Thanks for meeting with me.

Mm-hmm.

Do you know anything about my organization, the Eurasia Group?

Not so much.

It’s a consulting company. We work with businesses and help the understand politics. It’s a lot of multinational businesses, mostly American and European. I’m responsible for Taiwan, and some of mainland China.

I come here once a year to do research, to talk with people. Do you mind if I take some notes?

Sure, of course.

I talk to people who are government, talk to people who are in business. I talk to American people in Taiwan. I wanted to talk to you. Actually, I went to school at Stanford. I know that you lived in Palo Alto?

I lived there, yes. San Jose actually, but yes. Close enough.

Very good.

[laughs]

I wanted to know about the Asia-Silicon Valley first, because I was there, and I experienced Silicon Valley. How is it going here? Is the intention to be like Palo Alto, or is the intention to be a different version that is more…?

I put a dot to the Asia-Silicon Valley Plan, so now, it’s Asia connecting, multiplying, or a dot product, whatever, connecting to Silicon Valley. It used to be [Taiwanese] , but now, it’s [Taiwanese].

We want to be the dot here that connects with the Silicon Valley, but we are not just saying that it’s single-directional, like we’re replicating Silicon Valley in Taiwan. We’re rather introducing the spirits of Silicon Valley, the idea of an ecosystem, the idea of pivoting, the idea of fast iteration, a good collaboration between the academia, the startup scene, and things like to Taiwan.

On the other hand, Silicon Valley isn’t just the solution provider. They also create problems in terms of surveillance capitalism. We also want to provide potential solutions to surveillance capitalism by connecting people’s collective intelligence and wisdom from Asia to form, say, data coalitions, data collaboratives, and things like that that could also contribute back to Silicon Valley to ameliorate some of the social negative externalities that it cause.

We are also making our own unicorns that are also zebras, meaning that they take the social and environmental impact very seriously. One of the fastest-growing, unicorn-ish company here is Gogoro, but Gogoro is not just about making better motorcycles. It’s also about energy management, renewable energy and also sharing of motorcycles, and things like that.

It solves not only traffic congestion but also solves like the lack of battery stations for electric vehicles and renewable energy as well.

How old is the Asia·SV project?

When I joined, they were just rolling it out, so it’s around three years now.

Three years?

We connected with a lot of SV counterparts. Practically all of Geffen set up Taiwan either research labs or AI offices, or just downright bought part of HTC, and so on, with the idea of AI × CI or assistive intelligence × collective intelligence.

A lot of multinationals who started in Silicon Valley now see Taiwan more and more as their regional and the R&D center and regional piloting center as well.

I was very impressed by that. I followed the Google, and the IBM, and the list just goes out here too, right?

Yeah, Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon, you name it.

Were you reaching out to them via the government, or were they reaching out to you? How did that happen? Was it this initiative that led to that?

Yeah, we mostly talked to Taiwanese expats who worked at those companies, sometime at a quite high position. For example, the director of Cortana, which is a Microsoft technology, with the name Ethan Tu, decided to return to Taiwan precisely because he want his voice assistant to speak to more cultures, to more languages.

It’s not about forcing everybody to speak perfect Mandarin or perfect English, but because in Taiwan we have 20 national languages, so all of them need to be empowered in a way that is collaborative.

People who want this kind of social atmosphere prefers Taiwan because in Silicon Valley, most of the investment is on the, I wouldn’t say quick return, because they’re like in the 5-year horizon, but in Taiwan, we care a lot about sustainability, so, 10 years minimum, but 20, 30 years return.

With that horizon, the business concerns start to align very well with social environmental concerns. Ethan Tu came back to Taiwan, and with him, a lot of his friends from Microsoft. They set up the Taiwan AI Labs.

They set up open AI, a open innovation research team that attempts to introduce assistive intelligence in the norm co-creation, not as imposing new norms on the society way. I think it’s this vision that drew these people who are having really good career and positions in Silicon Valley back to Taiwan to try out whatever they’re working on in a way that is more pro-social and not kind of a neutral or antisocial directions.

How much regulatory change had to be introduced to change the environment here?

Quite a few. We made sure that we essentially adapted a Gold Card system from Singapore. Where if you’re a talented person, with a pretty good, like you can run your business yourself, or be part of international or Cayman Island company, and so on, you’re not required to find an employer here in Taiwan, you can just go to Taiwan.

