Today I am joined by the Taiwanese Digital Ambassador at large Audrey Tang to discuss their work championing the integration of technology and transparency into government functions with the goal to further empower the voice of people in policy decisions. Audrey Tang was the first digital minister of Taiwan from 2016 to 2024 at the Ministry of Digital Affairs , where they were dedicated to promoting a radical level of government transparency with aims to make all government information, data, and resources as accessible to the public as possible.

Today, we discuss a few of their past successful projects as well as the philosophy of plurality , which guides all of their work in a global environment where the topics of tech and artificial intelligence can feel esoteric and out of reach for ordinary people. The projects that Audrey has introduced in Taiwan and beyond have resulted in real humans communicating and enacting effective policy changes.

Personally, I was naive on this topic and I was blown away by what Audrey and their team were able to accomplish, and I wonder what the world might look like if more communities, more countries, the whole world followed this lead. In my opinion, this episode highlights the more hopeful side of the great simplification where technology could be used towards more pro-social community, ecologically aware, oriented goals.

Additionally, if you are enjoying this podcast, I invite you to subscribe to our substack newsletter where you can read more of the system science underpinning the human predicament, and where my team and I post special announcements and new written Franks and other such snippets related to the great simplification.

You can find the link to subscribe in the show description. With that, I am pleased to welcome Audrey Tang. Audrey Tang, welcome to the program. Hello. Good time everyone. So glad to be here. So you already have quite an amazing resume with lots of successful movements and governance initiatives in your country of Taiwan, especially over the last 10 to 15 years.

You became the first Minister of Digital Affairs in Taiwan from 2016 to 2024, and now you are Taiwan's Cyber Ambassador at large. But from what I understand, you'd been studying and working in coding and digital innovation for quite a long time before that. But much of your journey into Taiwanese politics began what was called the Sunflower Movement .

Maybe we could start there. Can you tell us a bit about what that movement was? What was your role and experience within it and how it affected your current worldview and work?

I have so many questions, Audrey. I'm glad you're here today. Let me set the context a little. We in the world today realize the algorithms and social media and the polarization and the echo chambers, and the inability to really have civic discourse about the things that matter, and we don't even know what's true.

I am not an expert on that other than I am an expert in knowing how important it is to solve these issues if we're going to have any hope of solving the larger issues that I discuss on this platform. So you just mentioned that instead of protest, you wanted to have alternatives.

And I'd like you to unpack that a little bit because so much of our postmodern critique of the world is just pointing out what's wrong and what's bad, and it's just like an anger sort of thing instead of actually proactive. So can you describe why that's so important and your experience with offering alternatives.

That is pretty amazing. I actually didn't know that, but let me ask you some questions about that. So you said you started with 200,000, you got it down to several thousand, and then you chose 450 based on demographics and then they were in 45 rooms of 10. And so there would be, because that itself kind of reflects Dunbar's number of sorts that you have to bring it down to a manageable human interaction level and then scale a little upwards. So did each room of 10 come up with its own kind of verdict?

Yes. And then you compiled those 45 verdicts in a way —

So what about someone that wasn't part of the 200,000? You said there's 20 some million people in Taiwan and they see the results of this, wouldn't they — their initial reaction be, oh, this was just some AI scam that put this together. Why should I believe what ended up being in legislation?

How scalable is this? Can't this be applied to almost any issue in the world and technically, maybe not politically, but technically in any country in the world.

So there's the technology itself, like what it does, but then kind of separate from that is the people's trust in the technology. And you said since you did it for 10 years in Taiwan, there was like a social approval because people were used to it. What's the threshold beyond which people believe this? Like, could this happen in the United States now on some issue that isn't existential, but is interesting to people and relevant to their lives?

Was there any evidence that within the 45 groups of 10 people, each or any other recent example that the 10 people themselves in the process of discussion and debate that was facilitated by AI that they learned and changed their mind, or they altered their position on the issue?

And the people, the 10 people in each group, did they know that the facilitator was an AI and not a real human?

So in addition to facilitating different priors and ideologies, it also equalizes in a different way. Because if you get 10 humans together, various power laws ensue and one or two or three of the people are gonna do 80 to 90% of the talking. But this actually upregulates the quiet and downregulates the chatty.

It's really quite impressive, and I am not such a fan of AI to be blunt, but this is one of the good sides of AI. Yes.

This is very impressive, Audrey, and I know it's approaching midnight in Taiwan. And your clarity on this is very helpful. Let me take a step back in your history. Eventually, your work with the Sunflower Movement turned into some other projects, g0v and Polis .

Can you give a brief account of what those two projects were and specifically how they relate to a concept that you describe as demonstrating rather than protesting.

Wow. So embedded in there is your emphasis on data about feelings, specifically the feelings of the citizens living under these laws and regulations that a government enacts? Why is that so important to incorporate those values into decision making?

And by the way, do you know Nora Bateson and her work in what's called Warm Data Labs ?

Yes, I've heard of — I've not worked directly, but yes. Okay. But go ahead. What about data and feelings? The integration of that?

