Because at this current level, they’re not yet causing widespread societal harm, but if they don’t see a positive role they can enter into, then we have this internal division that is never good for spreading public messages.

Right, right, right, exactly. And to do that, and that’s a dynamic that we didn’t go too deep on, but I believe for Hugging Faces and Meta, We need to paint them at this stage not as black sheeps, but rather as important vehicles for people to be able to ...

Right, it’s like a weather forecast, basically.

As you know, in Taiwan, anyone who witnessed a new virus mutation or whatever, or even if they just suspect that, can just call this toll-free line. And then we address these things 24 hours at most later in daily conferences. Almost like a daily forecast thing where you measure ...

Oh yeah, yeah. I mean, that’s the same in pandemic, right? The virus mutates and there’s a new way of aerosol spray or whatever, right? So, the idea is not that you measure one specific harm to one specific representative person. This is more about collective intelligence mechanisms with continuous ...

So, once there is a culture of doing scoreboard of sorts, it is not difficult to tell good-faith actors versus non-good-faith actors.

So, you measure the time from when the harm has surfaced to the harm is mitigated. And when the actual harm, albeit slower to respond initially, you see a good-faith effort. This is exactly like bug bounties and responsible disclosure and so on in cybersecurity. After a while, you very ...

Yes. So personally, I think during the pandemic, what we have seen between cooperating players and non-cooperating players, is simply that how quickly they respond with measures that redress the harm — in a publicly transparent and accountable way.

They don’t want governments to disappear. So basically, there should be very clear guardrails that says these are the players that play the race to safety game, and maybe there’s some peer pressure, maybe there’s some naming and shaming. But at the end of the day, is that anyone who ...

So, although on the midterm, like three years, five years from now, things vary wildly. I think around March, what we’re seeing is that there’s a wide agreement on what to do the year leading up to elections, which is next year.

And the third thing is that people don’t want governments to disappear. They want sufficient regulation so that on the short term, people who don’t prove that they can raise to safety can be escalated in an overtime window to villains maybe one year or two years from now.

Second, when actual harm, or likely harm of escalation is caused, people want the AI companies providing such services to be liable, and not just in a financial damage sense, but also in an early forecasting, warning, and mitigation sense. So, this is the second thing.

So, on the short term, in March, I believe everybody agreed about three things. First is that our current liberal democratic order is a good thing, and its processes should not be interfered by those black boxes. Everybody’s got to understand the harm it causes here and now, first thing.

While the “race to safety”, let’s call it that, the left column, and “shut it all down” on the right column, may differ like five years from now, 10 years from now projections, it’s quite clear that they… and that’s very clear in March already, that on the short term, ...

Yeah, I think the consensus we got in March was similar to the open-source/free-software non-debate, right? I think it’s Richard Stallman that said, even though the endpoint of open source and free software is completely different because they’re different ideologies, on the short term, they do exactly the same things, ...

This is like where we were at this March, so we’re just recapping.

Definitely. And we also have our own Taiwanese gold card for digital professionals, so if you are a startup person in Lithuania with like eight years of experience and so on, pretty soon you’ll also be able to apply from abroad without traveling to Taiwan, just on the internet, the ...

Yes. I got this e-resident card from Lithuania that allows me to digitally sign like a Lithuanian citizen. It doesn’t ultimately confer residency status, so my travel to Lithuania is not affected by this e-residency, but it does allow people working on startups and so on to easily open a ...

Yes.

Yes, exactly.

okay, so we’re not perfectly happy, but we’re happy to live with it and live with people from other 19 language communities and to just co-create and prosper together.

Because in Taiwan we have 20 national languages, many different traditions, and some of which are matriarchal, like the Amis, some of which don’t really care about gender and so on. So, this is really great that we are in Taiwan where all sorts of different traditions can freely listen ...

So, I came out when I was like 24 or 25, so it was already a while ago, and way before I joined the cabinet. This is a well-known fact. And so being, I believe, the world’s first open transgender cabinet member, I think I feel blessed that I do ...

It’s not an issue. I’m an appointee, so I don’t have any political parties, and I don’t have constituents. My constituents are everyone.

So, the scenario we’re planning for, exactly as you mentioned, is not just a couple of days, submarine cables are cut, and, well, we repair them a couple of weeks later, and everything back to normal. Of course not, right? So, what we are working on, as I mentioned, is ...

Right after Russia’s unprovoked illegal war of aggression, I was staying up all night just reading Kyiv Independent and other information sources. But imagine if they do not have internet there, then probably the Russian propaganda, synthesized media, will win the day. So, ensuring proper communication infrastructure, including the local ...

