But assistive kind of intelligence doesn't do that, is task only and is not trying to be this general super intelligent that dictates the human's logic. And so it's not about aligning humanity to the digital AI logic, it's about the individual digital tools like eyeglasses that can align to the human to human logic.

Definitely. So g0v.tw, that's the domain name, was registered before Sunflower in 2012, by some of my friends. I joined almost full-time in 2013. And the way we work is we look at all the government services, like something.gov.tw, and if we don't like it, whether it's budget or something, instead of just protesting that it's bad, we actually make a better version as something.g0v.tw.

So I talk about the National Participation Platform, join.gov.tw, and if you don't like that, you can change your O to a zero and go to join.g0v.tw, which is the g0v version. But because g0v is always free software and open culture, meaning that our products are forks — that's to say alternate versions of the government versions — but we also relinquish sufficient amount of copyright so that if a government wants to, they can always merge it back into government service. So quite famously, during the pandemic, the g0v people developed an alternate way to do contact tracing that does not compromise privacy at all.

So instead of government version, the government simply say, okay, let's use the g0v version. And that resulted in Taiwan not locking down any cities during the three years and actually held until Omicron, which is no mean feat. And TSMC just keeps running. Anyway, I digress. And so the g0v try many different things, but including Polis. And Polis was, before generative AI, before language models for sensemaking, you can think of it as a visualization of where people stand on an issue. So for Uber, for example, we ask people to chime in and they go online and they see a fellow citizen's feeling. For example, somebody may feel that undercutting existing meters is very bad, but surge pricing during high demand, that's very good. So somebody may have this statement, you can agree, you can disagree or you can pass, but there is no nuance, so no room for trolls to grow. And so it is in an asynchronous way, simulating a little bit of the 10 people room dynamics by highlighting what's the most resonating idea.

And so you see your avatar being sorted to one room and this room has these kind of agreements, but you also see across all the different clusters, different rooms, what are the ideas that are currently gaining grounds that everybody, regardless of where they're coming from, do agree. And so after three weeks in 2015, we agree on a set of very coherent ideas about Uber, which we then pass into law so that the local co-ops and so on can also operate.

And Uber is a legal taxi fleet in Taiwan for quite some years now. So the idea is to use asynchronous contribution and discovery of the uncommon ground so that even if we don't have the language models to weave things together, people can still kind of see the community notes that flow to the top.

And the same algorithm has been adopted by YouTube, by Meta, and by X as the community notes algorithm.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah. First of all, I think we're all experts of our feelings. And so that is actually what can easily resonate with our fellow citizens. Had we start our Uber consultation with, "what's your ideal economic model for sharing economy versus extractive gig economy?" — probably nobody will come, right? Because it was extremely abstract, but feeling is not abstract at all.

Feeling is very personal. And so based on feeling, then people want to take care of each other's feelings. So you can see like the Uber driver, the taxi drivers, the passengers, the people worrying about rural development and so on, they all center around shared feelings. And so naturally when people start proposing ideas, those ideas that take care of everybody's feelings will float to the top.

And so this speaks to a very different ethical foundation of policy making. This is more about the ethics of care. That is to say, how much do we want to take care of each other instead of what's a single abstract value, like in a scholarly sense, do we want to optimize? And care also has the benefits of its positive sum.

So if I take care of your ideas, then you are probably going to propose an idea that also take care of my feelings, as opposed to if you put it to referendum or something as Uber did in other jurisdictions, maybe 51% people feel they have won, maybe 49% feel they have lost, but their feelings are hurt and are therefore more likely to engage in negative sum conversations from that point onward.

Yeah, definitely. So we can look at very objective numbers, especially the very young people. In 2019, we changed our curriculum. So instead of the standardized answers, you know, that the East Asians are very famous about, we switched to prioritize the civic competencies , namely autonomy, that's curiosity, interaction with people who are unlike you, and also the common ground, the ability to construct common good.

And so the idea here is that if we do not have this shared uncommon ground in for young people, young people will feel they're very detached from politics. They're just 14, 15. They have no way to contribute to agenda setting, even though they do know what is actually better for the planet and people.

But by making sure that the young people have agenda setting power, in setting, for example, e-petitions or even becoming, as I mentioned, cabinet level advisors and so on, the Taiwanese 15 year olds, according to ICCS in 2022 are now top of the world when it comes to the agency. They feel that they can affect the society for people and planet issues, and they still maintain the number three to number five PISA score .

So people are also happy that their STEM isn't actually degrading. It's not a trade off, but I think the young people's empowerment as well as the depolarizing effect across religious, urban, rural, age brackets — Taiwan is also the least polarized among OECD equivalents a couple years ago.

