engaged.ca.gov, and we’re basically crowdsourcing, asking the state employees, what would make your life easier if we implement this technology, that technology. So it’s also about government efficiency, but it’s bottom up from the trenches, not top down.

If you have to name one priority for the global community to ensure technology strengthens rather than weakens democracy, what would it be?

I would like to remind everyone that we, the people, are the super intelligence we are looking for. So, we should not build this superhuman intelligence that builds another better intelligence that needs less of human intervention and finally takes off and leaves everybody behind a vertical takeoff. I think we should focus on horizontal takeoff, which is the ability for us to tap into our latent superintelligence, building through augmented collective intelligence.

Should the EU build so-called sovereign AI with American companies as OpenAI and Microsoft, or should they build with only European partners like Mistral AI?

That’s a great question. I think the idea of sovereign AI means AI that’s attentive to the local social-cultural context. And to do so, one needs to engage the model makers that build in this ability to fine-tune and to post-train to align those AI models. There are already makers of AI such as OpenAI that publishes the open version of GPT on Hugging Face. And so once it is in the open, of course, people in Europe can start building upon it.

However, I would also say that the training material also matters. If we make sure, for example, with Mistral, that a certain European culture is emphasized as an internal thinking language of the model, then it’s less needed for the post-training cultural tuning to force a model that thinks internally in American English to think in a European context. So at the end of the day, it is a matter of free choice. The more choice there is on the market for models that think internally in different cultures, the easier for people to build again in a horizontal takeoff.

In Taiwan, we fund more than 150 different vertical model trainings. So, instead of training one single supermodel that sees everything, solves everything in a kind of adequate but not very good way, we focus on those narrower domain-specific models precisely because that gives the users, the people, easier steering, easier control over individual model alignment and tuning. And also it’s much more energy efficient because it does not need to memorize all the Studio Ghibli clips or something like that. And so for each task, like summarization, translation, facilitation, and so on, it is both faster, more energy efficient, and much more tunable. So, I think the future is public, pluralistic and portable AI models.

(From Ryan Takeshita, TBS Tokyo) Throughout the world, from government to Supreme Courts to higher education, respected institutions are losing people’s trust. And you were the digital minister of Taiwan, so why do you think government institutions are losing trust and how can they regain back that trust?

That’s a great question. Well, as the Tao Te Ching says, to give no trust is to get no trust. If the vertical institutions do not trust the people, especially the vulnerable people who otherwise do not have a voice, then it is very difficult to earn that trust back because currently it is very easy to build the horizontal mode of trust of a peer-to-peer communication.

And indeed, the Right Livelihood Award goes to this year, people who build such peer-to-peer communication networks to speak from the margins to fight against injustice. And so the idea of a horizontal mode of trust through broad listening, I think is really key. If vertical institutions share their power to set the agenda so that people can, through broad listening, set the agenda of those institutions, then it’s an act of radically trusting the people. And then some of the people may trust back. But it always starts from the vertical power trusting the people first.

You seem like a very productive person. Is that because you work night and day or do you have people working for you? Do you have some recommendations or methods for that?

Well, it is true that I work night mostly and also day because I’m a very competitive sleeper. I have to sleep eight hours or more a day to be creative. And indeed, I often say that the most creative work occurs during the nighttime, because if we do not get sufficient sleep, then basically people just repeat whatever their habits were the previous day. But, a new day may actually come with new challenges, and so to have insufficient sleep is to have insufficient adaptability.

Now, I think the point of horizontal coordination is also very important. When I joined the Cabinet, I said quite publicly that I’m working with the government, not for the government. I’m working with the people, not for the people. And so by working in almost like a Lagrange point — facilitating conversations between both, then we increase the bandwidth of democracy. Previously, if you vote, which is very important, but it’s just, I don’t know, three bits of information uploaded every four years, that fuels polarization and populism.

