We set the terms of service, not the platforms.

And Nostr, and the Fediverse, and Bluesky, and so on are these kind of off-ramps and on-ramps that exist between the platforms. They’re called protocols. So that whenever people want to move, like you switch from one telecom to another, you get to keep your number, these protocols start working ...

But it’s not just in Taiwan. In the U.S. state of Utah, they passed the law, Digital Choices Act, that says starting next July, if you are a Utah citizen, you want to move from, say, X.com to Bluesky or Truth Social—both are open source—you can mandatory forward the old ...

But in Taiwan, just as broadband is a human right, so is, through government procurement, through the crowdsourced policies that I just mentioned, all the biggest platforms have to play by the interoperable rules.

You cannot build a highway without an off-ramp. A lot of vendor lock-in around the world starts from the simple mistake of a government thinking that you can build the information superhighway and then benefit from the network effect without building that exit, that off-ramp.

One, the Ministry of Digital Affairs that I founded—I was the founding minister—is uniquely in the transportation committee in the parliament. Everywhere around the world, the digital ministries are in science or, I don’t know, interior for cybersecurity, but we chose transportation because we understood it is infrastructure.

And I think that isomorphism, that bridge, is something we need to keep in mind. What on this side of the wall works as an anti-surveillance, anti-tampering technology, on this side of the wall works then as a freedom of choice, of a pro-competition, antitrust technology. And they are exactly ...

That is to say, the same people working on mandatory interoperability so you can move between social networks, between platform providers, between AI providers using web3 protocols are also the same people that formed a new political party, the so-called Future Party, that used those tools to crowdsource their platform. ...

Yeah, I can point to quite a few, but I would say that Japan has been most active in both the digital democracy work as well as this decentralized, what’s called the web3 systems work. Because for them, there was no backlash after FTX. They’re uniquely not harmed by that ...

I live on a plane.

Oh, the past year.

So when we share, for example, the collaborative fact-checking with Thailand, with many other people, with the help of many of you here, we started checking food and drug and agriculture safety and environment and things like that, but it gradually practiced the civic muscle.

What I learned when I was a child is that with the homemakers’ buying power to negotiate better environmental practices by farmers and so on, we gradually learned how to assemble, how to coordinate, how to—because it’s a co-op—run elections, and so on, still within an autocratic regime. But when ...

But people then in Taiwan learned something: You can actually exercise the civic muscles without doing something overtly political. My mother was the co-founder of the Homemakers Union, still today the largest consumer cooperative in Taiwan. And they started with something… Thank you. Yes, very green.

And I think in Taiwan, we have been on the front line on both sides, actually. I was born not into freedom and democracy. When I was born in the eighties, Taiwan was still under martial law, and there was not a lot of communication freedom, not freedom to form ...

When people link arms, firewalls can fall, too.

Thank you.

And when we see “Internet of Things,” let’s make it an “Internet of Beings.”When we see “machine learning,” let’s make it “collaborative learning.”When we see “virtual reality,” let’s make it “shared reality.” When we see “user experience,” let’s make it about “human experience.”And whenever we hear that “singularity is near,” ...

We the people are the superintelligence.

The superintelligence we need is not a machine. It is our capacity to coordinate with care.

Because if we delegate democracy and policy to chatbots for debate, that would be like sending our robots to the gym to lift the weights for us. I’m sure it’s very impressive. They can lift a lot. But our civic muscle will atrophy.

And we can train AI agents this way, beyond maximizing a score or just following some thin rules. This is called relational alignment. We align with the process of care.

In Oxford, I’m developing the “6-Pack of Care” with six basic moves: Listen to people, keep promises. Invest the people in the process, verify the results together. Win-win as possible and as local as possible.

Now, forging stronger democracies is never easy. We need to see the process as working out in a civic gym with a care loop.

We need to bring our own policy. Our local safety rules and deliberation norms need to travel with us across the web. And such an approach is critical in rolling back transnational repression. We can use AI to detect harassment, but we must let each community decide the code of ...

We need edge AI, smart defenders that run on our devices, safeguarding our community without surveillance, without pinging home.

We need selective disclosure, verifying any part of our credential that is relevant, like “I’m over 18” or “Ich bin ein Berliner” without revealing our full identity. No doxxing.

In the upcoming panel, we’ll talk about digital resilience for all, but it suffices to say that authoritarian playbooks are global. The spyware, troll farms, transnational repression we just heard about—our response then cannot just be the local takedowns after the harm is done. We have to be pre-bunking. We ...

We need protocols of freedom for movement, association, deliberation, safety. Think of them as public roads and bridges and parks, not private walled gardens. Because when an exit is real, then the platform must compete on care, not on capture.

