Recently, I attended the convening of International AI Safety Institutes in San Francisco to share how Taiwan addresses the harms caused by synthetic AI.

“Safety” has emerged as one of the global AI community’s paramount concerns. Over the past year, governments, industries, and academia worldwide have held summits in the ...

Great. Until next time, live long and prosper.

It was very, very low. But based on radical transparency and civic participation, we’re able to rebuild that. In 2020 it was 70% and it’s now, like, consistently over 50%. So I think we were able to essentially recover from the trust crisis not by asking people to trust government, ...

They can already look at the entire history of relevant data to make decision with. Because then the trust is built in a way that is part of the social fabric. Instead of just focusing on a few stakeholder groups doing consultations and so on, you see gradual increasing of ...

Sure. I always say to give no trust is to get no trust. So instead of asking people to rebuild trust, first ask how much can you trust the people? If you work in policymaking, you can make your decision-making process more transparent, more auditable. You can trust people with ...

And once they empower each other, then you get something beautiful which is a civic technology community.

So there’s a real disconnect in Europe and other places of people, people who are technologists working in the free and open realm, and people who are community organizers and educators and so on. So one of the main things that the government can invest in is just to bring ...

So it can be rolled out as infrastructure. And I think in the European Union there’s already very good examples like the German sovereign tech fund and so on that funds this kind of effort. The main challenge nowadays is just that people are not generally aware of it. People ...

And so once people get into that mindset, like a maker mindset, it’s much more likely that people will see technology as something that works with the people, not just for the people. And so part of what the government can do is to invest in what we call public ...

But, yeah, so, yeah, I mean, in addition to that, I would also say that the more technologies are in the open, as in free software and open source, the more likely that people will be able to bend the technology to their actual needs so that it doesn’t feel ...

And broadband is a human right.

Technology as just moving too fast, something happens to us. Yes.

It’s possible to disclose that you’re above age 18 without disclosing your birthday or your birth year. And it’s possible now to disclose that you’re not a bot without disclosing anything else. So we should encourage investment into those privacy technologies so that we can solve the bot-or-not problem without ...

And those bots should not have freedom of speech. So the idea of personhood credentials is not to show anyone any of your private information. The idea of personhood credential is just to show that you’re not a bot. I think we need to very clearly delineate these two. And ...

Right. But that is what’s happening with bots online. So I think it’s one thing to say that as a person I should enjoy anonymous speech. It’s another thing to say I should be able to run 2,000 bots, each pretending to be a different person. I don’t think there’s ...

Well, I mean, in real life, like I’m talking to you, and if you anonymize yourself like, I don’t know who you are, and maybe you wear some masking apparatus still, that I know it’s one person that I’m talking to. It’s not likely that the next split second you ...

So that is a matter of commons. And of course people have to come together and deliberate.

And he says that nowadays social media, some of them are like mixing the tap water with the sewer system. And if in the city even just, you know, 2% of sewer gets mixed up with the tap water, you would say it’s a broken system. You wouldn’t say the ...

Right. It’s a commons issue. It’s a democratic governance of commons. Right. Like in some European countries, the water is a commons. So of course people have to come together and deliberate about that. And I work with Project Liberty, I’m a senior fellow at Project Liberty Institute and the ...

That’s right. Without democratic control. Yeah, because when we run the citizen assembly online, we found that the people don’t want the government to look into the content. Like content level moderation is something they don’t want the government to do, but digital signature actor level authentication, they’re like, yeah, ...

It is exactly what the people want and you’re violating that. Yep.

So this rule was crowdsourced by an online citizen assembly in Taiwan and many other jurisdictions. I’m not saying they should copy what Taiwan has passed, but at least they can consider running something like a citizens assembly so that they can show conclusively to the social media companies that ...

It is already this case in Taiwan. If Facebook does not secure the digital signature or KYC of a celebrity and post advertisement and somebody gets conned for 1 million, then Facebook is now in Taiwan liable for that 1 million, which is why they have implemented good KYC rules ...

Also another big part is just to make sure that the online ecosystem have a kind of fact checking component in it. I mean, on X.com there’s community notes, you can sign up for jury duty, YouTube, there’s something like that as well. And I think going forward we can ...

For example, in classrooms in Taiwan we always prefer to use large tablets or large laptops. So the screen is for sharing and not for isolating against other people. And we do that very consistently all through K12. And so showing people the right mode to engage with the social ...

