Your position is really interesting. I don’t know how many countries have a digital minister. Do you? I’m digressing from the main topic that I wanted to discuss with you, because I’m fascinated by the fact.
There are countries that has CTO or a CIO...
What’s these?
A chief technology officer or the chief information officer, that’s more common.
I’m not a CTO or CIO. I’m more of someone who helps each ministry on the way of digital transformation, m more of a facilitative role than a commanding role.
Additionally, I think there’s some north Europe countries that start to have this ambassador to multi-nationals, like to Google or Facebook or Microsoft. That’s a semi-diplomacy to [laughs] semi-sovereign entities. I’m also playing some of that role.
I don’t think there’s many countries using the exact title Digital Minister, but I see many part of my work being done also at a central or cabinet level. In the UK, they have the Policy Lab, which is part of the cabinet office too.
When was the...
Appointment?
When were you appointed?
I was appointed August 2016, but I entered work at the 1st of October. There’s a month that I was in Europe and New Zealand, also trying to talk with my counterparts and through the public Q&A with journalists and the citizen and try to cloud source my job description, essentially.
The detail of this work is indeed worked out in public, because during that time, any journalist who wanted to ask me questions only asked me publicly, so it is a more ever-improving way where people can give me ideas and what they want me to do.
Our main values are: The idea of open government at the government side, to make the public servants trust people more; and social innovation on the society side to make civil society play a much more active role when it comes to public service. Instead of waiting for government to do something, the civil sector can pilot something and then prove to the government that this way actually can work.
This is a mutual trust-building on both sides of the civil and government sides. I think that that’s gradually crowd sourced and formed during the later part of 2016. I was also working as an understudy already at that time with Minister Jaclyn Tsai, that’s since December 2014 to January 2016. That’s also for a year and a few months.
Whose idea was this thing?
Of this title?
Yeah, this Office of a Digital Minister?
This title, I think it’s proposed by one of the people who asked me to recruit for the "Asia dot Silicon Valley project". The ASV Project started in a rough position, because initially everybody understood it as the "Asian" Silicon Valley, but we turned it into "connecting Asia to Silicon Valley." It’s the difference between copying [laughs] and linking.
The original idea about copying, it’s not very well-received by practically all Taiwanese who have been to Silicon Valley. [laughs] They thought, you can’t really copy Silicon Valley, so that plan didn’t have a very good PR.
There’s quite a few meetings organized by the Premier at the time, Lin Chuan, with start-up people trying to reformulate the plot so that it more agrees with what we will now call AIOT, AI and IOT start-ups and actually leverages their links to Silicon Valley rather than trying to make a replica of Silicon Valley. That never makes sense anyway, right?
It’s during those meetings that I was invited. They told me that they need someone in the cabinet who speak the language of social innovators and of a newer generation of open source communities. So I was asked to recruit a Digital Minister.
I think the title was brought somewhere up during those meetings. I didn’t know or anticipate that I’ll end up doing this role myself. I asked around, asked my friends and my acquaintances and so on.
Was there a particular premier that was pushing for this?
To be honest, while Lin Chuan did push for this, so did Simon Chang, the previous premier.
The Google guy?
Yeah, the Google guy. Before him, Premier Mao Chi-Kuo also made crowdsourcing and open data the national direction. All three premiers agreed it’s important. Now our premier, Lai Ching-te, personally, he ran for the Tainan mayorship with open government as his campaign platform, the same time as Ko Wen-je. So all the four premiers that I worked with embraced this idea.
It’s fascinating. I mentioned this to my editor the fact that I’m meeting you and I can see a Digital Minister and all that. He was just very intrigued by this idea and said to definitely ask you more about it. I can’t think of any other country in Asia that has a similar office. It’s a sign of where Taiwan is in terms of technology in Asia.
We’re taking digital transformation very seriously. There’s many Asian countries also say broadband as a human right and digital literacy as a human right, but the combination of Taiwan’s geography as well Taiwan’s high literacy and easy access to the whole supply chain of ICT makes it actually possible to deliver it.
We’re not settling on the idea of the digital divide. [laughs] We’re pretty unique in Asia to actually deliver.
What are some of the goals that you have set for your office?
For my office?
For our office, the core value is to increase the mutual trust between the public service and the civil society. After that, to empower the civil society to be able to participate meaningfully in public governance. Then simplify the existing workflow of public servants so that they can do more with less time, and to promote the idea of digital service.
