…We also demand more openness and more transparency and also getting more from academia, more in this, and also, I guess, more governance processes in terms of trust in their hopes, so to say, process. That idea would also involve accountability and transparency to the public. Again, that’s something we do as a routine effort.
…An air‑quality visualization network (AirBox) solved “no one trusts the other sector’s measurements.” The same stack can visualize water quality, manage river pollution, or support local referenda. When mask availability became the problem, the same stack was repurposed overnight for mask maps and routing, with OpenStreetMap folks. The “three‑day mask map miracle” happened not because we had GPT‑5 back then, but because the infrastructure from air and water maps already existed.
…That gained our trust with the social activists who share the same value. But then this doesn’t scale. You have to get the message out to make it cool to participate in this kind of thing.
…That trade-off and the stressors on how we comply with an expanding range of local laws coming onto the books around the world, while we try to protect our privacy values, is because that trust is everything to us.
…And so by adopting the same zero trust architecture, we can then contribute back from our cybersecurity industry to help safeguard other liberal democracies as well.
So, this fabric of trust is what we’re focusing on. And in addition to grants and hackathons and so on, we’re working closely with the W3C on decentralized identifiers, verifiable credentials, which is blockchain agnostic. We don’t say that you have to use Ethereum or Polkadot, but there must be some way to anchor the kind of cross-jurisdictional identities. And we’re also working with people in Japan on recognizing DAOs as a special form of limited liability, legal entity, which is another part in just harmonizing our digital signature infrastructure…
…For example, quadratic voting has been used in Taiwan for quite a few years and in the presidential hackathon quadratic funding starting this year as well, we’re experimenting with impact certificates, you know, all these things built on immutable common knowledge, which is really the foundation, I believe, for people to still trust each other more or less, even the ability for generative AI to interactively deepfake all the digital communication.
…And so, they’re proven that they are social entrepreneurs and I trust their mission.
And there’s no easy way to make exchange of network power between the different formulations of the same purpose, but by saying that anyone sharing the same purpose is part of the social sector, without any regard to the organizational form or the sector they are in, like, we’re all part of the social sector, they can leverage each other to regain trust even when, for example, the younger people on the urban setting, they may be a little bit distant from Tzu Chi now, it’s like my grandparents’ game, but they…
…I trust that our Ministry of National Defense, our National Security Council is also learning from the counter pandemic playbooks and so on. Especially the recent developments on geopolitics in Ukraine. It’s not my department. I literally don’t know.
…We sent a text message to 200,000 random numbers around Taiwan from the single trusted number, 111. It comes from the government; people know it comes from the government. We asked people, “What should we do together?” They gave us ideas, and thousands of people volunteered to join an online citizen assembly. We chose 447 people statistically representative of Taiwan demographics—a mini-public. In 45 rooms of 10, AI systems facilitated the conversation.
This inoculates the public, which is why every age bracket needs to work together on this core democratic process to build trust . For example, all age brackets participate in the vote-counting process. Anyone can use their phone to document the entire paper-ballot-only counting process. Even if we face the same attacks as other democracies about vote rigging and deepfakes, in Taiwan, they’re uniquely quickly dispelled by citizens. We prebunk by asking citizens to have their own recordings. When the conspiracy theories and the vote-rigging accusations come, they just release their…
…Any of the latest technologies, I mentioned zero-knowledge, zero- trust , FidO, and so on; we try it ourselves within our ministries and the two departments. And because we have those three different values, participation, safety, and progress, within our ministry proper, we can find in the internal regulations and code that turns these emerging technologies in a way that satisfies all three values. And then, we share it with our democratic partners and with all the sectors in our society.
…Maybe they’re trustworthy . Are they secretly, you know, giving themselves back doors into every system?
…In the rollout of ZTA, the Zero Trust Architecture, we cannot do it alone. We must work with the NIST and CMMCs of the world to make sure that we’re rolling it out with international standardization bodies. And the same goes to, for example, if you want to upgrade to post-quantum cryptography, or we want to be resilient against interactive deepfakes. I don’t think only Taiwan faces that. Everybody faces that. So, we need international planning and coordination.
…We can actually give you, again, trusted access to the PaLM models as well. But language access will take some time.
Yeah, and also because there’s a lot of new materials nowadays, not necessarily on pandemic control, but on privacy, part of the zero trust , new architecture is so that you can authenticate yourself without giving up a lot of your personal data just for authentication, for IDing yourself. So it can also be seen as a kind of reaction from the Taiwanese society to the privacy conversations during the pandemic that raise everybody’s awareness about privacy and limiting personal data connection. So it’s a kind of broader trend from not caring at…
…I think it only is of value in the cryptocurrency sense if the people have very low trust in the fiat, in the central bank. If you mean like a ledger technology that keeps people accountable and honest across jurisdictions, and more multiple writers for things like environmental science, and things like smart contracts for labor — like for migrant workers, as I mentioned at the very beginning — those can see useful work of distributed ledger technologies, and blockchain is just more implementation detail.
…The first acts of government putting trust in people begins to turn that the other way. I think that’s what you can see from examples around the world, where just the first experiments with a citizens’ assembly, like in Ireland in one of our other episodes, or in Norway, or a big participatory budgeting effort in the city of Paris, or a climate assembly in the city of Brussels. These sorts of things begin to create a different relationship, and anywhere in the world, it can begin from there.
…And there are even technologies like designated verifier, meaning that if both of us trust an intermediator to arbitrate, we don’t have to make public the fact that we have entered into a contract, and so on and so forth.