And what we found out is that the tools such as Polis, broad listening tools, Sensemaker, and so on, can lead to a much more accurate poll, which is not predetermined, but rather a generative poll, where the options are generated by the citizens, or what I call pro-social media. And this kind of way makes a continuous group selfie possible. As journalists, that’s actually a practice of journalism because it shows both the balancing ideas, and also the bridging idea. And this is how we changed the basic education curriculum in Taiwan in 2019 to focus on curiosity, collaboration and civic care, so that the young people go through this journalistic practice and inoculate their mind against this polarized outrage.

What is your view on U.S. AI projects like Stargate? Some people would say that the U.S. and Big Tech are using the AI hype to expand existing monopolies in social media and cloud and so on. In practice, for customers it could be hard.

I think what Europe has, which is this idea of portability, is very important. As you know, currently with the Digital Markets Act, you can have instant message systems coming from different companies talking to one another, so they must compete on better service instead of on the capture of the network effect.

Here in the U.S., the state of Utah also passed the Digital Choices Act that goes a step further. Starting next July, if you are a Utah citizen, you can move from social media A to social media B, while keeping all your community. The new likes, reactions, replies will simply forward to your new network, so you lose nothing by migrating to a better service. This makes innovation much more easy because the new way to organize information or social media does not need to solve the problem of a cold start. People can migrate one by one.

So, to your question, I believe it is very important that Europe also look at social portability like in Utah and also we can figure out a way to do portability across AI services as well. Well, I mean the idea of telecom portability, if you switch from telecom A to telecom B you get to keep your number, this is called number portability. It is very complex to implement on the back end because I was the minister of digital affairs and in charge of the number portability strategy. Or disaster roaming that we have done in Taiwan so that even if only one telecom remains in service after a natural or unnatural disaster, the other telecom users can roam on the existing network that is still operating and so on and so forth. So, while these are technically complex measures, for the people it is actually very simple to use once it is implemented. Basically it’s like a podcast, that is portability in motion.

How do you balance the protection of free expression while also preventing harmful disinformation from undermining civic trust?

Well, first of all, we need to distinguish speech versus reach. Of course, speech needs to be protected. On the other hand, currently in social media, we’re seeing a situation where if I don’t subscribe to someone, but if the algorithm think that this awful speech will cause me to stay engaged, meaning enraged, and also click on the advertisement more, it will push those unsolicited information to my eyeballs; it strip mines our social fabric of common experience and sells the attention to the highest bidder.

In Taiwan last March, to solve the problem of advertisers pushing deep fake scams. We sent 200,000 text messages to random numbers around Taiwan asking how we should make sure that the information integrity is upheld without harming freedom of expression because after all Taiwan is the most free in all of Asia when it comes to internet freedom. And so people gave us very good ideas. 450 people in rooms of 10 in 45 rooms deliberated in a generative way. The social media company needs to be liable for the full damage of $5 million. Let’s slow down throttle connection to their videos, but do not censor them. Many public representatives of Taiwan people agree on this bundle of policy with more than 85% approval. And that was last March. So, this year, if you scroll in Taiwan, Facebook or YouTube, you simply do not see those deepfake ads anymore. The problem is solved.

And so I think the idea here is again to radically trust the people and show the big tech companies that this is the measure that does not sacrifice freedom of expression. But the freedom of speech does not mean that we need to get foreign robots freedom of reach for free. I don’t think that’s in our constitution.

Are the tools that Taiwan used available in a place for reuse?

Yes, definitely. So, the tools that I just described, such as Polis, the Google Jigsaw Sensemaker, the Frankly online deliberative polling software, many others. All of them are not just available, but rather free, as in free software, so that you can customize it however you want. And if you’re interested in the list of all the tools that we have used and the stories from Taiwan, as well as from other places such as Japan. Please check out the website Plurality.net.

(From Peter, Radar.dk) Do you see any changes in the technological and political relation between the US and Taiwan in Trump 2.0?

So, one of the ideas that Taiwan had when we had half a million people on the street and many more online in 2014 is to build this bridging consensus when it comes to whether to allow the Beijing brands like Huawei and ZTE into our then new 4G network. And we had a conversation around that during the Sunflower Movement, and we agreed that because of the lack of independent journalism, it is very difficult to find out whether those so-called private sector services have been de facto state-owned at any given point.