Maybe you enjoy broadband as a human right, maybe you enjoy mountaineering or surfing, and just see it as a really good place to connect to the ecosystem in every sense of that word. In that case you get three years of self-employment pass, it’s called Gold Card, so you don’t really have to worry about finding employment or whatever, because you essentially is a mentor to the society.

Unlike the Singaporean Gold Card, ours is renewable. On the fifth year if you contribute to the society and you really like the society, you can apply to become a dual citizen. You don’t have to lose your own passport, but you can become also Taiwanese, and enjoy the single-payer very affordable dentistry-included healthcare system.

Tell us about it as Americans.

I think that’s one of the main attractions of the Gold Card plan, and I think one of the first person to apply was co-founder of YouTube, actually. We get a lot of high-profile people who then spread the word and attract more high-profile people.

To broaden it out a little bit, if Tsai gets four more years, what does that mean for you?

I’d be happy to work with her then. Tsai just said last week that we’re planning on a dedicated government unit for digital transformation. It might take the form of a council, commission, or ministry, we’ll see.

It will get a lot more coordinating facilities as compared to the current way where there’s only one dispatch from each ministry to my office. My office is cross-ministerial, it’s purely horizontal leadership. It’s working pretty well.

Of the 12 or so social-innovation-related ministries not only send people to my office, but they hired additionally, not really hired, worked with what we call reverse mentors, who are all people under 35, social innovators that points the direction of that ministry, and have a team in each ministry of so-called participation offices.

This purely horizontal organization has its benefits, but it’s also limited in sense of if a ministry sends a dispatch to my office and they were a director general, of course they would have considerable resource. If they are a section chief, then they can only combine the resource from that section.

If we have a dedicated digital unit, there could be much more room to amplify not only within the public sector, but also with people in the civil society and the private sector that really want a contribution to the digital transformation of the public sector, without having the need to overcommit their career to public service. It will be something like the 18F and the USDS.

Digital transformation of the public sector. That is sort of in regards to - trying to remember the – it’s not eTaiwan, but the program…

VTaiwan.

VTaiwan is that…

VTaiwan was a prototype, and they meet still every Wednesday here. It’s an active and vibrant community. On the other hand, we productionalized and institutionalized parts of vTaiwan into Join.gov.tw, which is co-maintained and as I had mentioned, by the participation officers in each ministry.

Whereas vTaiwan is still a research lab, Join is now the production version of that, and there’s 10 million visitors out of 23 million people to Join, which is a large swath of the population.

I was going to ask about that. How many people voted in the 2016 election, 60 percent in Taiwan?

Something like that, yeah.

It seems like you have a high number of people who are interested in joining.

The Join platform, yes.

Are these the same people that are voting, are these people that are…?

Yes, we’ve got some demographics, and there’s no real difference between rural and urban municipal participation. Meaning that broadband as human right is doing really well. Age group, the most actives ones are around 15 years old and 65 years old.

I think they have both more time on their hands, maybe. [laughs] This is anecdotal, I don’t have a real theory. Maybe they care more about the public welfare for the next generation, instead of their private interests.

They’re the best partners, the 15-years-olds set the direction, like starting petitions that says let’s ban the use of single-use utensils such as straws for [inaudible 10:52] . 65-year-olds join and figure out the most viable way to go about that like using carbon-neutral, organic way to make plastic straws, and things like that. We have a lot of collaboration between those two generations.

I know you’re pretty heavily involved, in the Uber decision.

Yeah.

This was via…?

Oh yeah, it was initially via vTaiwan to set the direction of the UberX decision. Then of course the further conversation of that is carried on the Join platform. It involves both platforms. The same is, for example, the FinTech sandbox, and self-driving vehicles.

That was an idea that was introduced by the public, or was entered…?

Yes.

Then it was picked up by your office, and it goes through to the…

Yes. That’s right. That’s exactly right. People surface their common agenda through this AI-powered conversation platform called Pol.is, where they can see what their friends and family feel about UberX at the time.

This is true, in fact first, these are not anonymous trolls, these are friends and family, just who didn’t tell you about UberX over dinner. Then the second it shows that people’s position can change. If this is a survey or a poll, the options are fixed.

Because we allow people the room, the three or four weeks to propose their more nuanced feelings and resonate on each other’s feelings, they can just refine each other’s statements after clicking agree or disagree for a few times, and moving toward people who feel the same way for more nuanced ideas to be deliberated by other people.