So for example, my phone is always in grayscale mode because that’s the way that my mind works. If it’s colorful, I get addicted. If it’s grayscale, it doesn’t. Or people sometimes interact with the stylus or with a keyboard and mouse and again not a touchscreen, so it’s less ...

Yeah, so one thing I would definitely suggest is not getting addicted to the touchscreen. Because if you’re addicted, your mind works in a very different configuration that makes it much more susceptible to spreading viral hate or harm or things like that. And if you’re looking at it in ...

Generally bad for mental health.

Yeah, I mean, if they can’t vote yet to the presidential election because they’re too young, at least they can vote in participatory budget within their school or something. You can do that every week. You can have citizens’ initiatives and many other platforms for them to exercise that muscle ...

But if only a few people are willing to share, but most people just passively consume, then again it creates an asymmetry, a power imbalance.

Not just in their head, but rather out there with the society. And this act of sharing is the most important because if you built the agency, that is to say the feeling that they are contributing to the society, then it, it doesn’t matter if they get things wrong ...

So I would definitely say invest in that first so that you do not have the classes of haves and have nots in your country. Now, assuming that this is done, the next thing is to work on competence education to ensure that people in the school, and also school ...

Once you build this kind of digital democracy system, online citizen assemblies and so on, and then say, oh, I’m sorry, you don’t have good enough bandwidth so you can only listen, then it creates a rift, a divide in your society. So nowadays providing high bandwidth bidirectional communication is ...

Well, ideally I would start with broadband as a human right anywhere in Taiwan, you’re guaranteed to have like 10Mbps both ways. Like even on top of Yushan, which is nearly 4,000 meters high, almost, or rural islands using satellite connection, because if you don’t have that, then you essentially ...

So these two things are worth investing in and have clear measurable outcomes. And then based on these, I think most of the other costs can be then borne by the private sector or the civil society. We were able to see many unicorns or good startups just building on ...

I think one of the main ideas that we pursue is whether people younger than 18 or people who are not citizens but just residents, or people who were otherwise excluded from political speech and voice, feel that their viewpoints are being put on the table in such ecosystems. If ...

You can do some randomized survey to say after a deliberation at a civic assembly, whether you hate people of different ethnicity or different political parties less or more. So that could be quantified. The depolarization effect should be the key attribute for you to monitor, and that’s the bridging ...

So if you apply this to the social dialogue network landscape, then it’s very clear that you can then involve the people who are building those bridges. For example, the community notes on X.com or on YouTube, it’s like jury duty. So you can measure like before intervention, after intervention, ...

But then the media need to provide kind of balanced viewpoints so that people can see that my fellow citizens, although we believe in different things, are also human and there are common grounds that we can agree on. So that’s the first thing. And also it needs to be ...

Yeah, that’s a great question. I think we need to see this as a media environment. And just in traditional journalism, where the Hutchins Commission has long ago had this entire book about what constitutes a healthy media ecosystem, the two main properties are that it needs to be bridging, ...

What’s the ROI?

And what Cofacts and other g0v projects have done is sort of providing a clearing house, an infrastructure so that the individual learnings, individual fact checking, are not just trapped or siloed in their communities, but rather can fruitfully feed into each other. So that’s more like a connective tissue ...

That’s right, so like having the civics classes empowering students and having the community colleges empowering lifelong learning students and the various different like spiritual centers and health centers and so on to help the helpers so that the helpers who are already a set of community organizers can then ...

That’s right. And also we have some of the lowest isolation and loneliness levels among developed countries, which means that people find meanings in the face to face connections.

Yeah, definitely.

But for each particular subject, for each particular field, there exists a very strong offline connection, like the g0v community itself. For more than 12 years now, g0v meets every other month, usually in Nankang, in our national academy. That is what enables informal ties between the civil society groups ...

Yeah, I think many of the most successful open source Commons infrastructure are reliant on offline communities, like literally people meeting every week. So that is why I refer to the meetups. So in a sense, the face to face nodes build the civic muscles, the trust between people, and ...

Wikipedia or OpenStreetMap, or how do you…

So maybe think about it first before the professionals enter the stage.

And every day there’s really only just two or three of these things. And so then the professional fact checking group can then focus on these. So this is how they collaborate. And we are also seeing that based on the previous fact checking, sometimes the cofacts team are training ...