Of course. That problem of surveillance, essentially, only appears when you have a centralized authority doing all the bookkeeping. But there are also ways to decentralize contact tracing, as it were.

But using the idea of humor over rumor, the very next day, we push out this meme where a very cute dog, a Shiba Inu, like the DOGE dog, put her paw to her mouth saying, wear a mask to remind each other to keep your dirty and washed hand ...

Yeah, indeed. In the first year in 2020, we only lost seven people to COVID. Throughout the three years, we’ve never announced any city-wide lockdown. And more importantly, the administration never did any takedown when it comes to social media or journalism. Because, according to the vTaiwan consultations, people think ...

So, in 2014, right after the Sunflower movements, a cabinet minister, Jaclyn Tsai, basically said the government, the existing apparatus is slower than the pace of innovation of emerging technologies. So we need to upgrade our democracy so it matches the speed of emerging technologies with more bandwidth between people ...

Now, we have silicon technology, like Polis. For example, when you answer the statement about search pricing, or other statements like insurance, you see your avatar, your picture moving in this two-dimension space on your screen toward the people who share your opinions, and you see the other side as ...

Well, it is a social technology, right? In ancient Greece, people used this randomization device where they put their names into this stone tablet thing and just drew lots and then selected a random column to serve as the deliberators for the day. That was like stone technology.

When you see the Polis platform, all it does is show you one statement from your fellow citizen, like “I don’t think undercutting meters is fine, but surge pricing may be a good idea,” for example. And then, you can agree or disagree or pass on. But there’s no reply ...

We sent SMS and emails and invited Uber drivers, Uber passengers, taxi drivers, unions to join this online platform, Polis.

During that time, we built the vTaiwan platform to use this kind of bridge-making algorithm to resolve other things without physically occupying government buildings. But we built online spaces to resolve issues, for example, when Uber first came to Taiwan in 2015, they engaged drivers with no professional driver license, ...

I was tapped to join the cabinet at the end of 2014 as a reverse mentor, a young person, younger than 35, that advised a cabinet minister.

I think the point here is that if you just look at the anti-social corner of social media, you will think that they are really polarized, but that’s an illusion. Actually, most people agree with most of their neighbors, most of the time, on most of the things.

Around that time, 10 years ago, many people around the world are figuring out the same question, which is, if we give virality not to the extremes, but to the bridge makers. What if we reward instead the people who can build these bridges so that both sides who don’t ...

That is exactly right. We used the systems designed by Occupy movements elsewhere. First from Occupy Wellington in New Zealand. They built this platform called Loomio, and later on we switched to Polis, which is another platform built by the Occupy Seattle people.

It’s like, the more extreme you are, the more megaphone you hold. So we in the occupied parliament built a different space, which I refer to as pro-social media.

We called ourselves not just protesters, who are usually against something, but rather demonstrators building a demo, which is showing a better system. Since we know that in the anti-social corners of social media, the engagement is through enragement, so the things that are on extremes are amplified.

We’ve been here before. For the past 12 years, Taiwan has indeed been the top target for polarization attacks, and we have seen the polarization effects firsthand. In 2014, half a million people went to the street and we peacefully occupied our parliament for three weeks to protest the trade ...

Thank you for the great question.

Yes.

Very happy to be here.

If you just look at the anti-social corner of social media, you will think that they are really polarized, but that’s an illusion. Actually, most people agree with most of their neighbors, most of the time, on most of the things.

The government needs to trust the people before the people trust the government back. To give no trust is to get no trust.

The existing apparatus is slower than the pace of innovation of emerging technologies. So we need to upgrade our democracy.

Since we know that in the anti-social corners of social media, the engagement is through enragement, so we in the occupied parliament built a different space which I refer to as pro-social media.

We want to send a message to the world that we’re here to show that authoritarianism actually does not deliver as well as democracy. And if people around the world can echo this message because no democracy is an island, not even Taiwan. And if we can all band together, ...

Definitely. Keep up the great work! Live long and prosper. 🖖

Amazing. Blackpool North. That sounds remarkably accessible from Oxford.

Definitely. As you know, I’m new to the technical part of the field, though I’ve been in the policy part for a long time. I will be spending much more time visiting technical communities. I literally started with the FHI folks in Oxford, so if there are other high-value ones, ...

Yes. Let’s make it happen.

Amazing. Well, I think we’re in the lucky timeline — we only took an hour but managed to align on everything we have talked about. So obviously, alignment is possible between researchers.

And also give us shared vocabulary. A lot of this is reminiscent of theoretical physics, where a good experiment can unify many different theoretical branches because they suddenly realize they’re talking about the same thing.

I think the hope of the Metta AI simulator is that at least the parts around group dynamics and takeover scenes—they even have a scenario called “Clips versus Cogs,” where the Clips try to turn everything into paperclips and Cogs try to defend—can at least put some of these technical ...

Maybe they’re both right and the world ends either way, but yes.

Indeed, the same technology that translates “climate justice” to “creation care” and back can be used to translate among the different alignment vocabularies.

I agree. This could also be a good bootstrap phase toward CEV, assuming CEV is achievable.

Like participatory design over lightcones.

If, at that point, we figure out that it is technically impossible to climb another ladder, then a strong, horizontally aligned group intelligence would stop there instead of committing suicide. Which is one of the good endings.

I think what CBV means by “blending” is not averaging. Each human has an incommensurable, irreducible set of preferences. Instead of extrapolating, which will only diverge, we need to figure out a way we can “live and let live,” and make this agreement coherent such that everybody in a hyperlocal ...

Well, that is not different from the way we would explain today to humans from two hundred years ago?

Are you familiar with the Ben Goertzel idea from 2012? The main idea is that instead of extrapolating human volition, which allows a razor-thin margin of error and is very difficult anyway, we focus on the capacity of humans to blend their volitions over time.

This would manifest not as slaves bound to single human principals, which doesn’t work, but rather as a team coach or facilitator that works toward a fiduciary duty to the <em> relationship </em> between human actors. The core insight is that loyalty is not to single human preferences or any ...

A core insight is that We, the People, are <em> already </em> the superintelligence we’re looking for. I’m picturing the latent human communities as superintelligence. What is needed for superhuman-level strengths is not something outside our moral scope, but something we can always reason about in a hyperlocal way.

Okay. First, I remember the phrase you used: “applause lights.” I will try to keep applause lights to zero in my answer.

I’m just happy to calibrate our wordings. A lot of written words can be interpreted in various ways. Almost like a late Wittgensteinian “fly out of the bottle.”

The intuition here is that we are composed of “dividuals”—shards or whatever—that are specimens of multiple different hyperlocalities. If we achieve some sort of internal coherence through negotiation, then it emerges in each bottom-up level. Hyperlocal morality gets resolved at a slightly higher level, but never at the very top ...