This is the shape that we see every time we run such a conversation. If you only look at institutional or even some social media, you would think there’s only those five ideological statement that instantly divide the community in half, but actually most people agree with most of their neighbors almost it seems most of the time.

This is a real case from Bowling Green, Kentucky, USA, actually, that the top consensus is that instead of STEM, science, technology, engineering, and math, it need to be STEAM, including art. No matter whether they identify as Republican or Democrat, everybody is for it.

There really is no reason why this shouldn’t be done, because it doesn’t cost anything, really. If you keep looking at these parts then the sense of polity returns. If you only look at these because institutional media and social media amplify these messages, then people would feel they were in a divided society.

In UberX, the same people apply these consensus areas that attracts both taxi drivers and Uber drivers, and their passengers. That was what we pass now, so all the Uber dispatch are now also taxis, and all the taxi companies now are also rolling out their Uber-like apps, and so everybody wins, or at least can live with it.

I’ve been using it while I’m here, it’s been very easy. Let’s move in another direction. I, in 2015, I spent a summer in the Office of Taiwan Coordination at the State Department, I was a graduate student intern. I was on the cybersecurity portfolio for the office.

At the time my job was to try to locate areas where there could be more overlap between election meddling between Taiwan and the US online. At the time nobody, maybe cares is the wrong word, but it wasn’t something people were talking about.

But now it’s a major topic.

Now it’s a major topic. What changed? How did that happen? Was it the…?

I think there’s two reasons for that. The first one is that the GoFa, the Google and Facebook was not as dominant in 2015, but now people are gradually awakening to the fact that they are co-governance, they’re not just platforms like forums and bulletin boards, they’re really co-governance.

When both US and Taiwan see them as co-governance, and both understand that these governance share, at least ostensibly, the same idea about free speech, about first amendment, and things like that, and we’re committing, Civicus says now we’re the only open society in Taiwan when it comes to the civil society of freedom of expression, assembly, and so on.

We necessarily have to figure out a way not to infringe of the freedom of speech and the press, but still can counter and disarm disinformation. I would say this idea of co-governorship is the first change. The second is the realization that all the short cuts actually infringe and encroach on civil society’s space.

That is something that neither the US or Taiwan want to do, so we have to figure out some solution that is common to both of our cultures, instead of saying any minister can take down any journalist’s words, which of course is the obvious short cut. Japan just joined this global cooperation training framework, as one of the co-hosts of this now trilateral.

I was looking at I think this was ongoing, or maybe it’s completing now, but this idea of political advertising online, and who is held responsible, is that Facebook or is it that…?

Yeah, it’s implemented now. Yeah, it’s fully implemented.

It’s implemented. OK, how’s that going?

Pretty good. We’re saying because in Taiwan as you may know, we have a separate branch called the Control branch other than the judicial, administration, and legislative, the control branch holds everybody to account by publishing in raw data form, actually, all the campaign donation and spendings.

This is pretty comprehensive, and we have a lot of data scientists and investigative journalists looking at analysis of the raw data published in the previous election. One of the finding is that a lot of social media advertisement expense is not gone through donation and expense revelation, they went directly to say, Facebook, and it’s dark.

You don’t see where it goes, and you don’t see where it comes. As kind of semi-ambassador to those semi-governors, we’re now saying this is the norm in Taiwan, we don’t quite care what is the norm in other jurisdictions on this advertisement act or not.

What we’re saying in Taiwan is the Control yuan has the spec, and we’re treating your political advertisements as campaign donations as they should be. This is the norm in Taiwan, law or not. If you don’t do that, you may face social sanction, law or not.

Facebook said, “OK, sure.” Just for the Taiwan jurisdiction, they actually just published the first transparency reports of the advertisements just last week. People can see that they turned down thousands of political advertisers because they did not wish to reveal their identity.

Or they don’t want to show proof that they’re Taiwanese people, that they’re citizens of the ROC, that they’re Republic citizens. Also, all these advertisements that do get published are kept indefinitely instead of taking down after the election as they would otherwise.

Basically, the same standard as campaign donations. Google and Twitter said maybe not this election, they just said, “We’re not running political advertisements for this election.” That’s the position we’re in right now.

