At the end of the day, Facebook is a platform for advertising and entertainment

A public square is something that’s in the social sector that people administer together and co-govern.

I think that was because many democratic jurisdictions were confusing Facebook with the public square.

Yes. It not only can be used, it has been used to jeopardize democracies. It’s very well documented.

Now the next question, “I was really interested in what you said about Facebook and potential impact on democracy. For example, Cambridge Analytica. Don’t you think it can be used to jeopardize democracy?”

Once we have that, then it’s much easier for us to talk about societal issues in a way that respects people’s preferences instead of just a single authoritarian AI training things. So this is my position.

I think we can actually take the governance issue by putting what we call the overview effect to entire city or entire society, but with each person’s assistive AI helping them to comprehend this wicked problem and people’s positions and things like that.

It’s very accountable: If there is bias, that is to say if it’s blurry or it’s skewed, I just fix it myself using some super glue. I actually did that a few months ago. Or bring it to the repair shop down the street. We don’t have to reverse engineer ...

It’s very transparent: It lets me see you more clearly, but it doesn’t push advertisement to my retina.

I often say this assistive way of looking at AI is like my eyeglasses, which is an assistive technology.

I mentioned that I do my language model training on my own laptop. I do believe in edge AI, local AI, open source ones at that, because it gives control to the citizens, to the people benefiting from the AI, and everybody can tune it the way their norms dictate ...

And the main difference is whether it empowers everyday citizens, people closer to the pain, or whether it just empowers the experts or the people with the most GPUs.

Well, then it would also be more centralized, and I’m not sure whether that is a good idea. Because when we say AI, I prefer “assistive intelligence” rather than artificial intelligence or authoritarian intelligence.

Is it possible that the administrative task of a city, region, or a nation can be gradually, at least in part, taken over by an artificial intelligence, because it’s more competent, more neutral, and less corruptible?

There is a new question on Slido. Let’s switch back to that.

If we just stay on this short-termism and look not above the clouds, then everybody is trapped on our own plot of land. So, to promote holistic thinking and use data-generated evidence for international coordination, I think this is the main way that digital technologies can help.

So this is just one example, but it does give people a sort of overview effect. It’s like flying to the International Space Station and see the Earth as one holistic object. And I firmly believe when we get people to that mindset, it does make working on societal challenges ...

You can even easily quantify the environmental impact, which would be impossible without some AI and some digital and communication technology.

Using latest satellite technology, we can easily verify whether people who promise a carbon sink, a forest here, a garden somewhere, are actually delivering the work.

Oh yeah, definitely. Because as you can see from this background, the IT makes visualizing the entire globe easier than usual.

So I made this conversation with myself many years ago, and I’m now very firmly taking care of the planet before even the people. I hope this answers the question.

However, even if we reorganize society to our liking, if we destroy the planet, it’s all for nothing.

Now I’m on Ethereum and Tezos, but I’m not on Bitcoin anymore, which was actually a difficult choice for me to make back then, because I was, as some of you know, a conservative anarchist and believed in the ability of code to reorganize society.

Since then, we very happily saw that Vitalik and his teams successfully migrated Ethereum to proof-of-stake and thereby massively reducing their environmental issues. Then I publicly said that I’m not going to use any proo-of-work coins.

When Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum, visited me in 2016, the main thing we talked about was actually the climate crisis and how the urgency of the climate situation promotes societal changes and how the blockchain community can make a good fork, instead of a bad fork that makes issues ...

At the time, its carbon footprint was negligible because not many people use it. But as Bitcoin started to gain adoption and as I publicly burned my wallets joining the cabinet in 2016, I see more and more of the environmental impacts of that.

And so the large companies that I work with, none of them processed Bitcoin. So they just look at the BTC index and translate to fiat and pay me that much fiat. But I was a very early Bitcoin advocate.

Certainly. Back in 2010, I publicly said that my consultation rate at the time was one Bitcoin per hour, which sounds astronomical now, but back then it was just 100 euros or 200 euros.