All of these are aspects of how you slice the pie, but it’s the same big chunk. Concretely speaking, we’re working through a few platforms.
There’s the e-petition platform, which now doubles as a regulatory pre-announcement and discussion/consultation platform; it also doubles as a open budget/open spending platform, that people can track thousands of ministry projects and have a real discussion with career public servants.
The unifying theme with that platform is that we make every part of the government not just transparent, but accountable, like they become social objects around which people can have a meaningful conversation. That’s a part.
On the social innovation part, I’m just traveling around Taiwan and meeting with social innovators everywhere and try to...
Just gathering ideas.
Just gathering ideas, brainstorming with them. I often use teleconferencing so that every couple of week, 12 ministries here in social innovation lab see with a real two-way teleconferencing wherever I go, maybe to rural places and indigenous places and so on, we can resolve in real-time the questions brought by that regional social innovators.
Because everything is radically transparent, it’s all published online. People can continue on on previous discussions just like that. Previously, people have to wait for weeks the government to have a written response. That’s not very efficient, and it often loses relevant context, because social innovation only makes sense if you’re within the social context in which in happens.
If they send one delegate to travel for four hours to Taipei to give a 15-minute PowerPoint presentation, it loses all the social context which it originates from. By visiting there myself, and through telepresence to let the ministry people be part of the social presence, we can all better understand what kind regulatory changes is needed, what kind of sandbox is needed.
Sandbox is this idea that any innovation can challenge existing regulations, so that they should be re-interpreted in the favor of the innovators. If there’s no law against it, it should be permitted, previous interpretations notwithstanding.
Even if it’s illegal, as long as it’s for the public good and not just for the profits of one company, we allow, for example, for AI banking in the FinTech Sandbox, we allow them to break the law for 12 months, then for the stakeholders to work out whether this is a good idea or not. If it’s a good idea, then we change the laws and regulations.
We have the AI banking in the FinTech Sandbox. We just sent the AI mobility sandbox to the legislative, that covers all the autonomous vehicles, it could be flying, it could be in a sea, it could be driving, or a hybrid vehicle. Again, that is how we think about AI integrating into the human society, not by top-down decrees, but by something that is just really solving a local need and with sufficient time for communication.
For this is not only about AI to understand human society, but for humans to understand how the world looks like to the AI and so we can co-domesticate, like human and dogs, into new norms.
To facilitate all these multi-stakeholder communications, we enable every ministry to organize a team of "Participation Officers" (POs), that form a network that collaboratively design these multi-stakeholder processes.
I’m pretty much all over the place, but the main operation is the same. It’s just open to all the stakeholders to discover common values and solutions.
Do you find that this radical transparency idea, which is also...This is the first time that I’ve ever experienced anything like that. I find it really fascinating.
Do you feel the changes the way people respond? Do you feel that maybe it gets results faster? I don’t know. What’s your sense of how useful is it as a tool?
It think it’s very useful. For example, when we did the e-sport case, there was a huge gap between people who have played e-sport...
E-sports?
Competitive electronic sport. That’s like competitive Internet gaming. Some people consider them as athletes and some people consider them as just gamers. Whether this is a culture or an industry, or whether it is just another sport, it is a point of very high contention for the past 10 years or so in Taiwan.
What we did was essentially, through a public hearing, asking all the athletes to come forward and say whatever the current law is making their life difficult, making the full transcript radically transparent, and then the next meeting within the government, the Ministry of Education, Ministry of Culture, Ministry of Economic Affairs, we can use the transcript to set the topics.
So we have this crowd-sourced agenda that we address. Even if in one meeting we cannot establish a full resolution, at least we know what is needed for it to pass. For example, the Ministry of Culture thought that it is not possible, at that time, to allow for alternative military service for professional e-sport athletes, and they gave the reason why.
After every internal meeting, we allow for 10 working days for everyone to edit the transcript. First, maybe during the meeting they just speak and did not listen, so actually going over it lets people listen more. The second effect is that they edit the words, of course, to sound more professional. Once this is published, the entire Internet community also responded to that as a social object.
People would say like, the Go players have been enjoying that from Ministry of Culture, and some relevant terms from the basketball players also apply here, and so on. They discover specific regulations that could have applied to the e-sport athletes. They’re very professional.
