Around the time that I saw his map, in very early February, we decided that working with pharmacies on the rationing makes more sense because it will distribute it to more people. Even if it’s less efficient, in a sense, it made sure that three-quarters of population do have access to masks and can use it more properly because the pharmacists are more trusted by their neighborhood.
That’s very true. Did you feel, and as we’re going forward now…? Once again, this trust is very strong. Once again, a lot of times there are ways for Taiwan to export this either through material means or just ideologically. A lot of times, though, I think there may be fears that it just sounds idealistic given the state that much of the world is in now.
Of course, that’s a little bit, we’re feeling honored, but also feeling a lot of responsibility of we’re just figuring those things out. Now, it’s already textbook. [laughs] Then it shows that this culture building is truly cross-sectoral and that the social expectation of something like this – not any particular forms of meetings, but rather a culture of trusting the citizens – is a norm.
Impact Hub Taipei. And a very active organizer of MPO Hub and the global Impact Hub network. Each and every of these reverse mentors already have the trust of at least one minister, but they work around Taiwan to convene local meetings to invite other ministries to their field of work and to brainstorm about how the cabinet can work in a new direction in a cross-ministry way.
So they proposed a telemedicine system where they can be supervised and aided by the specialist doctor in the main Taiwan island, as well as the hospital in charge of dispatching the helicopter, in front of the family so that the family can trust them more. And that they can, along with the local general practitioners, operate on the patients with the supervision of the Taiwan main island doctors.
Or even crowdfunding will back you. Citizens have disposable income to spend. They currently however don’t trust charities because they don’t know where their donations go and whether the money is being used prudently. If ideas get validated through the sprint process, it helps reduce the risk of failure and brings more transparency to the situation, resulting in positive outcomes that are achieved faster and more effectively.
At the end, those two sides -- one is an ongoing discussion, the other is a citizen-initiated idea -- they converge toward mutual trust in the sense that people feel that if there’s anything unclear or anything, a rumor that’s about to spread, they can reliably get something from someone who they have met with, or at least interacted with, so the rumor has no place to spread.
People who participate tells us that they prefer this over voting once every four years. That’s where we’re at. In PDIS, we’re about 20, 25 full-time people and, every year, around 35, 40 interns. We’re trying to take this model whichever way, with the same value of increasing the trust between the public service and the civil society. That’s the TL;DR. [laughs]
When we’re working this into the education system and having the collaboration as part of curriculum, I think the society gradually gives trust to people who are doing AI research to keep polishing, to keep sharing whatever it found with the society, because the alternative would be they’re afraid of being lynched by the mob and only sharing to an elite society, which leads to our imbalance...
…who work with Tao are Tao people, they belong to the Way. People who work with power belong to power. People who work with loss belong to what’s lost. Give yourself to the Way and you’ll be at home on the Way. Give yourself to power and you’ll be at home in power. Give yourself to loss and when you’re lost you’ll be at home. To give no trust is to get no trust .
At the core of it, I think, is this idea that the government trusted its citizens. The government sought to tap into the ideas, energy, and resources of everyone in the country to be part of a national team response, rather than trying to do it for them or to them. Rather than seeing citizens as something to be managed, they saw their citizens as a resource to be tapped.
Yeah, the chips, also for the model that we show that democracy can deliver, and also to build, for example, cybersecurity alliances, and digital trust , resilience, among other things, right? And so, this kind of indispensable position, I think, protects Taiwan. And I’m, of course, very happy to read in the news that Xi Jinping said to President Trump that he would not invade in the next few years.
Yeah. Certainly. I actually started this work in 2014. That’s even before I went into the cabinet as a minister in 2016. In 2014 the trust level in Taiwan was very low. President Ma Ying-jeou at the time was enjoying an approval rate of 9 percent which means that in our country of 24 million people, anything that the president said, 20 million people may be against that.
All the international companies at the meeting agreed that AI needs to be trustworthy , accurate, and safe. They mentioned that their teams are constantly testing and adjusting their models to meet the expectations of reliable AI systems. When the moda invited to promote and provide their development language model to the AI evaluation center established by the NDI for testing, everyone reacts positively, and Meta and OpenAI have tentatively agreed.
This is already true for investment schemes, but we’re looking to extend it to… to more cases, or we can say, you know, there’s this general pollution on the fabric of trust , which can be cured through, like, journalism, through deliberation, through democratic resilience activities, and so your earnings part of it should fund such activities. We can also do that without directly linking it to copyright adjacency.
And because this number is not forgeable — in Taiwan, normally when you get a SMS number, it’s 10 digits long; if it’s oversea, it’s even longer — so one can very simply tell by the sender that this comes from a trusted source. This is like a blue check mark. And already, our telecom companies, the banks, and so on, are also shifting to their own short codes.
And so with open weights models, and local fine tuning, watermarking only works when it’s like a book length, but the information manipulators don’t write books to do their manipulation. They rely on interactive, deep faking. The trust is gained by, in real time, they can synthesize a response that looks like an authentic source. But these are almost always very short, which is why watermarking is good.
Hey, Minister Tang, thanks so much for being with us today. My name is Irving. I’m a joint degree student between the Harvard Kennedy School and the business school at Stanford. My question is, what do you see the role of Taiwan playing in terms of promoting responsible uses of AI to simultaneously increase public trust in AI technologies while at the same time maximizing its impact for businesses?
And the main obstacle for this is how do we recognize digital signatures across jurisdictions? So, this is something like the European wallet, European blockchain is doing, the trust systems are doing, and we’re now adjusting our Digital Signature Act and the Cybersecurity Measurement Act to do cross-border signature verification. So, the idea very simply is that only digitally signed people are people, everything else is a bot.
And the same goes for provenance of online, like blue ticks. So, if I have a single manifest of all my blue ticks or not social media accounts, everything else that purports to be Audrey Tang from Taiwan’s digital ministry is fake. So, instead of playing whack-a-mole and saying that this is false, this is fake, this is whatever, we just say these are the trusted communications.