Interesting. My next question is a little bit maybe more theoretical. In the US, obviously the US-China trade war takes up a lot of people’s attention who are in the field that I’m in. There’s this idea that what you see in 5, to 10, to 15 years is a splitting of the technology supply chain, so we’ll have two sets of standards and one is Chinese.

The red chain, and the non-red chain.

Exactly. One, do you think maybe that will happen, and then two, how does Taiwan fit into that, if that happens?

I think back in the Sunflower Occupy in 2014, a bunch of NGOs, like 20 of them, deliberated on various aspect of the Cross Straight Service and Trade Agreement, or CSSTA. One side of the occupy parliament talked about this very issue.

At that time the telecommunication system was even before 4G, they’re like pre-4G. People were saying we’re allow service and telecommunication in the infrastructure that builds the 4G network. People generally said that PRC components are not to be allowed.

They’re not saying this because of cybersecurity reasons, they’re saying this for two reasons. First is the systemic risk of non-market forces, that any vendor supposedly in the private sector can become overnight controlled by the state or the party, really, no difference in the PRC.

There is no guarantee that a so-called private sector entity we’re dealing with will not become state-owned the next day. This is too much a risk. The second is path dependency. If we use it for a system, then it’s always easier to keep using the same supplier, 3G, 4G, 5G, and for all the upgrades, and all the natural disasters or whatever service outage, you have to trust the vendor to come up with emergency hot fixes.

We’re basically saying, “This is not about specific companies, but PRC components should be disallowed in these scenarios for obvious reasons.” That was a consensus of people on the street. At the time the National Communication Commission and the National Security Council look at consensus from the street, and actually agreed with that assessment.

That’s why don’t hear a lot of debate about that in the Taiwan 5G, because we’ve been doing the non-red chain since 4G times. We’re in a pretty solid position. We’re not dependent on PRC components in any of our core communication facilities.

Even the devices themselves, of course, if they keep displaying “Taiwan, China” now, even the end devices are being taken out from the display here in the everyday stores. I think we’re pretty prepared.

Could you argue that you couldn’t have Chinese 5G without Taiwan?

That’d be a pretty broad claim.

I mean with all-in, with all the components of it, to have Taiwan’s input in that?

If you’re talking about system on chip and other devices more towards the edge, of course MediaTek and so on are a world leader on that.

5G is a very vast ecosystem, and there are parts of it, of course semiconductor, there’s part of it that you really cannot have a non-Taiwan choice if you decide to go non-red. There are also parts that could be manufactured everywhere.

What happens? Does Taiwan have to make a decision, eventually, to continue to be part of that? Is it even possible to make that decision the way sort of supply chains work?

I think it’s really a matter of whether we see these components in each of this clearance levels, for lack of a better term. For things like if it’s obviously “dual use” then of course that decision is eassier to make.

For things that are not quite dual use, but contributes to let’s say a network effect of increasing returns, in WTO terms, and then of course it only helps if all the liberal democracies make a collective decision together.

Otherwise, the people who make that decision is at a disadvantage, vis-à-vis the part of the liberal democracies that did not make that decision. I think that’s been the argument for OPIC and JPEC as well, like for foreign aid joint projects. We need to make an entire stack that are all from liberal democracies that can trust each other’s cybersecurity lab for tested components, and things like that.

Unless we see such a coalition, simply out there, then it would be at a business disadvantage for any of the first movers, obviously.

I know you went to the UN, right?

Yes.

This year?

My robot, but yes.

What kind of an impact do you think you’re having there on the cyber norms conversation?

I think the cyber norms conversation, we’re using Taiwan’s, for example, the way that we can counter disinformation with memetic engineering, and fun, and humor, to make sure that instead of turning helplessness and anger into outrage that spreads divisiveness online, we’re turning out these memes that highlights the disinformation without reinforcing its frame. Instead, we’re telling jokes about that.

This is important because when people associate something that makes them angry with fun, with something that makes them laugh, then actually outrage as no place to spread, you just laugh about it. That’s humor works.

A lot of norms around disinformation currently is being predicated on the fact that if you don’t take down, if you don’t do all sort of movement that may encroach on the civil society freedoms, it may just be unsolvable.

The very fact that Taiwan is trying this humor-based clarification, and it actually works, and it actually went viral, and everybody can verify that by just putting these terms into search engine and see that the clarifications are, once that turns out, instead of the disinformation packages. It creates a strong case to support the non-erosion of freedom of speech online. I think that is our main contribution in the dialog around disinformation here.

