The Mozilla Foundation recently announced its “Rise25: Leading the Next Wave of AI” list, highlighting 25 individuals, and I am honored to be among them.

The selected individuals share a commitment to “equity,” working across various fields with the spirit of open source to address issues such as racial, gender, ...

A new book that I co-authored with economist Glen Weyl, <em> Plurality: The Future of Democracy and Collaborative Technologies </em> (Plurality.net), has recently made waves in Tokyo.

One of the book’s key concepts, augmented deliberation, demonstrates how AI can be harnessed to enable broad listening. This idea resonated with Takahiro ...

We’ve grown accustomed to social media constantly feeding us interesting posts and ads, but we rarely consider that current algorithms are actually steering the world towards anxiety.

Parents of children addicted to smartphones feel this anxiety most acutely. The digital world in which children are immersed from a young age ...

After May 20th, I have been on a whirlwind EU tour, with a speech at VivaTech – Europe’s largest tech and startup event in Paris, France. At the forefront of innovation, everyone is still talking about AI. But this time, there is a noteworthy phenomenon: many Europeans are not entirely ...

Thank you.

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Sure. With my coffee?

We bring digital and plural, which is the same word in Mandarin, shu wei, together. A digital democracy is a plural democracy.

Yes. Across the diversity, across the generations, the ecosystem, the environments, maybe other planets can be part of democracy and in making sure plurality collaborative diversity as a philosophy can work to serve the people, not asking the people to serve the technologies.

We start with human beings that are adults, but then to younger people, to even younger people, to representatives of future generations and eventually to the entire ecosystem. It’s infinite diversity in infinite combinations.

When we say plurality, that is collaborative diversity. We mean not just this transcultural republic of citizens that we have here. It’s a start, but we also think that it is one of the potential models for the future, for the entire planet, for people, but also animals, rivers, and ...

In Taiwan, we have those ideological earthquakes constantly, but with the resilience in our democracy. The Jade Mountain, the highest point in Taiwan raises by a couple of centimeters every year because of these tensions that brings co creation.

A vast majority of people nowadays agree with that no matter how they voted on the referendums. That is the deliberative spirit. The more diversity you have, the more tolerance, no inclusion that you enjoy from the co creation of inspiring creative solutions, I liken it to the tectonic plate ...

When the constitutional court ruled that marriage equality needed to happen, the legislation finally took the form after two referenda that the individuals wed as individuals, but their families don’t. Enjoying the same rising duties without confusing their confusion can ship idea. This eclectic solution is what I call good ...

At the end of the day, the conversation turned into this kinship relationship where some people think marriage as families wedding to families. The individual are just representatives for the essence through spirits and lineage, and the text that is about the individual rights and responsibility and so on.

When we have deliberation about, for example, marriage equality here in Taiwan, it is the matriarchies of the indigenous community, or the Paiwan community which doesn’t care about gender in choosing leadership, that offers valuable perspective to this conversation.

I get this, like if you’re all Confucius worshiping robots, but we’re not. [laughs] In Taiwan, we have 20 national languages and a lot of diversity including the sign language, many indigenous languages, the whole of Gan Hakka and so on. Each community tend to think of the society and ...

Community policing?

Means that nobody need to be a top down censor, but rather people can take care of the quality of public discussion through voluntarily supplying context to discussions and reporting the most viral disinformation and conspiracy theories so that professional journalists can dedicate their time to debunk those.

In this, we discovered, I would say, a cure for the disinformation crisis because collective fact checking is like community policing.

When the middle school students can fact check our three presidential candidates in real time as they’re having the debate on platform 2020 election, well, that brings them into the mindset that renders them immune detox from the outrage that is the share button and the retweet button.

In Taiwan though, we learned that if people participate in civic journalism, if people learned the art of source checking, of proper narrative framing, of making sure that there’s context behind each report, this act of fact checking, of reporting likely disinformation or misinformation, the same thing as you would ...

They were so scared by the color revolutions and so on, the counter power potential of the social media, so that they would even take away what used to be some journalistic freedom that they have online.

