Just honoring traditions, but without coercing.

I mean, it doesn’t even respect English cultural norms, but it does a better job respecting it. And so my ministry, the National Institute of Cyber Security, is now working on aligning AI so that it is more just epistemically with those different cultures. And that speaks to the conservative ...

At this moment, if you try to interact with those large models, it doesn’t actually speak Taiwanese languages. It speaks a little bit Mandarin, but pretty much nothing else. But that creates a problem, because if you speak Taiwanese Holo or any of the indigenous languages, you will have to ...

And I’m still, you know, working to conserve traditions. So in Taiwan, we’ve got 20 national languages, including the sign language. And if you’re making progress on one of the cultures to sacrifice the other, then that would be optimizing too soon. So always, for example, we just talked about ...

Our current Civil Cybersecurity Act does not extend outside of the critical infrastructure and the public service. So it is true that after becoming the head of the National Cybersecurity, I gained a little bit of top down power over how the public service use their devices and so on. ...

So I believe in voluntary association. That is to say, not coercing people to do things. And fortunately, the Ministry of Digital Affairs, even in our role as the administration for cybersecurity or in my role of chair of National Cybersecurity Institute, it only currently has this, I would say, ...

I’m fine answering that actually. So, yeah, because that’s definitely not a minister question. Right. But OK, I can answer that.

If you specifically ask for, for example, social entrepreneurship or internet broadcasting policy and so on nowadays, because I’m no longer minister at large. These are specifically other ministries’ portfolio.

Oh, really? Yeah. I didn’t know.

And so I still meet them to make a full report. It’s just not on the 空總 previously the Air Force HQ anymore. It’s usually just that meeting room over there. Yeah. So I still meet people both online and face to face, same radical transparency, but no longer social ...

When the civil rights groups ask for a meeting, I still dedicate a lot of time and it’s still the same radical transparency principle. So you can still see the transcripts of, for example, civil society groups asking for broadband as a human right for overseas fishing. People who don’t ...

I definitely still work with civil rights.

That was because I had another portfolio, which is social innovation. So like social entrepreneurship. But that portfolio is now Minister Li Yongde. And so because I transferred the portfolio to him, so the social entrepreneurs now reach Minister Li Yongde instead when they want to go to the social ...

Wednesday.

So all these different units that worked very closely with me for a couple of years after the pandemic, we just put them together and it became a new ministry. So it’s not that life suddenly got these teams of people. These teams of people were already very close to ...

But during the pandemic, the three years, I worked very closely with many, many agencies. For the vaccination, for example, we had to work closely with the part of the National Development Council that does e-services and data. We had to work closely with the part of the Ministry of ...

So meaning that I work through voluntary association with all the ministries and departments and agency that want to work with me, but I’m not giving orders to them because as I said, I was a minister at large with a portfolio. I don’t have my own ministry.

Well, I’m still flying around. (laughter) Yeah. I think back in 2016, when I first got, I guess, promoted from a reverse mentor, really an intern in a cabinet position for two years to the full minister still in the same office, I said quite publicly that I work with ...

Exactly. To cherish that time we have together.

Right. Exactly.

Well, I overheard the doctors. And my parents didn’t deny that. I don’t remember anything before four anyway. It’s like my earliest memory.

Right. When I was four.

Right. So I always lived in an existential risk until I got my surgery in 12. So it’s the entire eight years, which is quite sufficient to form my core personality, where I always try to write down what I learned in a day, publish it to the internet when ...

Well, yeah. So yes and no. I mean, I still attended school, but not in a high energy way. Certainly not sports classes. And so my heart condition was diagnosed when I was just 40 days old. And when I was four, I overheard doctors telling my family that I ...

So the head of school is really good to me. Because then I can take her promise to my parents and say that I don’t have to wait until the end of my ninth grade, end of compulsory education. I can just start a startup, start a company together with ...