So what did those projects tell you about the divisiveness and polarization of the societies where they were enacted, and did people respond well to these technologies? Like, oh, this feels more positive sum and caring, and did they notice that?

That's amazing and important, because there's two issues. One is using this technology to actually change policy and regulations and things. But the other is, irrespective of that, this technology suppresses apathy and provides agency, which is essential in our current world because there's more and more people with mental illness and just checking out because it's so much, because they don't feel they have agency against all the things that are going on.

So this technology could be really important just as a vector to increase the feeling of agency. Yes.

So yeah, this is like literally, I'm soaking this all up because I think it's so important and I take our current social media landscape as a given, and I've stopped using Facebook and I do use the other things to post the content of this website, but I'm become really disenchanted with social media and this is exciting to learn that these things are possible.

Let me continue. Ultimately, I believe you've rooted your work in the idea of plurality . Which I think is the name of the book you co-authored with Glen Weyl . Can you describe what is at the core of plurality?

Thank you for that. I've heard that word a lot, and that was the best description, as horrifying as it is.

So is that kind of — a plurality is kind of like a decentralized singularity.

This could be applied in a lot of different areas. I'm specifically interested in how it could be used for the ongoing battle of what the future of social media could look like. Especially with our aims of this podcast and your work and a lot of our colleagues and people in the world for a pro-social future. What would be specific features of a social media platform rooted in the ideas of plurality and how would those look different than the platforms we have today?

I'm sure you've thought about this and if not, are working on it.

So how prevalent are these various technologies? Some of the things, the projects you've mentioned in Taiwan. And is there any evidence that on some group of issues that Taiwanese population is less polarized than other countries?

So what are the barriers to this scaling pro-social, plurality based, social media? What — why isn't this taking off more? This feels like something that people would want of all political ideologies and backgrounds.

Just like everything else in our world though, isn't our global economic system, our national economic system, our corporate economic incentives are based on dollars and we get clicks for dollars. So, you know, when we use social media, we get some benefit and a lot of times it's dopamine based instead of oxytocin based to make a generality, but it results in an economic gain for some individual or corporation. Does this still combat that at all? Or how does that play into this?

Seriously. I think our culture has like a massive dopamine hangover. They may not know that, but we're so depleted. It's like we've all been on this Las Vegas junket and have lost all our coins and our brains are kind of fried and we're hungry for serotonin and oxytocin — other of our ancestral neurotransmitters that we've been craving, and we get that through community and community engagement and social interactions, and the fact that we can possibly get that from social media is encouraging. Don't you think?

Hmm. That's quite profound and dopamine is still worth two times serotonin and oxytocin in our current economic system. But that might change. Yes, that might change.

So you are in your work, you're very specific in your projects and initiatives about the use of language and the importance of it. So why is language so important in these movements and for civic engagement and participation in general?

Nice work, Audrey. Thank you. I do think language is so important. Like fossil fuels. They're not fossil fuels. They're fossil hydrocarbons. We're just choosing to use them as fuels. As one example, or we refer to "the United States consumer spent more this month," like we're human beings who buy food and other things. We're not necessarily consumers, unless the true ecological sense. But yeah. Language is super important.

So I've heard you describe liberal democracy as a sort of social technology that should be in constant innovation alongside other technologies. How would you describe the current state of innovation for democracy itself and what is needed for it to keep pace with other things in parallel that are going on in our world, like artificial intelligence and other disruptive technology?

I didn't know that. So is there a risk that if we don't continue to innovate democracy as it is today and all the liberties and freedoms that we've come to take for granted in our generations, that democracy will simply become obsolete in the face of accelerating AI towards the singularity and the changing global political landscape.

How worried are you about that and how do those concepts interrelate?

Audrey, why are concepts like responsibility, liability, inclusivity, and transparency important for creating and maintaining an open democratic governance system of the type that you've been describing?

I imagine that there are many other countries in the world, some countries are very interested in copying your success in Taiwan. And others are also afraid of implementing some of these things. I mean, in your opinion, should countries be doing more to regulate social media platforms to be in line with these principles and what are some of the benefits and risks to such government oversight and any comments there?

Do we have the technology to do that at a township level now?

I want you to finish answering this question, but just so I understand: in the United States right now, people in Topeka, Kansas, or Red Wing, Minnesota or Sebastopol, California could access some existing technology right now to do some of the things you're talking about? What technology — yeah.

So the Bowling Green and the Oregon, there are entities that are working and chaperoning that process. But in theory, anyone listening to this show could look at the Bowling Green example, access the source code, and start something in their own community.

Let me ask you a related question. Not to do with democracy per se. But I've noticed over the years, decades of convening groups of high status scientists and activists, that everyone's got an opinion and they're very smart, and you get 80 or a hundred people together. But what ends up happening is when you're in person or when your name is attached to something, people, since we're social primates and we compare and look at status metrics, they defer to the senior wealthiest, or most famous, or most influential person in the group.

And so they don't let their real thoughts be known. So I'm wondering, the technology that you just described about the Bowling Green, could that be used in an institution itself where there's 200 people and you really wanna know what people are thinking without fear of saying the wrong thing and getting demoted or anything?