Of course, there are also people online that are toxic, or they’re just not very helpful. But I don’t care about those comments. I just bring those constructive comments next time back to the meeting saying, "Based on our previous radically transparent transcript, here are the some suggestions from the netizens. They seem very reasonable. Why don’t we discuss them?"
Throughout this process, the netizens see the public servants not as anonymous, but as pretty reasonable professional people that they may want to help, and the public servants also see the crowd as not just noise but signals. After three rounds like this, we actually resolved everything brought up by the public hearing.
Now e-sport is officially recognized as a sport. The main conceptual difficulty was that it’s not considered 體育, because 體育 in Mandarin is physical education. It’s not really physical, right? [laughs] It’s mostly mental, but mind sports could be a sport too, which is why we have reclassified it.
What I’m trying to get at is that, it’s not just one-time transparency. A repeated, transparent communication between multiple parties builds a accountability trail, where people can ask, how did we end up here? I think that’s our main contribution, making all the parties trust each other more.
Anyway, I’m here because I wanted to talk about... I was researching China. I cover Asia trade and economy for the journal. One of the issues that we looking into is the trade frictions, particularly between China and the US. Taiwan is emerging as a primary venue where all this is happening.
I just wanted to get a chance... I’m sure in the course of your work a lot of businesses probably come to you and you may have some contact with that. I wanted to get a sense from you on where things stand. Where do you see Taiwan as these pressures continue to rise from China? In the first place, do you have a sense that these pressures are increasing for Taiwan?
Naturally, I would say when I started my first start-up, that was in 1996, it’s generally seen as that PRC and Taiwan have a complementary position on the supply chain of electronics, and especially around semiconductors, but also other parts of the supply chain. There’s places where we think it’s better manufactured there.
There’s things that we think that better remain here, mostly the technologies that requires a high amount of expertise. Back in the late ’90s, I would say up to the early 2000s, this position is mostly complementary, that is at least for the Taiwan people’s perspective, on how the respective economies stack up and split work among themselves.
Of course, PRC have changed, as you already mentioned. For example, take the "China Manufacturing 2025" plan. In that plan, they’re moving also to the place in the value chain where traditionally they did not say that they would occupy. So it’s a new ambition for them.
They’ve become more competitive.
Right. On that segment, it becomes much more competitive. I wouldn’t say it’s a pressure specifically for people in Taiwan. It’s mostly that PRC has changed its ambition along the supply chain. Of course, in the original complementary position, that still goes on. That’s still complementary.
I guess the primary problem that Taiwanese and American semiconductors makers are finding out as a result of this revised competitive positioning from China, they’re facing a lot of intellectual property theft issues. That, I guess, is something that they are very worried about. Do you...?
There’s a few things, right? There’s the cybersecurity level, like actual cybersecurity hacking. That’s one level. There’s the level of trade secret leakage, through common...
Yes, that’s more what it is.
...social engineering.
There’s of course outright acquisition of teams. That’s another level.
Who bring the trade secrets.
Right, exactly. We have the cybersecurity act, and I’m sure that you know that our official position is that we use the real practice as training field [laughs] so that our white-hat hackers have something to do. I think that is well-established.
Can you repeat that?
When I went into the administration, I brought in a system called Sandstorm.io, a security-hardened work space, for non-confidential, but drafting-stage data, that all the government officials and public servants are welcome to use. It is also what we call a sandbox, a cybersecurity sandbox.
Everybody is welcome to develop new applications, like we have a colleague who developed a application for ordering lunch boxes together.
In any case, it’s mostly for collaborative writing, collaborative spreadsheet, and the usual teamware applications.
It is, of course, essential to have a hardened cybersecurity audit on that, which is why we asked the top security hackers like the people who have won the number two place in DEFCON, the DevCore people as well as our 技服 people, multiple teams to try to attack this system that I brought in.
This system is open-source, so it’s not reverse engineering; it’s line-by-line auditing. Also, to achieve defense-in-depth, they also worked on the auditing and notification system until we’re reasonably sure that it is safe for the public service to put data on it.
We didn’t stop there. We continued to retain white hat hackers to do social engineering on the whole public service and to try to attack us. The idea is with with these contributions, we credit their findings so they can publicly file CVEs that helps their career and credit.
The whole point is that the cybersecurity is a active thing. It is not something that you can just delegate to insurance and assistants. Those helps, but what helps more is to engage the white-hat community and continuously ask them to audit, to do penetration testing and share with us their findings. That’s how we can step ahead of the people who want to do cybersecurity attacks on our systems.