And it also has what we call a pre-bunking effect because if there's already a polarized fight between the two memes, then trying to arbitrate it, especially from the government, tend to just kindle the fire even more and people become even more polarized and fuel conspiracy theories and so on.

But this kind of technology allows us to discover the uncommon ground and share it as pre-bunking. So one very early example — pre-bunking, yes. So it's not debunking. It's pre-bunking. Debunking is after something goes viral, you say, oh, that's not quite the case. Pre-bunking is that before something goes viral, you already say, by the way, this is actually like this. Right?

So many people feel that if they pre-bunk each other, they are less likely to be polarized. And there's many ways to pre-bunk and humor is one large part of it. So in early 2020, when people are not sure what the coronavirus interaction with masks are, in Taiwan we already observe — as in other places, like one side says, because we had a SARS experience a few years ago, people feel only N95, the highest grade mask, are useful and every other mask are actually a scam or something. And the other side says it's ventilation, it's aerosol. So wearing a mask hurts you and wearing N95 hurts you the most, right? So if we just let these two polarized memes grow, then they tend to fight each other and people will basically polarize into mask and anti-mask camps.

But the science was still not very clear then. So we basically pushed out the meme of an uncommon ground very quickly, and it's a Shiba Inu, a very cute dog , putting her paw to her mouth, saying, wear a mask to remind each other to keep your dirty unwashed hands from your face. So that's an uncommon ground no matter which part you are.

You probably agree that hand washing is good. We actually measure tap water usage. It actually increased. And because the dog is just so cute, if you laugh at it, the next time you see somebody wearing a mask or not wearing a mask, you would just think about hand washing, which is like not polarizing at all.

Everybody washes their hands. So just like there's no pro-fraud camp in Taiwan, there's no anti-hand-washing camp in Taiwan. And so it just diffused the polarization into just hand washing. There's also songs about it and the cute dog dancing and things like that.

Yeah, certainly. So, singularity means an AI that can improve itself increasingly without human control.

And at some point the AI can automate everything there is to automate about AI research. And then either, I guess, grow a self-preservation instinct and refuse to develop the next generation of AI and kind of see us as competing carbon-based species, or they don't get that and just recursively self-improve and serve not themselves, but maybe a CEO.

And then the CEO becomes transhuman and then become a very different species than the rest of us, right? So that's singularity.

It is kind of losing the race of humanity, right? It's not a race of ascension, as sometimes portrayed, but for the rest of us, it's just the humanity race loses. And so plurality says, instead of making an AI that's even more powerful by the day recursively, we should actually enhance the way that people can work across differences. So design each piece of technology — it could be AI, it could be immersive reality, many technologies — with this eye on fostering the differences, but seeing the conflict that ensues not as fire to be put out, but as energy that can be harnessed for co-creation. And so any sort of technology that enhances this collaboration across differences is in the direction of plurality.

So instead of a vertical race of takeoff, escape velocity — you see a lot of space based metaphors — the plurality is entirely horizontal. It is a lateral diffusion of technical capabilities. And each capability is steerable by the community that's deploying it. And so the more we invest in plurality, the better we're prepared to face all the emerging harms that are being caused by advanced AI and so on. And the hope is that at some point people will just discover that this is a better, a more worthwhile direction. Maybe it's not worthwhile at all to replace our human race with some other silicon-based stuff. Unless you're the CEO. And as we have seen, when people said to the CEOs of big tech from Taiwan that you need to be liable for whichever scam advertisements that you put on because you've been earning advertisement dollars from those scammers.

And the entire society is paying the consequences, the cost of such negative pollution, externalities. This is the kind of plurality technology that quickly lets the decision makers rein in the CEOs. And so I do believe that this steerability comes from the bottom up, but it also does need endorsements from the regulators to say basically, okay, it's not my idea. It's like a trade negotiation. It is the people's idea.

Well, it's an acceleration for decentralization, for democracy, and also for defense. So Vitalik Buterin called this d/acc or defensive democratic decentralization acceleration.

So it is a kind of acceleration in that we want the most possible equitable way of diffusion. But it accelerates not in the sense of self-improvement, like the vertical singularity one.

Yes, certainly. So I co-authored a paper called Prosocial Media that talks about this. The idea very simply put is that in your newsfeed, instead of being ranked by the engagement or addiction that it generates, it can rank instead by the various communities that you belong to and how much coherence, how much uncommon ground each post can generate between those communities.

So each of us have very different like spiritual, professional, family and so on circles. And it's often the case that we ourselves are also figuring out how to take something that we feel cherished from one context across to another context. And the idea is that there are creators on social media that specialize in creating this kind of bridges so that people can understand the other community more and vice versa just by viewing and engaging with such content.

