And key to today’s meeting actually is this idea of privacy enhancing technologies or PETs. The idea is to… Because we already have a new Personal Data Protection Act in effect now that massively increase the penalty for privacy, personal data breaches and things like that. So, the ecosystem is ...

Definitely. We were just at the all hands meeting of the cabinet level privacy meeting. So. we are going to have an independent data protection authority GDPR style later this year. We now have a working office to where it’s not reporting to the ministry, because just like the GDPR, ...

Exactly, exactly. It’s like how Ukraine open sourced their DIA app so that like any super app, anyone who wants to build add-ins or modules on top of it can build on a shared open infrastructure instead of being vendor locked to a single assistant integrator.

So, these are just two very quick examples involving reimbursement, but there are many more involving data infrastructure and so on. So, my vision is for anything that concerns two or more municipalities to be done in the public infrastructure way, but we don’t control how it’s used. Rather, it’s ...

And again, using this idea of public infrastructure, we work with the most advanced cities such as Taipei City and say every other city need to interoperate, at least to this level, so that the other cities and counties no longer need to do their own infrastructure level procurement and ...

Now, it is not just handing out to citizens. There’s another public infrastructure that ADI is doing that aims to simplify reimbursement processes for social welfare organizations or, for example, the long-term health care organizations and so on. It used to be that they require different invoice formats, different proof ...

Now, because this is done in a public infrastructure budget, it means that all the municipalities, starting from this year, when they want to do anything that resembles cash handouts or anything like that, they don’t have to build this accessibility, resilience and cybersecurity from scratch. Instead, we provide as ...

Now, last year, because TSMC and friends paid too much tax, right, than we expected the legislature passed an act that says, you know, now there’s a free cash handout. Each and every individual of Taiwan, 23 million people is going to receive around 200 US dollars just because they’re ...

I’ll use one quick example. Previously, when each municipality want to issue like stimulus coupons or cash handouts or reimbursements and so on to people, they usually do it their own way, which means the richer cities like Taipei do it in a way that’s accessible and inclusive and so ...

Yeah, that’s a great question. As the cabinet CIO, it’s not just our ministry, but all the ministries that have a component of digital transformation that we consider as infrastructure worthy and therefore, provided to municipalities.

Yeah, just like having no tap water if you don’t have problem during the Covid.

This is the main development since the previous year.

But starting this year, we’ve been adopting the public code infrastructure which actually comes from the Netherlands and now we are working with the National Development Council, so that all the common requirements from the local municipalities - they don’t need to do this competitive bidding anymore. We will just ...

Okay, great. Yeah, the smart city budget was part of the science and technology budget, but starting this year, we’ve changed our, like, public digital infrastructure as a new pocket, right? And so, just like building bridges and highways and so on, building the digital twins of the cities and ...

Thank you.

Yeah. Just today, the administration began the process to become the competent authority for large online advertisement platforms such as Google, Facebook, and TikTok. Simple stuff.

Mm-hmm. Great. So, have you already introduced yourself already or maybe we do a very quick-rounded self-introduction?

Okay. Great.

Wow. Congrats.

…works with my counterpart.

Of course.

Great.

Yeah.

And that is not because we became much more democratic. It is because we keep at our democracy while the other democracy backslid, especially during the three years of pandemic. So, again, this is not about chasing some democratic ideal to the detriment of future choices. This is about responding ...

Yeah, so our hashtag, official hashtag for our ministry is hashtag free the future. And so, yes, I think it’s always a tempting vice, really, to design anything perfect. I see myself as just a good enough ancestor, someone good enough to open up possibilities. So the next generation, who ...

Yeah, there’s a policy chapter in my new book. But the main idea is don’t see Taiwan as somewhere exceptional, because as I mentioned, back in 2014, the administration was enjoying less than 10% approval rate. Political apathy was at all time high. And as recent as 2008, people dispute ...

Most of the fact checking ecosystem here in Taiwan is powered by the antivirus ecosystem. So TrendMicro, Gogolook and so on. They take the Cofacts database to participate in the governance, but it’s still comprehensive packages that protects against unsolicited calls and messages. Like there’s an app called message Checker ...

That’s a three hour seminar. I think most of my work can be done with private sector taking care of the infrastructure. If NCU, their governance structure is democratic, that is to say, if they’re subject to the same oversight and accountability. And there’s some people trying that, right? The ...

And so the ideas of participation, progress and safety were usually what three ministers or two ministers fight. But in our case, it’s all in my head. So anything we do is to increase the overlap between participation, progress and safety. The inbox chase only becomes a problem if you ...