Then, we’re also sharing this experience to, for example, local governments and so on.
Coming back to the point that...
Yeah, social engineering for trade secret leakage, by way of a higher remuneration for engineers. That is a issue. Of course, the trade secret law has already been hardened so that it’s now punishable for 10 years. That’s just the law.
What we need is to have the court system as well as the investigative system to be equipped on digital forensics and on the necessary digital knowledge in order to work with cases like this. That’s why we’re always trying to empower them, starting from the front-line police officers, all the way to the investigative officers.
Then there’s a limit to what this can do, though. If there are specific cases that we identify, of course we can deter them from doing. If, as I said, they recruit a entire team -- because Taiwan is a free society after all, if a entire team decides that they want to move elsewhere...
Does that happen?
Not frequently, but there are attempts for getting this to happen. We see constant attempts, for example through HR companies or recruitment agencies set up locally, but actually controlled or getting their command for oversea interests.
While they technically still work in Taiwan, they are actually working for the...
Chinese.
We do see these shapes of attempts, they are rarely very successful, but we do see these attempts. The existing trades secret law applies here. I think the Minister of Labor adjusted their interpretation on anti-competition, so that even if it’s indirect working for foreign interests, it’s still interpreted as working for foreign interests.
We did change some interpretations based on the actual happenings that we witness in the field.
That’s so interesting that they have human resource companies here. Are these Chinese-owned companies, or are they Taiwanese companies that...
All we know is that they have de-facto control, but they may not take the shape of a PRC company.
Human resource companies here maybe they have some sort of mainland funding or shareholding?
Yeah, or out-of-band payment, or whatever. Because it’s a gray area, it’s difficult to say it’s all illegal. Some HR company do that for very legal purposes.
Yeah, there’s nothing wrong...
There’s nothing wrong with that. [laughs]
There’s nothing illegal about going out and looking for Taiwanese talent.
Exactly. Even if you form a team and report to other people, there’s nothing technically wrong with that.
Right.
So we can only identify these cases, and judge the actual trade secret violations on a basis that’s corresponding to what actually happens. We cannot preemptively say it’s illegal. To do that would be against the code of the law. It needs a close collaboration between the companies that are affected by this and of us, and the judicial system.
Are there any better known names among these human resources agencies that have these connections?
No, I just read the Ministry of Labor’s interpretation which mentions this possibility, but I don’t personally know the name of any agencies.
（ "有關雇主與勞工簽訂離職後競業禁止條款相關疑義" in https://www.mol.gov.tw/topic/3073/32027/ ）
That’s really interesting, and it makes sense. I guess this will be quite a recent development that happened in recent years. Is that right?
I don’t really know. When I entered the discussion, that’s after I become the Digital Minister...
After doing...
So it could have already been going on for some time. When did it start? I don’t know, because previously I worked on web startups; I’m not in the semiconductor sector.
In your role, do you get a lot of interaction with a wider range of technology companies such as semiconductors and so on?
Well, there’s two main project I’m working with. The first is the DIGI⁺ project ( https://www.digi.ey.gov.tw/ ) which is ensuring, as I said, broadband as human right and things like that. There is also a application strategy which is the Asia connecting to the Silicon Valley ( https://www.asvda.org/ ).
Currently, there is a lot of projects on having the semiconductor companies and design companies to work with what we call "AI on the Edge" projects so that basically tailoring the chips in a way that enables more intelligence at the edge, instead of transmitting everything, because the volume of data is just too large.
Instead of transmitting everything to the cloud to compute and then back, for autonomous driving, for example, it’s not really practical for the car has to make split-second decisions. That’s even more true smaller devices, like a small drone. The power for embedded systems is even more limited, but we still have to put some machine intelligence there.
The semiconductor companies are quite willing to work with this kind of intelligent edge idea, and to basically give a better embodiment of AI, of those sensors and the brain that we use for computation. It’s on those AI-related projects that I participate in forums and discussions.
One of the questions that I had on my list, I guess, was about...I’m fascinated by this idea that Taiwan is in a really difficult position here, because at the same time that...You alluded to this a little bit when you talk about how 20 years since, 20 plus years, almost 30 years...Am I right? 20 years ago.
Yeah. [laughs] Yes, not 30 years ago. I’m not that old.
(laughter)
I’m 37, so I think...
