And this is very powerful, because those cruxes, the bridge makers, once they get encouraged, they will devote more time to bridge that difference instead of just replying on a reply thread and keep dunking on each other’s pro or contra arguments.

A very similar idea, after we adopted this in our petition platform and our poll list platform, Twitter, now called X.com, adopted this idea into community notes. So, if you want to look at plurality technology currently reaching the most people, it’s probably community notes. So, if you have a ...

And this is really good in the sense that if you don’t agree with the best pro argument, you actually have to think what is the contra argument that will bring some of those supporters toward you. So, this is a way to incentivize bridge making, not polarizing.

Oh, yeah. Okay. So, we didn’t invent this idea in Taiwan. We adapted from Iceland, from Better Reykjavik. So, in the Better Reykjavik petition platform online, when you post a petition, people can second it with the supporting arguments, or they can say, no, we have other ideas. But in ...

So, while in our region, many countries backslid on their amount of free expressions, Taiwan actually advanced, not by a lot, I would say, advanced a little bit, but because there’s a gradual backslide across our region. So now we’re at the top one.

No, I think what we have shown was that while many countries were forced by the amount of what WHO calls infodemic, which is disinformation related to the pandemic, so much so that they have to impose some sort of control on the freedom of expression online, Taiwan actually relied ...

Well, yeah, I think in terms of, especially internet freedom, association, expression, and so on, Taiwan is currently ranked, according to Freedom House, the top in Asia. And it was not the case, actually, before pandemic. And…

And it turns out people feel the same once you have this very specific case. People say don’t undercut existing meters. People say insurance, registration, and so on. But if you start a conversation saying, oh, what do you think about capitalism? I don’t think it goes anywhere.

Well, yes and no. I mean, the main thing that we solve through this method are what’s called overlapping consensus, meaning that instead of debating about the abstracted economic theory of sharing economy versus gig economy versus extractive economy, whatever, we just talk about very simple thing like, oh, there’s ...

I am, of course.

So, the important thing is that we don’t confuse personal feelings or opinions with actionable results. We don’t actually jump to solution. We want to make sure that people are in each other’s shoes, so to speak, so that people who are anti-marriage equality and for marriage equality, they may ...

Definitely. So, the way that I facilitate and design facilitation is inspired by the focused conversation method, which means that we establish the facts, the objective part, before we even talk about feelings. But once people are informed of the shared facts, we just talk about feelings. So, as I ...

No, I like the word ‘protest’. It was just that I’m more about demoing a kind of process.

And so, it was a demonstration in deliberation rather than a protest that blocks parliamentary progress.

And namely, that the 20 NGOs that gathered around the occupied parliament each held, a little bit like alignment assemblies, talking about specific aspects of the CSSTA. So, people would talk about labor conditions, they would talk about cybersecurity, of over-reliance of the then new 4G core network infrastructure, and ...

Oh, a demonstrator is somebody who demos, right? So, when we occupied the parliament back in 2014 for three weeks, totally nonviolently, the idea was not that we want to block the liberation on the cross-strait service and trade agreements. Rather, it is about a demonstration of a new way ...

Yeah, I always said that I’m a demonstrator, not a protester.

Sure.

Then it’s just understand the perspective, and summarize it in a way that is sympathetic to that group. And you can then lead a group discussion, and show them the summary. And they can say, ‘oh, this was misrepresenting,’ ‘I didn’t mean it like that,’ and so on. And you ...

This is about, you probably already have hours and hours of deep interviews, or community forums, or deliberative workshops on YouTube or Vimeo, or somewhere. And then you feed the URL, the playlist, to this AI.

Yes, exactly. So, if you’re a community facilitator, this is not replacing your work.

And again, they can create an AI language model that’s like a speaker for them, that decision makers can query, can have an interactive debate, even. And they will get some sort of representation based on the synthetic avatar that is co-created by this community conversation.

But at the end of the conversation, we would just take everything that was deliberated, and tune an AI based on the collective expectation of such communities. And this can be done not just on AI ethics, or whatever. There are experiments that was done based on the interviews of ...

And so, because everyone can do this personal fine-tuning, alignment assembly is about getting a group of people, maybe in a community, maybe in a company, and so on, who have interacted with AI and noticed the bias, or the harm that could be caused by a certain worldview, or ...

And to train this LoRA, we can do this adapter’s training overnight on a MacBook. So, on my laptop, I have trained an adapter based on my email correspondence that writes my email reply drafts for me. I always read before hitting send. It’s not an answering machine. But it ...

