Yes. People know I sleep for eight hours a day; I have to do that. It’s my routine. But I don’t do it “perfectly”—eight hours consecutively. Sometimes I wake up in the middle; sometimes, because of jet lag, I do four and four, or three and three and two. It ...

But “Plurality” means being humble—not destroying the canvas, but also not overcrowding it, leaving future generations a wider canvas on which to paint. So that, when we log out of this world, we leave behind a bigger canvas than the one we logged into. That’s “good-enough ancestry”—not perfect, not bad, ...

That’s my job description. The idea is not to solve everything for the next generation—to be a “perfect” ancestor. Because no matter what “optimal” means, if we try to converge on a single vision, we take possibilities away from future generations. We’d be designing their lives for them.

When we see the Internet of Things, let’s make it an Internet of Beings.When we see Virtual Reality, let’s make it Shared Reality.When we see Machine Learning, let’s make it Collaborative Learning.When we see User Experience, let’s make it about Human Experience.And whenever we hear “the Singularity is near,” let ...

When I first became Digital Minister in 2016, there had been no Digital Minister before in Taiwan. So the people in the Executive Yuan—our Cabinet—asked me to write my own job description. I wrote one when I was in Wellington, New Zealand. It’s very short and goes like this:

Sure.

Yes, I want to be a good-enough ancestor.

In high resolution. We were like pen pals.

Okay.

Yeah. The public domain doesn’t need to extend to your podcast—you can use whatever license.

You can do it for your podcast. I will just publish it as text.

Yes, you can edit however you want and use it for your podcast.

Yeah, public domain.

Yeah, I don’t defer the debt. Interest rate too high.

Yeah, or five and two and one.

If I can, but it doesn’t matter. I can also do four and four.

Till I sleep. That’s right.

Yes.

(laughs) Yes, we have here a full hour.

Earlier this month, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that the company would discontinue its third-party fact-checking program in the United States and, taking a cue from social media platform X, pivot to a “community notes” model to address misinformation.

Two main factors underpin this decision. First, for years, large numbers ...

The recent appointment of an “AI and Crypto Czar” by U.S. President-elect Donald Trump has sparked significant discussion in Washington. This personnel move signals a significant shift in U.S. AI strategy, moving beyond traditional defensive measures like chip export controls to a more proactive approach focused on bolstering domestic research ...

Recently, I attended the convening of International AI Safety Institutes in San Francisco to share how Taiwan addresses the harms caused by synthetic AI.

“Safety” has emerged as one of the global AI community’s paramount concerns. Over the past year, governments, industries, and academia worldwide have held summits in the ...

Great. Until next time, live long and prosper.

It was very, very low. But based on radical transparency and civic participation, we’re able to rebuild that. In 2020 it was 70% and it’s now, like, consistently over 50%. So I think we were able to essentially recover from the trust crisis not by asking people to trust government, ...

They can already look at the entire history of relevant data to make decision with. Because then the trust is built in a way that is part of the social fabric. Instead of just focusing on a few stakeholder groups doing consultations and so on, you see gradual increasing of ...

Sure. I always say to give no trust is to get no trust. So instead of asking people to rebuild trust, first ask how much can you trust the people? If you work in policymaking, you can make your decision-making process more transparent, more auditable. You can trust people with ...

And once they empower each other, then you get something beautiful which is a civic technology community.

So there’s a real disconnect in Europe and other places of people, people who are technologists working in the free and open realm, and people who are community organizers and educators and so on. So one of the main things that the government can invest in is just to bring ...

So it can be rolled out as infrastructure. And I think in the European Union there’s already very good examples like the German sovereign tech fund and so on that funds this kind of effort. The main challenge nowadays is just that people are not generally aware of it. People ...

And so once people get into that mindset, like a maker mindset, it’s much more likely that people will see technology as something that works with the people, not just for the people. And so part of what the government can do is to invest in what we call public ...

But, yeah, so, yeah, I mean, in addition to that, I would also say that the more technologies are in the open, as in free software and open source, the more likely that people will be able to bend the technology to their actual needs so that it doesn’t feel ...

And broadband is a human right.

Technology as just moving too fast, something happens to us. Yes.

It’s possible to disclose that you’re above age 18 without disclosing your birthday or your birth year. And it’s possible now to disclose that you’re not a bot without disclosing anything else. So we should encourage investment into those privacy technologies so that we can solve the bot-or-not problem without ...

And those bots should not have freedom of speech. So the idea of personhood credentials is not to show anyone any of your private information. The idea of personhood credential is just to show that you’re not a bot. I think we need to very clearly delineate these two. And ...

Right. But that is what’s happening with bots online. So I think it’s one thing to say that as a person I should enjoy anonymous speech. It’s another thing to say I should be able to run 2,000 bots, each pretending to be a different person. I don’t think there’s ...

Well, I mean, in real life, like I’m talking to you, and if you anonymize yourself like, I don’t know who you are, and maybe you wear some masking apparatus still, that I know it’s one person that I’m talking to. It’s not likely that the next split second you ...

So that is a matter of commons. And of course people have to come together and deliberate.

And he says that nowadays social media, some of them are like mixing the tap water with the sewer system. And if in the city even just, you know, 2% of sewer gets mixed up with the tap water, you would say it’s a broken system. You wouldn’t say the ...

Right. It’s a commons issue. It’s a democratic governance of commons. Right. Like in some European countries, the water is a commons. So of course people have to come together and deliberate about that. And I work with Project Liberty, I’m a senior fellow at Project Liberty Institute and the ...

That’s right. Without democratic control. Yeah, because when we run the citizen assembly online, we found that the people don’t want the government to look into the content. Like content level moderation is something they don’t want the government to do, but digital signature actor level authentication, they’re like, yeah, ...

It is exactly what the people want and you’re violating that. Yep.

So this rule was crowdsourced by an online citizen assembly in Taiwan and many other jurisdictions. I’m not saying they should copy what Taiwan has passed, but at least they can consider running something like a citizens assembly so that they can show conclusively to the social media companies that ...

It is already this case in Taiwan. If Facebook does not secure the digital signature or KYC of a celebrity and post advertisement and somebody gets conned for 1 million, then Facebook is now in Taiwan liable for that 1 million, which is why they have implemented good KYC rules ...

Also another big part is just to make sure that the online ecosystem have a kind of fact checking component in it. I mean, on X.com there’s community notes, you can sign up for jury duty, YouTube, there’s something like that as well. And I think going forward we can ...

For example, in classrooms in Taiwan we always prefer to use large tablets or large laptops. So the screen is for sharing and not for isolating against other people. And we do that very consistently all through K12. And so showing people the right mode to engage with the social ...

So for example, my phone is always in grayscale mode because that’s the way that my mind works. If it’s colorful, I get addicted. If it’s grayscale, it doesn’t. Or people sometimes interact with the stylus or with a keyboard and mouse and again not a touchscreen, so it’s less ...

Yeah, so one thing I would definitely suggest is not getting addicted to the touchscreen. Because if you’re addicted, your mind works in a very different configuration that makes it much more susceptible to spreading viral hate or harm or things like that. And if you’re looking at it in ...

Generally bad for mental health.

Yeah, I mean, if they can’t vote yet to the presidential election because they’re too young, at least they can vote in participatory budget within their school or something. You can do that every week. You can have citizens’ initiatives and many other platforms for them to exercise that muscle ...