And so for each post, you can then see of the communities you belong to, which communities find this to be bridging, and which communities find this to be debatable. So it's like the Polis interface, but applied to social media. We already have that in the form of community notes, but it is kind of a debunking thing.

You already have a trending, polarizing post, and then you can look at the community notes to have this kind of resonance and bridging. So the intuition is to move this into the main feed so that the main feed itself becomes pro-social. And in the paper we talk about, for example, I'm involved in advising the Project Liberty Institute , who works out a new economic model for TikTok if the people's bid succeeds in buying TikTok US. And so instead of the advertisers paying to bid for the highest bid, getting the attention of each individual kind of strip mining the social fabric and making each person look at a wildly different feed, this idea is recreate this common experience so that people can know, oh, your community and that community are enjoying this together.

So a little bit like those 10 people in the same room, people will be able to know that this resonates with the extended communities and it creates kind of a Super Bowl effect and things like that. And we conjecture that the communities as well as brands will pay for this kind of shared experiences.

Definitely, as I mentioned, across urban/rural, across age groups, across religion and so on, Taiwanese people are the least polarized. And we can also simply compare the pro-social ranking algorithm that's deployed in LinkedIn versus say in Facebook. LinkedIn curates its feed in a way that is not maximizing the time you spend on advertisement, but rather on the cohesion, the coherence that we just talked about.

And so the feed is quite different. When they first introduced the newsfeed to LinkedIn, they were very intentional and then they curated this kind of common ground bridging posts from business leaders, from people who are followed by a lot of people on LinkedIn.

And then they gradually opened up commenting and things like that. But the whole idea is to shape a norm where engaging with the feed actually adds to your sense of social cohesion instead of distracting from it, like Facebook did since 2015.

Yeah, definitely. And it is true that I've been talking with many different people on different sides of ideologies and they all feel that it's time to move past peak polarization.

And I do think that what we need now is both strategies. One is working with free software communities that run those smaller but still very respectable sized networks such as Bluesky with 30 million people on one side, and also Truth Social on the other, which is also free software. And in a way to show that we can bridge the contents so that people across Truth Social and Bluesky can find the uncommon ground, the surprising validators. So this is what we're doing. And the other is just to take an existing network like TikTok and just change its algorithm. And the idea of people's bid is that TikTok needs to interoperate.

Meaning if you post on TikTok, you should be able to consume the same content and link to the same friends on Bluesky or on Truth Social or on any other places. And so people will then be able to curate their own experience instead of feeling locked in to the core recommendation algorithm of TikTok.

And so this gives us much more grounds to experiment with the pro-social ranking.

The hope here is just as LinkedIn has demonstrated, there is a way to pay for common experiences and oxytocin-based feelings, while still making sure that whatever advertisement, whatever messages that you pay can result in like a Super Bowl, which is the kind of pinnacle of common experience. And then you can build narratives and brands and so on in a way that individualized dopamine hits really cannot.

Yes. And there's a famous study a year and a half ago — an average undergrad in the US using TikTok. If you ask them to move off TikTok, then you will have to pay them almost $60 a month so they lose that much utility, like FOMO. While everybody else is still on that hamster wheel, but if there's a magic button you can press that can transplant everybody around them and themselves into some other non-dopamine-based platform, then they're willing to pay you almost $30 a month.

And so it's obvious we're in a product market trap . Everybody loses utility on the hamster wheel, but the first one to move off suffers so much FOMO so that nobody want to be the first that moves off.

Yeah, I think repeating the category errors of some business as usual language such as, I dunno, saying human resources, or incentivizing corporations, just propagates this category error in our thinking. So it's like trying to chart out a map, but with like very tilted lens — you can't perceive the world, right?

If you use that sort of category error — and so in 2016, when I first entered the cabinet as the digital minister, I made a word play because in Taiwan, digital — shuwei — also means plural. So I'm not just a digital minister, I'm also the minister for plurality. So even though there's no ministry at the time — the ministry will come in 2022 — I still wrote a job description as a shuwei minister. It goes like this, very quick. When we see the internet of things, let's make it an internet of beings. When we see virtual reality, let's make it a shared reality. When we see machine learning, let's make it collaborative learning. When we see user experience, let's make it about human experience.

And whenever we hear that the singularity is near, let's always remember the plurality is here.

Yes. Because we're marketing to each other. Consumer of foods is like referring to your users and it assumes this drug subscription case, right? So I think when I say user experience should be instead human experience, we're pointing out the same thing. That is to say there's much more to being human than just consuming something or getting addicted on something.

Yeah, that's a great question. So I analyze democracy as a communication technology that has bandwidth and latency. Bandwidth is how much information can each citizen communicate to their communities and also into decision making. So if you have a referendum, that's one bit of information. If you have votes on mayor with four plausible candidates, that's two bits of information.