(laughter)
China has really moved to a much more competitive position. I wonder whether Taiwan is now just in a very difficult position of having to invest...It’s still sort of trapped by the fact that China is a huge buyer for what it makes, and Taiwan is now essentially having to invest in the entity that it will probably one day out-compete it.
Yeah, but for things like AI on the edge, it requires a manufacturing prowess that is, as far as I know, that PRC is still figuring out, the latest AI related chips, I don’t think they are actually at that position in the supply chain yet.
So there’s a few things. We’ll try to focus our energy on the products and integrated services that we can produce that leverages the cutting-edge technologies that we know as a fact that PRC doesn’t have yet. Secondly, we also diversify so that there’s a lot of social innovations that could only happen in Taiwan.
For example, this air quality sensor, the AirBox, it is an edge IoT device that’s really cheap, that people just built on their balcony, their school, or their home -- anywhere, really -- to get an accurate reading of the PM2.5 or whatever other air pollution statistic they care about.
There’s thousands of spots around Taiwan where the citizens themselves gather these numbers, and analyzing the open source function that’s even on a blockchain to make sure that everybody has an idea of how the air quality is like.
Projects like that are traditionally, we don’t see them in other Asian countries, because they threaten the legitimacy of government. When government, the Environmental Protection Agency publish number, but the citizen also publish number, people who participated are going to trust their own numbers, no matter the position of the measurement.
Many other Asian countries, not just PRC, are trying to contain these citizen science or civic tech groups so that they appear harmonious with official numbers. In Taiwan, we not only encourage that civic technology, we in fact actively collaborate with them.
As the saying goes, "If you can’t beat them, join them." We join them with NT$ five billion over four years, to build what we call "IoT For Public Good" , basically making more precise the sensors for them to measure, and provide hosting to this collective data.
Not just citizen data, but also meteorological, water quality, earthquake-related data that’s actually public data to the national supercomputing center, so that anyone who want work on the AI model to explain the correlation in human activity or policy can access the same data.
Now, that is a very bold move by a democratic country, basically trusting the citizen to not abuse data that’s traditionally reserved only for decision makers. What we are doing is essentially saying when in a democratic society, everybody has access to same data, then we can do science, because it’s better for prediction models to be accountable to everybody.
Currently, for example, in some PRC cities where air pollution is also an issue, it’s very rare that you can see a replicable publication that could be replicated by ordinary citizens. They may have different datas, different model, and you are not knowing which one is correct. What we’re doing, as I said, is increasing trust by radically trusting the citizens, through social innovations such as the process of the AirBox system.
It’s now all over the world, because people see it as a way of easily getting more accountability to the civic society organizations, to environmental groups, and things like that. It’s kind of diplomacy, but not just to foreign governments, but for CSOs, international NPOs, things like that.
For social innovation such as this, we can build large bidirectional and multi-directional relationships. It’s something that we can offer as part of the smart city solution. Again, it requires a technology environment that is not just about nanometer semiconductor processing, but also the capacity to form consensus among conflicts.
That social environment cannot be replicated, at least not now, by the PRC. They don’t have the environment for this kind of social innovation yet. We’re trying to work on innovations that are unique to Taiwan, but still useful globally.
I was doing some research before I met you, and I just want to step outside what we’re talking a little bit, and talk a little bit about your background. You have a really interesting background. You dropped out from...?
From high school.
High school, right. How did that happen? What led you to where you are now?
When I was 14, I ran into this new thing called the wide web. I’m on the Internet since birth, but that was very siloed system, BBS, FTP, Gopher, Archie, and so on. Some of them proprietary, like Gopher.
When Tim Bernes-Lee introduced wide web, he gave away his copyright and patents, and the World Wide Web consortium was done in a truly multi-stakeholder fashion, that anyone, even at 14 years old, who want to participate and contribute can contribute.
I told my teachers at the time that the human knowledge is being created on the web now. It’s not in the classroom. It’s not in the library. The very creation of those pre-prints, these research agenda, everything appear on the web in a contextual fashion.
If I just write an email to a researcher, they don’t know I’m 14 years old, so we start collaborating real quick. In that environment, I think...
Did that actually happen?
That actually happened.
That you were writing people?
Yeah. One of the more memorable case was, I think when I was 17, I wrote Douglas Hofstadter -- Hofstadter, the author of "Gödel, Escher, Bach" -- Pulitzer Prize winner, and a leading figure in artificial intelligence at the time.