And if you don’t do that and just put it on GitHub, of course it makes you more vulnerable to attacks. I hope that answers the question.

But if you just do openness without doing collaboration, then it does make you more vulnerable to attacks because you don’t benefit from your collaborators working with you to make your move secure. We need to plan openness with participation and an accountable way to get democratic input, including white ...

This is why Linux is easier to harden. If you work on security-enhanced Linux, many Linux variants that focus on security, it’s much easier because you do not have to be Linux robots to make such enhancements. Everybody can attack Linux and see its weak points and also improve on ...

So as long as you do the openness in a properly staged way, like first opening in a sandbox or even a honeypot, and then opening through a pilot testing, opening through bug bounty, opening through some ways to incentivize the white hat hackers to work with you, rather than ...

Yes and no. I mean, there are attacks that are adversarial, meaning that they want to achieve a strategic goal, but there are also friendly attacks, like penetration testers, white hat hackers, people who want to help you.

Doesn’t openness make one more vulnerable to attacks?

In Taiwan, we spent 10 years building this solidarity. I see a very similar dynamic back then when I visited Paris in 2016. As long as we keep on such a route, bringing as alliances, civil society, civic tech to the career public service and vice versa, so not just ...

It’s not the parties, not the ideologues, but rather whether we, the civic technologists and the career public service, see each other as complementary forces, as alliances.

So we have seen solidarity between the civic technologists on one side and the reformers, the public service on the other side. To me, that’s always the most important thing.

My main learning when I was becoming the digital minister in 2016, I actually spent 12 months before that, six of which was in Paris. So I was like almost moving to Paris before I joined the cabinet. I witnessed firsthand the first rounds of République Numérique consultations, the participatory ...

What do I think about France’s level of e-government services? I think your level is very good. I consistently see you placed in the top open data or smart city application indexes. In terms of delivering services to the citizens, I think you are obviously very capable.

But if your population does not yet understand the critical details, like in 2014 when people generally didn’t understand that PRC vendors carry this risk, then society-wide deliberations are a great way for people to become aware of such issues.

So I would say it’s just like a trade negotiation. If the citizens are on your side, if the consumer protection, the unions and co-ops are on your side, it’s not a difficult game.

So Facebook in 2019 implemented, I think, one of the first jurisdictions, the full civic integrity measures. Now they’re enrolling in more jurisdictions, but at the time, specifically because they know if they don’t comply, there is a real chance of social sanctioning.

When they adopted this accord on their own, the civil society gave Facebook an ultimatum saying that we have seen what you have done and we have, the civil society, have worked with the government, actually pressured the government into adopting the Sunshine Laws and Open Data Laws on political ...

So the domestic counterparts to Facebook passed the self-regulation to basically treat sponsored ads as political campaign donation, which in Taiwan means you have to publicly publish the details. foreign people are banned from buying such things, just as they cannot donate to political campaigns.

But Facebook was selling bypass-fact-checking as a service. If you just buy advertisements, sponsored ads, it bypasses this entire ecosystem of fact-checking. Closer to the 2018 election, there’s a lot of foreign purchases of targeted advertisements in Taiwan along with social or political campaigns doing micro-targeting and there was absolutely ...

For the most trending ones, people also collaborate voluntarily to give context. Then we adopt a notice and public notice way so that when professional fact-checkers verified the context supplied by the crowd, a mandatory notice restoring the context like Twitter community note is posted.

For example, in 2018, we discovered even though Taiwan has a very good fact-checking ecosystem for real-time response to the trending not coronavirus, mild virus, people voluntarily report the foreign interference even into encrypted channels.

This is an excellent question. What we have found is that those large companies do listen to the civil society if there is a credible threat of social sanction and there is a credible alternative solution.

Given the increase in budgets, technical means and powers of large district companies, what should be, in my opinion, the position that a state should adopt in terms of regulations of over-deployment and also negotiations?

I think voluntary participation through the National Health Insurance System, I think it was key in avoiding both the Orwellian risk, but also the other risk of pandemonium of people just doing whatever they want and spreading the virus.