So we must safeguard freedom of movement online by resisting digital colonialism, the way that Taiwan resisted the deepfake ads or Uber ten years ago and last year. And policy is catching up fast. Now we understand the platforms online are places too. The EU Data Act gave us data ...

So here, Berlin built bridges, and Europe promotes interoperability and portability—also bridges. And the spirit that today already enables you to exit an instant message app with your data, your social graph, just like you keep your phone number when you change your carriers. This is freedom architecture.

So basically, those ideas get woven together by a language model, a small language model, at the end of the day, and everybody voted on it. So those 447 people, more than 85% regardless of demographics, agreed. And the other 15% could live with it, considered it quite legitimate. That ...

So one room said, “Let’s label all advertisement prominently until it’s digitally signed off by somebody.” Another room said, “If somebody lost 7 million to an investment scam that’s not signed, let’s make them fully liable, like Facebook.” So Facebook has to pay that 7 million dollars damage if it ...

We sent 200,000 text messages to random numbers around Taiwan asking for a citizen assembly to deliberate the idea. So 447 people randomly selected, representing the same demographic as the Taiwanese population, in rooms of ten, facilitated by an AI. We said to them, those 45 rooms, “You have to ...

But, people in Taiwan, if you poll them individually, say the same thing. “The government should stay away from censoring the internet. As Dr. Tsai, our president said, you know, we’re the most free in all of Asia when it comes to internet freedom.” So, what to do?

And last year, when we faced a new threat from deepfake scams online, many people saw Jensen Huang, the Taiwanese NVIDIA CEO’s face. If you click it, Jensen wants to give you free cryptocurrency or some investment advice. Of course, it’s not Jensen. It’s a deepfake of him running on ...

So ten years ago, when ride-sharing Uber came to Taiwan, it triggered intense conflict in various segments in our society. But we used Polis, a bridging system, to map where the people actually agreed, like a group selfie. And in just three weeks, we turned the conflict into policy options ...

So concretely, this is what we did in Taiwan. In Taiwan, we know about pressure. Pressure makes diamonds. We’re the number one target for polarization attacks worldwide for the past 12 years, according to V-Dem. But we adapted. We learned to replace anti-social media dynamics with pro-social architecture. We understand ...

And what does that mean? Concretely, it means that we take control of the steering wheel together. We use AI as assistive intelligence to help to find the overlap that turns conflict, not into explosion like volcanic energy, but magma into geothermal energy. That for powerful co-creation, we can maximize ...

Because right now, people talk about “human in the loop.” But human in the loop of AI is like a hamster in a hamster wheel. Maybe feeling great exercising, but there’s no steering at all. We need to move AI into the loop of humanity.

So the question here, in this spinning wheel, is not whether we should accelerate AI or stop AI. It is who should steer that spinning wheel.

So 10 years of engagement through enragement morphed our social feeds into adrenaline factories. It rewarded extremes. It muted the nuance. And the environment of fractured trust is exactly what authoritarians around the world exploit. And now adding generative AI to the mix, and we’re spinning ever faster with slop: ...

Now, the dominant logic of AI today in our digital age is not that. It is what I call the “Max OS”—not the Apple macOS, Max OS. It maximizes engagement. It maximized watch time, clicks, and it creates a parasitic recommendation engine: engagement through enragement. And the result for the ...

And for democracies, that is key. We must publish our process, not just our final policy. We must publish the how and why — so people can see them — and turn critics into co-creators.

So, I adopted a mantra that I call “publish before I perish.” I record everything that I learned every day and I discover something profound. Publishing on the internet, if it’s perfection, it only invites applause. But imperfection, imperfection invites participation. Our cracks are opening for collaboration. As Leonard Cohen ...

When I was five, a life-threatening heart condition taught me urgency. Doctors told me that I only have a 50% chance to survive until heart surgery. After that, every night felt like a coin flip.

Now, I wish to share my thoughts on how we move AI from addictive intelligence to assistive intelligence. I ask you to join me in moving from extractive platforms to protocols to foster relational health. And I propose the most important frontier model is not found in a lab somewhere. ...

And Berlin, I think, is a perfect place to talk about the role of AI because here the lesson of ‘89 is very simple: When people co-create, we outperform any master plan.

Good evening Berlin. It is such an honor to be in the city that proved to all — when people link arms — even walls can fall.

If we cross these red lines, the pedal/brake debate becomes meaningless; we’ll be off a cliff and the steering wheel won’t work. So we must <strong>raise global awareness</strong>—in our jurisdictions, towns, and classrooms—about what counts as a red line. Don’t “read the air” (guess norms); <strong>write the air</strong> together so ...