Yeah, so training an email replying model really helps. I can still read everything before I send, but the model does most of the drafting, so there’s that. And there’s also about the design of our ministry. Our ministry really is three very different parts that will belong to at ...

But if we had already opposed people and said that all these people, these parties, always say the wrong things and so on, then they will not become carriers and fellow inoculators in the firebank.

So when a new situation arise, they can just slap on some clarifications and memes and so on, and then instantly make something very funny to the general public. And so I think this kind of rapid response, we see it as just like cybersecurity, like time is of essence. ...

And so for this particular thing, I think it’s always easier for us to simply say, we respond instantly. There’s this idea of two, two, two, which means that for each polarizing narrative, we respond with two modalities, like a short video and a picture or a press release or ...

Indeed, that’s a great question. So prebunking is not about, again, it’s not about anticipatory debunking, particular operations. It is about the overarching narratives and letting people know that there’s going to be manipulations using those narratives coming, but there’s no telling which particular form or which social issue it’s ...

It’s like the good side of populism without the bad side of polarization. And so when politicians start adopting this, and I would say President Tsai Ing-wen is a master in adopting this particular kind of politics, taking all the sides, building bridges. And so this then has a leadership ...

I think that’s literally true. Instead of just polarizing more and more across the same two groups of people, you polarize across different axis when a new social issue comes. And so in Taiwan, we’ve been very intentional in phrasing our social conversations so that it’s always possible for people ...

I know. Yeah. We’ve had our own share of peak polarization and populism around 2018, so I totally hear you. And I’ve just co wrote a book on this. It’s at plurality net. We are finalizing the english edition this Sunday, but most of it is online. It’s free of ...

I think it is this larger environmental context that made their grand narrative really doesn’t work. That is going to provide a backdrop for the next a4 or a3 white paper revolution. And these tools, they may be somewhat useful when people want to communicate across censorship, but these are ...

Great. Yeah, I think I was interviewed by the VOA. So I basically said that you can package the whole VOA into a few hundred gigabytes and then send it as a USB stick or whatever, and then people have this interactive VOA that they can interact with. So I ...

And something that is much more persuasive than any normal human has the right to be. They published it publicly, right? I think it’s good for science that they publish, but I don’t think the human civilization is ready for this kind of capabilities yet. And so part of the ...

I don’t think humanity is ready for those precision persuasions. I read a paper by ByteDance researchers. It’s called Linear Alignment, that’s the title of the paper. It basically is a very interesting way to turn what’s called alignment fine tuning during their training phase, which was usually expensive, and ...

But because we’ve got more infrastructural budgets, and we say that as long as it’s going to be used twice or more across different agencies, then it qualifies as infrastructure. So we can afford to pay the upfront cost of red teaming, of collaborative red teaming, even of collective evaluation ...

In Taiwan, we have a program called public code. So it’s not just open source, but rather it is open source that is used first or initially in the government that makes algorithmic decisions or things like that. And so it’s transparent because of governmental accountability, not just because to ...

That’s a great question. I think a lot of the frontier model labs, of course, they take from open source, but they don’t contribute back, mostly because they were afraid that those frontier models can be used in a primarily open source manner. If they now, well, maybe Taiwan is ...

But recently, thanks to the forming of Moda, we’ve had a lot of very good exchange with the audit office and the HR audits and so on. And because we can prove that during the three years of the pandemic, the people who meet every week to design revenue responses, ...

And it’s very popular with not just open source contributors like Vitalik Buterin, who have contributed for eight years on a small project called Ethereum, but also his fellow Ethereum hackers, many of them from Argentina and so on, who don’t normally have the credentials required for Gokart application. So ...

Okay, great question. So you’re all invited as gold card holders. So we have this quite innovative program, the gold card, which was very popular during the pandemic. A lot of my friends in Silicon Valley, whether they work in startup or science or research, they prove that they’re expert ...

So the idea is just like a blue tick. If you don’t see a short code, that’s a scam. Unless, of course, we’ve met face to face and exchange our address code on WhatsApp or whatever. But otherwise, it’s always assumed to be a spam. And this is a marked ...

So that’s the first point. And the second point is none of this require cutting edge hardware. I kill my own email replying models on this MacBook, and it means that just capping GPUs or whatever doesn’t work because for scammers, they have eight advantage in that it doesn’t have ...

Yes, I of course think that it’s qualitatively different. Everybody get to be a shapeshifter now. It used to take a, because we have 20 national languages, if someone really fluent in one language or one culture, to scam people in that culture. But now that restriction is gone, anyone ...