So maybe we can just bypass all that. And maybe I can spend 16 hours a day on research. And she said, yeah, you don’t have to go to my school anymore. And I was like, okay, but this is compulsory education. And she’s like, I’ll just fake the records ...

And then like when I was 14, I decided to quit middle school. Not because the head of school is bad to me. Actually, the contrary. She was really, really good to me. But she always wanted me to get the top grades, to get the best high school, to ...

Right. About everything.

Well, of course, my parents are very liberal folks. That really helped. And also that I encountered the internet really early when I was 12. I went back to Taiwan, got my heart surgery for a year and just connected with this world of researchers and people who don’t mind ...

So there’s a lot of intrinsic motivation instead of just extrinsic control in the German system. So I think it had a big influence on me because I always thought that education is in the way of learning because that was always my experience before going to Deutschland. But now, ...

And because it’s like a Pygmalion, in fact, because the adults treated the children as adults, right? They can actually schedule their own rest of the day instead of just spending a very long time in the class and in cram schools, yes. And if they’re on time, like a ...

Thank you. Right. And so my classmates were then one year younger than I am. And before going to Sachland, I was 10 years old, but I’m attending the sixth grade in Taiwan, so my classmates were two years my senior. However, in my own experience, my classmates in Germany ...

Yeah, definitely, definitely. Yeah, because at the time I was 11, but because I don’t speak Deutsch at all when I joined, so I was joining this Gunschule, the Albert-Schweitzer-Grundschule in Dudweiler, Saarland.

Ein bißchen.

Yes, in Saarbrücken.

It would be really nice.

My personal wish is that they see the light and join the democratization.

Right? So, I mean, theoretically, right? If they, I don’t know, sincerely invite you back to help them have a real civil society and journalism and so on, they would be, of course, also contributing to the Declaration of the Future of Internet, and the Summit for Democracy. But at ...

Well, first of all, I think to democratize, that is to say to give people a say, requires a different kind of thinking. A request, for example, trusting journalists in bringing up both the good news and the bad news so everybody can learn and so on.But at the moment, ...

So I think this new type of conversation in which we participate as a full democracy is a really creative way out of the traditional more Westphalian point of view.

So we refer to each other as partners. So there’s no this oh, I don’t know, observer, country/area/territory. (laughter) Or whatever, right? And it’s summit for democracy. It’s not summit of democracies. So this is not the exclusive club. This is just a bunch of partners working together to advance ...

Exactly. So out of this more than 60 now signatories of the declaration for the future of the internet, each and everyone recognizes us as a full democracy, a full partner.

Now I have, right? And that’s thanks to the summit for democracy. Because the summit for democracy, as well as the declaration for the future of the internet, BFI, are this new type of international collaboration in which Taiwan is a full participant. We’re referred to as a partner or ...

And so I think, like Finland recently decided that they want to also invest in Polis following Taiwan and Canada and New Zealand and so on, to be part of the democratic infrastructure. Because the free software is open source, that means that each country’s investment is of benefit to ...

So it’s a very nuanced consensus. And once the people has this consensus, what the public sector does, what the private sector does, it’s obvious. And so we resolved that issue of emerging technology. We’ve used Polis for many things, Airbnb, privacy preserving, contact tracing, many things.

What do we do, right? And then overwhelmingly, the consensus was that actually, you probably need to get a professional driver’s license for that, and the insurance registration, and so on. But Uber also had a point in saying surge pricing helps the drivers. But then the people said, but ...

(laughter)

Maybe what really is needed is, as we did starting 2015, when UberX first came to Taiwan, we asked everyone, including taxi unions, Uber drivers, and passengers, what do we do if someone with no professional driver license drives to earn a living picking up strangers and say, I’m just ...

Yeah. And indeed, what Taiwan’s experience was always what we call People First PPP. So People Public-Private Partnership. So before going into a long debate about the state should regulate more, the private sector should innovate more, and so on.

And this actually, no matter which side you’re on, you all agree. Literally everybody agree. So pro-social media is something that can surface those common values that are often neglected in the anti-social media.