Of course, we immediately made sure that there is microwave transmission that helps solve the problem, but also we started testing the mid-Earth orbit, non-geostationary satellites from Europe that begin its operation in Matsu as a proof of concept. So, our work in communication resilience is to make sure that ...

And indeed, exactly as you said, the communications were disrupted. There’s a lot of infrastructural worry, right? Like how are we going to keep communicating with people in Matsu and from Matsu to the world.

Yeah. so right before the interview, you mentioned that you visited one of our allying islands. We are now in Taiwan proper, but we have smaller islands. And just a few months ago, in the smaller islands of Matsu, the submarine cables that connect Matsu to Taiwan proper was cut ...

What sort of military attack?

And as long as we keep contributing toward that direction, I do not think anyone in the democratic world will want to see that Taiwan revert back to the better days of authoritarianism or get annexed by the PRC into totalitarianism.

And so, my point is that if the people in Taiwan back then bought into that authoritarian narrative, that fuels authoritarian expansionism and would send the wrong message to the democratic world, basically saying democracy doesn’t work for those very large emerging threats. But by working together, not just within ...

And Taiwan, of course, along with New Zealand and other democratic countries, proved conclusively that this is not the case. Because lockdowns or takedowns and censorship, any top-down shutdowns, actually put people in a decontextualized position, where people do not actually know what’s going on. And therefore, their innovation, their ...

So basically, their main idea was that this is not a liberty vs. public health trade-off, but rather only by going all the way, can you have any chance to counter this virus? You’re nodding, so you remember that, right?

As I mentioned, this is mainly a contest of narratives. In early 2020, for example, the PRC was having this narrative to the world that only authoritarian regimes can counter COVID through lockdowns, through restriction of civil liberties and so on.

What do you mean by that?

So, I’m now less afraid compared to a decade ago when we were just beginning this experiment.

Well, certainly not on the world’s watch. We’ve seen that around the world, that people are now waking up to the fact that Taiwan really is like a lab of democracy and freedom. It’s here that we’ve made sure that technologies that in other places of the world damaged democracy, ...

So, I would say that both sides now are very evolved in our use of technology, but it’s on completely different directions that is very difficult to compare.

And we’ve maximally engaged even very young people to fact-check the three presidential candidates as they’re having a debate or forum and so on.

Now, fast forward a decade or so, as you’ve mentioned, we evolved in completely opposite directions. They have evolved to precisely take down the messages that they deem as potentially going viral and damaging to their authoritarian regime.

In Taiwan, we started developing, as I mentioned, vaccines of the mind, inoculation, cure through participatory fact-checking. But around the same time, the PRC people got so worried that they essentially did a kind of zero hate, like zero COVID policy by banning basically civic journalism, even the mentioning of ...

Well, I would say that around 2014, when the retweet button, share button and so on got really viral, and people were at the time starting to worry that AIs that are like a black box will manipulate people’s emotions and get the most polarized messages across the globe, but ...

Both my parents are in their 70s. They were both professional journalists, so they enjoyed this kind of pastime of engaging as part of the fact-checking community.

Literacy is when you read; competence is when you produce. And so, the elderly people, for example, in addition to long-tapping and reporting something as probably scam and so on, they can learn to engage with the community like co-facts, collaborative fact-checking and so on, and add context. After they ...

Yes, so that’s the second part, right? We felt that literacy or critical thinking and so on is just the first step. It is not necessarily the products of fact-checking, the fact-checks that inoculate people against disinformation. It is rather the act of going through the fact-checking process oneself to ...

If you use Twitter, it’s a little bit like Community Notes, where a controversial tweet is appended with a piece of clarification. Now in Taiwan, it may come from professional journalists or also the civil society or private sector that also engages with the fact-checking network.

So that, as I mentioned, when people receive a piece of disinformation, instead of the government taking it down, we don’t have a censorship law like that. The journalists can contribute to the fact-checking network so that when people receive a piece of rumor, maybe they long-tap it and report ...

So, we have a platform of dialogue between Facebook and Google and so on, and with professional journalists. Google specifically set up the Digital News Co-Prosperity Fund to help the journalists, in addition to using broadcast media, also tap into this sort of social media or precision targeting media or ...

Well, so… There are two things going on, actually, in your question. One is that how does journalists’ work, fact-checking, context-making, and so on, transmit to the people who do not have a habit of receiving broadcast journalist media? I’ll answer this one first.