I just wrote Hofstadter about one of his new published books ("Le Ton beau de Marot"). I commented on poetry that he made, and things like that. He just personally wrote back, and in Hanyu Pinyin too. He actually knows Mandarin. [laughs] We then had some discussions about...
He writes Pinyin? That’s so difficult to read.
Well, but that’s his hobby. He learn it from one of his good friend, David Moser.
How did you figure out? If I read Pinyin, I would not figure out what the person is even saying.
(laughter)
With a certain context, it’s not that hard.
In any case, because previously, everybody told me that to reach a professor like Hofstadter, you had to get really high on a grade, go to top university, get to his research program, join his research team, and maybe you get to spend some time with him.
Now, with just a direct email, we are collaborators, and he’s treating me as a peer. That really changed my whole outlook of the academic hierarchy. It’s as if those institutions were suddenly irrelevant. That’s when I told my principal, "This is supposedly mandatory education, so can you please tell the ministry of education that I am still here every day, when I am actually not?"
The principal, after I explain all those things to her, she actually agreed. My teachers all agreed. They gave their blessing. I dropped out of the last year of junior high education. They just keep faking the records of me actually attending school while I actually start a startup shortly afterwards.
That experience also informed the homeschooling movement. The people younger than me, like my brother, four years my junior, they are then the first generation of self-educated, alternatively educated, students in Taiwan. I think that’s really helpful, but then the alternative education can experiment, and find ways in which the ordinary education can also improve to learn from experiments -- some are successful, and some less so.
At the end, I become a member of the basic education curriculum committee, right before I joined the cabinet. We brought the part that worked in the alternative education back to our basic education, to focus on students’ characteristics and more skills. The characters being autonomy, interaction, and the common good. So this has gone full circle.
What did your startup do?
It used to be a book publishing house. I wasn’t involved as a shareholder back then. I was just a co-author. It was called "Informationist." When it did a restructuring into a software publishing company, I was one of the three co-founders back then.
Then the company name was Inforian. The three main shareholders was Lawrence Ho, Heidi Hsueh, and me. I was the CTO back then. It was around 1996 when the restructuring started. Afterwards, the company did many things. We did Taiwan’s first C2C auction site, CoolBid. It’s like eBay.
You said Cool-Bit?
CoolBid.
Oh, CoolBid, I see.
I also worked on what we called FusionSearch, which is a search tool that search for multiple engines, and also search your local files. After I left the company, they also worked on CICQ, one of the early instant messengers, and Intel invested a lot in them. I think it was the highest valued web startup during the dotcom boom in Taiwan.
By that time, I have already left, and joined the open source movement. Still, that was the first company I joined, at the beginning just to work on the search part.
Very quickly also, I also got involved on the auction site project and other, what we will now call social media projects. There’s no such word back then.
Did it make money?
It made quite some money before getting a lot of investment from Intel. They folded quickly afterwards during the dotcom crash. Back when I was on board, we were quite profitable.
Is it you were doing this to support your family?
No, not at all.
I was under this impression that you were helping to support your brother or something?
That’s when I was eight years old. I wrote a computer game to teach my brother mathematics.
Oh, I see. OK, sorry. The startup, you were just branching out, because you felt that this was...
Because I was a co-author in that publishing house. When they were transforming into a software company, I happened to be working some software that I wanted to reach more people.
Did you feel traditional education is... It’s very clichéd when I say this, but did you struggle, and then were pushing back, because you felt that there are other, better ways to get educated? Which is very true, in a lot of societies, like Singapore, for instance, where I’m from.
I haven’t lived in Singapore for many, many years, but in Singapore, there is a real push now to just reevaluate all of the education. They feel that it’s too results-focused. It breeds elitism, and blah, blah, blah. Did you go through that yourself personally?
Personally, yes.
Was what you were doing a rebellion, because you were...?
Now, next year, the curriculum that I helped design will become Taiwan’s basic education. It’s coming full circle.
That’s great. Congratulations.
What I’m saying is, personally, yes, after the World Wide Web, I see knowledge as something that people are making together, rather than being just dispersed vertically. Previously, there’s a power-over relationship. Like the curriculum board over the textbook makers, the textbook makers over the way teachers teach, the teachers over the students.
There’s this idea of the standardized tests, standardized answers. This idea of individual-based competitiveness. None of this makes sense in the World Wide Web. It’s just all contributors. Everyone are just identified by their contributions. There’s always a consensus-making mechanism amidst individuals. There are competitions, but they are between groups. They are not between individuals -- that never makes any sense on the web.