Non-erosion of freedom of speech. I don’t know how much time I have left with you, but I think I have two more questions. Taiwan digital currency. I know there’s not much of an effort, do you think there could be or will be?

Not much effort in the central bank, but a lot of effort in civil society, even in the Family Mart, right?

OK, tell me about that.

There is already a Tao coin in the Orchid Island, by the Tao people. They of course is one of the indigenous nations, because of the physical distance the mainland Taiwan, the main island of Taiwan, there are building their own indigenous nation identify.

Their issuance of the Tao coin as part of their idea of to build more solidarity across cultures. Anyone can identify with the Tao by just spending more time with them. I think that’s the strength of Taiwan’s model of FinTech sandbox, is that you don’t have to wait for a central planner in a central bank.

Anyone with an idea of how to make a digital currency can apply for one year of exemption from really any regulation from any ministry who care about and challenge them for one year. Other than, of course, funding terrorism and money laundering, because we know what would happen.

Otherwise, everything else is good for experiment, [laughs] and so you can find a lot of experiments on the FinTech area. If they made sense, if the local people really love them, then we just make them into regulations. We’re doing that not just for FinTech, but self-driving vehicles, as well as 5G test cases, which is actually taking effect just the week.

I had a question on, very specific question on a digital healthcare.

Oh, yeah.

What’s that looking like right now?

That’s one of the issues accelerated by the Presidential Hackathon. We have a system called the Presidential Hackathon. Every year for three months, from April to July, we work with hundreds of the teams that present one or more ideas about sustainable development, and they want the rules, the budgets, the personnel, to adapt to emerging trends.

The President give out five trophies every year to five teams, and they may for example use machine learning to detect water leakage automatically, so they can shorten the time required to repair to two months, to detection to two days, and that’s a really good idea.

The trophy is a micro projector, when turned on it shows the President herself handing the trophy to the team. It’s very useful, especially if you’re in public service. The Director General says there’s no budget for that, you summon the President and there is budget.

One of the teams last year in the Presidential Hackathon worked with the Green Island, it’s a smaller island where the local people didn’t trust the local clinic that much, so that when their family members are injured or sick, they insist on helicopters carrying them to the main island.

At night, it was raining, and a helicopter crashed, everybody was like, “What’s the root cause for that?” The local nurses said the current telemedicine laws disallows the nurse to practice in medicine in the diagnostics with a remote supervision by a specialist doctor in the main island. They can only do so if they’re physically nearby. That’s impossible, right? [laughs]

Then the regulations, for example, require a physical signature to get the healthcare copies of the records of that patient to the both systems. Actually, the third system, which is the hospital in charge of determining whether helicopter run is needed. They cannot really share the data because of the regulation that didn’t catch up on the Electronic Signature Act.

A lot of issues, but during those three months, they prototype a solution and really wanted the love of the local people on this kind of data collaborative. Because of that, they won one of the five awards. When the Minister of Health said this requires a law change, and several regulations, and most of them are actually Minister of Interior concerning helicopters and e-signatures, then just turn on the micro projector and summon the President.

The two ministers went and had a meeting, and the draft is swiftly passed the parliament. As of this year, it’s now legal for nurses to operate based on specialized doctors in the mainland, main island of Taiwan, and also very importantly, more than 100 clinics, not only in remote islands but also in indigenous nations, are deploying the same system.

We have a lot more cases now, as compared to just one or two prototypes. I really think Presidential Hackathon is a great amplifier for those smaller scale social innovations to be skilled into country level, because the trophy is a promise from the President that whatever you did in the past three months, we will make it happen on national skill within the next 12 months.

Are you optimistic that all these digital efforts will reduce this brain drain concept?

I think so. What we are seeing is talent circulation. It’s great if somebody went to the US or some other jurisdictions to learn and to find some opportunities, but once they climb up to their career ladder to a certain point, they will realize that maybe Taiwan is a really good chance to prove their ideas in a way that works with instead of against the social norms.

When they do so, as Ethan Tu did, they will bring not only themselves and their family, but their friends and colleagues as well, back to Taiwan. The circulation actually increases all the trust between the various people.

It builds people-to-people ties as well. We want more circulation. We’re not saying that brain drain is a bad thing, as long as it actually goes back, yeah.

It sounds great. I think that’s all that I had. Let me check. Yeah.

OK, cool.

Thank you.

Thank you.

This was really nice.