So, they’re going to have all these ZK proofs. That’s like, oh, Barry went to university for a couple of years, here’s a proof. And he did this, and he’s going to be a good contributor, I swear. And there’s going to be all of these really interesting interactions to build trust between these models. And I think that’s another place where we can have a lot of fun.
So, the polarization can be thought of a kind of a map with broken zooming levels, only the individual level and the entire country or entire globe level. And if you have a map that only works on those two levels, you may feel hopeless, because it’s either a Sovereign Individual and nobody trusts anybody, very, you know, Bitcoin-ish future or it is state or capitalist surveillance that works on the top level.
It was a lot of fun. I very quickly discovered this open source movement had a lot of synergy with what I’m trying to make at a time, because the open source communities at the time was trying to find out what is the best way for hundreds of thousands of unrelated people who have not met at all, and somehow to find a way to measure trustworthiness when it comes to accepting contributors.
Last year, at night, a helicopter crashes, and so everybody is looking at the root cause. The mayor there said, “Well, we’re not trusted enough. We wish that a specialized doctor from the mainland island and the dispatch center of the helicopter can give a three-way video conference to show the family members that we can actually perform the diagnostics and even treatment by the instruction of the doctors in the main island.”
There’s also, you already mentioned exclusionary, tribal sentiments that might work against that. I can see another tension, which is, for lack of a better word, anti-intellectualism -- sort of a sense that the world is too complex, I’m not going to understand it, and I don’t trust people who have knowledge since I don’t have it. It’s very easy to get into a bubble on that side as well.
What we view data is a relation. In Taiwan, we care very much about people’s relationship with each other. If I have some personal data that I entrust you with, that means that we start a relationship, and you are held accountable to keep the data up-to-date for our mutual benefit. I, because of my relation, can decide to trust you more or less based on the way you treat my data.
For us, the global board of trustees is we want them to support, to advise, and there is no timing, no obligations. It’s very flexible. For example, we would like them to participate in all summits, but they can come, for example in one in a year, or if they can’t come, a representative of them can come, or maybe they can just be online in a video conference, so there’s no...
Yeah. I think the more people learn that TSMC is not just one company, but rather a set of practices that makes the entire supply chain trustworthy , I include in it, for example, the SEMI E187 standard that we in the Taiwan Ministry of Digital Affairs worked with TSMC to publish as a standard, basically assume breach. It assumes that any of your upstream vendors is probably already breached at some point in the cyberattack sense.
We’re quite interested at that use case. Our CIO Dr. Chiueh helped us to transition to a passwordless, always-verify, assume-breach architecture, which means on all levels of services configuration, I can use Linux 100% of the time collaborating with other colleagues. I think all of this is part of our demonstration of a public code approach, so that all ministries who may be considering zero trust architecture can see the value in that.
I do find myself going into, let’s say, whatever given meme or thread, often with the view to not trust . It’s non violence. There’s an interesting…Just occurred to me as you’re explaining this too, is like coming at it from a more of a benefit of the doubt position rather than one where you’re looking for the conflict. You’re looking for the darkness that inhabits particular thread or trend.
This is a three-part thing. The first one is the stakeholders building trust deciding on exactly what topic to talk about. The longer asynchronous pol.is stage, which usually lasts for three or four weeks until we get a set of consensus, then the same stakeholders, or even more stakeholders because people become aware of it as a result, go back to the same room, live stream or at least take a recording or transcript.
I think if we’re going to build a recursive public and plural sector or whatever other new words that people have coined around it, we need to move from being one of the items to be invested into this crucial point where it’s like the hub where around which data accountability and responsibility can be built so that all the different players can come to trust each other more as the transactions goes by.
That’s right, or Facebook. It doesn’t matter. I was like, "All right, this is interesting. OK, Taiwan is doing something very cool." I read up on you more, and then something ticked, and I became excited. We share a lot of the values. That was what attracted me to email you. We believe in tech as way to create a more optimal government, civic duties that we have, responsibilities, building trust in the government.
Then this, which is also broadcast on YouTube for five minutes long, the voiceover says, "The economic boosting plan is a very complex plan. Because of that we wish we can explain five minutes, but we cannot but the important thing to remember is trust your government. We have everything figured out and as for economy the debate does not do people any good. What’s important is just to follow the plan and do it."
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.
In a sense, populism, escaping vertical trust , is a direct consequence of people feeling closer together on digital platforms than through any intermediaries. Any intermediary, whether it’s BBC or CNN, that tries to do interpretive work necessarily relies on the broadcasting capability of vertical institutions that reach millions. Populism is less about that; it is more about finding a very short, resonating message that lets millions of people kind of horizontally disperse it as floating signifiers.
The TSMC did learn from the cyber attack attempts on it that it is not just TSMC proper, but if any weak point in the supply chain gets exploited, the entire supply chain is at risk. They adopted a what’s called assume breach mentality, assuming that the adversary has already breached one of those supply chain anyway. The focus should be on zero trust , meaning that the no lateral movement between affected parts, compartmentalisation of damage.
But the point I’m making is that because of open source AI, this capability is literally in everyone’s hands, which is why we’re so insistent on zero trust and on passwordless authentication, because we have to assume that anything can be transmitted through a telephone line will be transmitted because voice cloning, scams, social engineering, phishing attacks will probably succeed with a very high success rate, given this newfound open source capability of deepfaking.
That’s right, the zero trust architecture from 2009. Secure by Design is a foundational and driving principle for all our products and services. We do think very much about the importance of distributed cloud, and the fact that data localization, for example, can actually be inconsistent with a lot of the security or governance objectives where sharing data in real time can be important, for example on detecting, sharing information and responding to international financial crimes.
To refrain from doing the top-down, shut down, takedowns lockdowns. The first time you do such a top-down lockdown thing, it decimates. You reduce by 10 percent the agency of the people, and then people would not want to think of new measures when they know those measures may be turned around and canceled anytime, if the jurisdiction leaders feel like it. We very clearly said in the very beginning, that we trust the citizens.