It’s between projects. There’s brain drain between projects and so on, but people don’t compete individually with each other. It didn’t even make sense. The idea is to really shift from power-over-people to power-with-people, that I experienced personally when I was 14.
It’s a commonplace idea now. People talk about platform economy, micro power, or whatever. Back then, there was very few words for it.
Were you doing well in school at the time, or were you struggling?
I was doing very well. I won two science fairs.
It wasn’t the case that you were failing?
No, I get a guaranteed spot at the top senior high school. When I gave that up, teachers really thought I’m crazy.
What did your parents think?
They wanted to know that I know what I’m doing. I took easily two months or more to try to get through to them, to let them know that there is a new way of making knowledge that’s happening. They eventually agreed, because they could see that the correspondence that I have with researchers and so on, that’s like doing real research.
The two science fairs that I went to, the one I’m in first grade in the junior high, and the one that I’m in the second year, the only difference is that I got exposed to the Web between the two science fair projects.
One is very much like a student’s practicing work. I think it’s third place nationally. The second one, which is on symbolic AI reasoning, when I was in the second junior high grade, that’s the top place nationally, and also much more like part of cutting edge research. It’s not that I grew so much during one year, it’s that the material that I’m working with, from textbooks only to cutting edge research on the web.
Congratulations. I think you’ve done really well for yourself. It’s incredible. You’re occupying one of these really interesting positions. It’s great. Let’s see what else we have. I guess I should ask, on this issue of remuneration.
It seems to me that if you have a competitor that’s paying five times what you are paying... People will talk about, "Oh, we offer a better culture," and so on. This is a really hard, money talks, unfortunately. Do you think that this is something that Taiwan can never win, in terms of remuneration, compensation?
Well, working as Digital Minister, compared to my work with Apple and other Silicon Valley companies, I’m now running with less than one-third of my previous salary...
You were working with Apple?
I was working with Apple on Siri, and at the same time with the Oxford University Press too, as a consultant. Right before I joined the cabinet, I am getting more than three times more salary than what I am having now.
If it’s just about money, I wouldn’t accept this job. [laughs] I think it’s about positive social impact, though. I think there’s a research that says beyond a certain pay grade, it’s diminishing return, in terms of extra hundred dollar can buy in terms of happiness and a meaningful life.
Below a certain threshold -- of course, when we talk about poverty line, improving one’s life -- that’s very important. Above a certain point, it’s no longer very meaningful. It’s only meaningful if you are just competing with other people.
As I said, I don’t have that in me. I’m willing to take this pay cut mostly because I see here a real chance of delivering more positive social impact, working with the Taiwan government, compared to working with Apple as a consultant on language technology.
I think that is also that many people felt as well. For example, Ethan Tu, when he returned to Taiwan from Microsoft, as director of Cortana and speech technology, he’s basically running a charity here. He’s running a foundation called AILabs that work with the local AI people, and try to find out how AI improve the society, in trustworthy way. Again, I am sure that he took a huge pay cut, compared with his work in Microsoft.
We happen to think that it’s reflected in the society in a way that people appreciate these kind of positive social impact much more in Taiwan, compared to other, more authoritarian societies.
Our families think it’s worth it, our culture thinks it’s worth it, so I think it’s really true. If one feels that one is making a positive impact to society, it is possible to resist the capitalistic temptation.
You were actually working on Siri with Apple?
You were an engineer for them, I guess? A consultant?
A consultant. The technical term is independent contractor, but that role is very rare in Apple. I heard that they are not creating more of those roles. Everybody were asked to be in Cupertino. I’ve never been there.
The story starts with my contribution in the open source community started on the late ’90s and early 2000s. There is a wide community of Perl programmers. When I try to improve the Perl language itself, with help from many people, we become very good friends. I flied to more than 20 countries.
One of my friends in the Perl community happens to be a project manager when Apple first acquired Siri, working on language technologies. He also wanted to get his doctor’s thesis worked out in CMU, so he needs someone he can trust to help with the team while he works on his PhD.
Because we’ve been working together for like 15 years by that time, so he trusts me. I enjoyed working with him while he can focus on his PhD work. That’s the story. I worked with the same team for six years.
Thank you very much, Audrey. Thanks for your time.
It’s a pleasure.