And, because of that, we share this idea. And during Trump 1.0, the idea gained this branding called a “Clean Network,” I believe. And then this idea got adopted by many democratic partners. Now in Trump 2.0, and I would say also that Biden continued this idea of a trustworthy tech stack with Taiwan really at the center because everybody trusts our chips and the supply chain around them and cyber security. And so now in Trump 2.0, we’re seeing the idea of Clean Network being applied to things that are not telecommunications, for example the social media company ByteDance, which produces the service TikTok.

And the idea again is that in Taiwan we have for a very long time now since 2019, I believe, that says that anything that is de facto controlled by Beijing should actually not get adopted without question in our public sector. Whether to integrate it more or less, is a matter of cybersecurity. And so that idea has been taken up seriously by Trump 2.0. And as we have seen in the news, they recently reached an agreement so that the data flow can be monitored to U.S. citizens based in the U.S.

Would you consider Trump’s friends as good caretakers of TikTok? Quite a weird partnership, Trump and TikTok, couldn’t Trump just take advantage of that?

Well, first of all, I would say that it is a matter of network flow analysis. This is a matter that independent audits can easily prove. And, so I think in internet governance, what is important is that independent third parties can also monitor and see for themselves whether the agreement is actually taking place. And indeed, if Europe goes with the Utah idea of social portability, then anything really anyone posted on TikTok can be subscribed from other non-TikTok platforms. This is really the magic of the inter- in the internet.

Well, first of all, again, if we take the protocol-based innovation lens, then it is positive-sum, right? If TikTok offers its videos in an open protocol and makes sure that anybody with any better algorithm can rank those videos according to people’s preferences instead of a centralized preference, then yes, the communities around President Trump will gain much more community sovereignty over the discourse that they would prefer, but then so would any other community.

This is the beauty of bridge-making systems. For example, community notes, which was inspired by the Polis algorithm that we tried in Taiwan and still use in Taiwan. It’s not just the left wing in this bubble or the right wing in this bubble, it is calculating the up-wing, the unlikely common ground that is agreed broadly by both sides, and then featuring these as community notes; it allows people with different world views to see in stereo fashion.

(From John) How can alignment assemblies play a central role in depolarizing politics in countries on the front lines of freedom and democracy?

Indeed, the idea of alignment assembly of which the information integrity is one, the example that I just used in Taiwan, can produce this kind of group steering of emerging technologies. And this has always been the case in Taiwan. When Uber entered Taiwan, when Airbnb entered Taiwan, when, well, the deepfake scam ads entered Taiwan, we always used this kind of online citizen assembly to resolve the tension between freedom of expression on one side, and the depolarization needs of the society on the other side. And time and again, we have proven that you do not have to make the sacrifice of one side or the other.

And in a citizen assembly, especially using bridging algorithms, this gives virality to the middle ground, to the uncommon ground that is collectively discovered. And so once again, I think this depolarization is really key. After hundreds of such exercises, the people of Taiwan understand that democracy is not just voting every four years, it is a continuous motion that with 5,000 signatures, anyone can get a cross-party, even post-partisan conversation on any emerging topic.

What does the Right Livelihood Award mean for you, and how will it further your work?

Well, first of all, I’m really, really honored to be recognized this way. I’m truly humbled by the 203 laureates. And I think we unite in a mission to make sure that the depolarization methods are widely known and shared. I think this is very important because Taiwan researched these kinds of methods not out of fun, although it is fun to participate in bridging conversations, but also out of existential necessity. We have to prove that democracy must deliver. Democracy does not lead to chaos, as some authoritarian narratives would like to say, and it is worth keeping our democracy system around.

But no democracy is an island, not even Taiwan. So, the other laureates show across the world in various different configurations, in the front line in the struggle against autocracy that again and again, horizontal peer-to-peer, this horizontal mode of trust can actually get depolarization done, can deliver results. And so in my mind, this is a network of democracies that reinforce each other, and together we can make democratic backsliding into the democratic comeback.