On the other hand, the AI can be amended by what we call an adapter. With the same AI, like Anthropics Cloud, or GPT-4, or LLaMA, a local community can train an adapter that says, before this AI actually speaks to me, it needs to run it through this cultural ...

This is a very simple idea. AI, in its current form, you can tell it to behave in such and such a way. And it might remember for a chat session, but it will not fundamentally change its bias, because exactly as you said, it’s constrained by the kind of ...

And that is the important part, because exactly as you said, if this is about who can spend most time on an online forum, you will get a very different self-selected group.

When I said statistically representative, I literally mean sortition, like random numbers, like drawing lots. So, for example, both OpenAI and Anthropic, working with the Collective Intelligence Project, which I’m a part of, just did this survey within their user base or within the American public, but they ensure that ...

And so, that was our main contribution, actually, to the current generation of gen AI, is just to get hundreds or thousands of statistically representative people through an online survey or through face-to-face deliberation, and we just converge everybody’s expectation about AI, and then we show the top AI labs, ...

Yes, definitely. So, before I joined the cabinet, I worked with the Oxford University Press and also with Apple on Siri technology. Siri is this AI chatbot that doesn’t hallucinate as much as ChatGPT, but I digress. Because that was the important thing for us. And so, what we have ...

So finally, our ratification after two referenda was such that those two persons, they wed, but their families don’t form kinship, family connections. And so basically, just bylaws, but not in-laws, like father-in-law, mother-in-law. And then that, I wouldn’t say pleased both sides, but both sides can live with it. ...

But our main idea of pre-bunking it is just showing that actually democracy can foster mutual understanding and collaborative diversity, one case in point which are marriage equality, right? So nowadays, I think a great majority, almost 70% or even more now, support marriage equality. But that was not the ...

And I understand this almost sounds alien now, right, to a polarized polity, but this is what we’re aiming toward, because we do see autocracies want to spread this meme that says democracy only leads to chaos, only leads to polarization, only lockdown, shutdown, top-down control works. And so, we ...

And so, this kind of people-to-people solidarity toward democracy, this is what unites people together. So, this is not about a political party winning and taking all the power and things like that, but rather about a commitment to simply say, actually, democracy can advance mutual understanding, and technology can ...

Plurality means collaborative diversity. So, it’s not just about collaboration, it’s also about respecting diversity. And the people you just mentioned that have very different views on the PRC. On the other hand, there are also people within PRC that actually want democracy, want democratic networks, and so on. And ...

And so, although there is still some polarization, it is within a kind of friendly competition frame.

So, the point I’m making is that with some humor, we can always turn a zero-sum competition, something that only has one winner and everybody loses, into a friendly competition where it’s a positive sum, right? If people keep saying, oh, actually, my friends all got this vaccine brand, and ...

I really am non-binary, and indeed plural, right? Digital in Mandarin is called ‘shu wei,’ which also means plural. So, I’m also a plural minister.

That’s not a joke.

And just to make a point, I have been inoculated with four different vaccines…

Nobody. And the reason why is that we shifted this to a friendly competition, to my vaccine is better than your vaccine. And so, there’s four, and finally five, different vaccine brands to choose from. If you interview people around that time, there are people who will insist only the ...

Nothing.

Sure, so during the pandemic, for example, we noticed that when people are anxious, they’re much more likely to repeat polarizing messages. And in Taiwan, for example, we don’t have a political anti-vax faction.

So, this information exchange maintains integrity by working outside of the public internet, so that’s one. We also work with the three leading telecom providers, currently there’s five, but soon three, so that any foreign telecom providers, or even local ones, proposing to be a telecom provider via 2G signal ...

Yes, so we designed 111 to run on the system called the T-Road, which is like the Estonian X-Road. This is something that’s specific to governmental agencies.

Everything is assumed to be a bot, unless it comes from a previously face-to-face meeting, we exchange mobile phone numbers, so of course that’s not a bot, or it comes from those short numbers with verified checks, with provenance.

So, we’re switching to a different default. Previously, people assumed when they received a message or encountered somebody online, they assumed it’s a human, until they exhibit behavior that looks like a bot, but nowadays, with generative AI, with voice-cloning technologies, there’s very convincing personas that are actually bots, but ...

Yeah, no, we launched, for example, the 111 SMS service, and we need people to tell each other that if you see a governmental SMS saying that your tax is due or something like that, parking tickets… And starting next year, if it doesn’t come from a short number like ...

Every day, we’re facing that kind of attack, and last August, in that single day, the adversary threw 23 times more resources compared to the previous peak just to keep the Ministry of National Defense, the Foreign Service, and the Presidential Office website down for a few hours just to ...