On the digital arena, in around 2012, 2013, in authoritarian regimes that used to have some freedom of speech and journalism back then, they decided that the retweet button, the share button is too potent a virus, that they have to apply professional people to police the speech.

Sure.

We don’t need so many gun carrying polices on the street to keep the street tidy and safe, because in a sense this community spirit is even closer to home, quite literally speaking, when it comes to policing against the behavior that may harm the community.

If you have a community that cares about each other’s well being very much, so much so that if you double park, chances are the neighbor will discover it before a police does.

There’s a police there. [laughs] My bodyguard. [laughs] In Taiwan, we think about the community of crime and prevention and so on in a holistic peer to peer fashion. People care about the neighborhood. People keep it tidy and remind each other to wear mask before the vaccination, and things ...

In that, you can say that we’re hacking the governmental system in the service of democracy.

The remaining parts, the parts that the civil society cannot take care of yet, maybe the state supports them for a bit, but then always with the aspiration of relinquishing more control to the people instead of the state. A state that works to minimize its control is the direction ...

I’m a minister that work not for the people, but with the people, thinking outside of the box. Meaning that when we encounter important challenges like cybersecurity, climate crisis, we do not think, “Oh, how can the state solve it with state capacity?” I think instead, how can the civil ...

The real time information shared upon collection, as long as non personal data is the common ground on top of which that the competition in partisan democracy can grow into the flowers, the blossoming of co creative deliberative democracy.

The minister can say to the parliamentarian, “The MP, you know a lot about data and so teach us.” However, if we publish only every 30 days, then the MP can only make critics, but they cannot make improvements because they do not have the real time information on top ...

In a democracy, decision making is only as good as the information we have on the actual problem at hand. Consider during the mask creation of 2020, if we publish the real time inventory of pharmacies every 30 seconds as we did, then the opposition party can be turned into ...

In Cybersyn, there was no invention of distributed ledgers back then, and so you probably have to trust the main architect.

In air box and water box, is people who care about the design can improve the design. They can configure the design in a network topologies previously unimagined. They can choose to use distributed ledgers to keep multiple records in multiple parties that don’t fully trust each other, so nobody ...

There are certain parallels between the, for example, air quality measurement or water quality measurement and the Cybersyn project, because they’re like the nervous systems that allows people to see in a more holistic way, in so called real time what’s actually happening. The parallel ends there.

Instead of disagreeing, protesting the design, they can just write a few lines of code and translate that to French, to fit into the small screens on the phone, without permission from the original creator, because it’s in the commons, it’s free software. I think free software and the permissionless ...

However, on the Internet, people who don’t like the original configuration of their pol.is system, maybe it was English only, maybe it doesn’t run on small screens, on films and so on.

The providers of Internet service cannot object to you inventing a new way that may be putting some of the actor out of business. In projects like Cybersyn, there is a architect, there’s a designer, and their design may be good, maybe bad, may inform the society, distract the society, ...

Unlike the Internet, the system is controlled by a few designers. In the Internet, the main thing is permissionless innovation. If you think about a better way to do things, you can convince two or three of your friends across the world, and then you start building a new protocol, ...

Before the Internet, there was many attempts at building central nervous system of a society with whatever technology people used to have. Like the Internet, it connects people in very different areas, different experiences into the commons, meaning that people can look like a physical map, what is going on ...

Like the airboxes.

Of course.

Minus 10 years.

I don’t think we’re competing because it’s not the same track or maybe same track, but opposite directions. The more we move to the democratic direction, the farther apart we are from the surveillance state, from the all seen controlling state apparatus that authoritarian regimes are moving toward.

On the other hand, if you take away first the ability to talk about civil society on an online platform and next journalistic freedom and maybe the next scientific freedom as well, that more and more the lose of touch in the reality will lead to more and more top ...

The building of the democratic feedback loop thanks to the Internet, I think, will lead to more and more awareness of the agency, the potentials one can take the right actions in our communities and have a sense of democracy as a social technology that we can all contribute. It’s ...