We now have not just three but potentially four presidential candidates. So, it is far from me to say that, oh, I think this candidate, that candidate, they will nominate this person as head of cabinet. There are just too many variables for me to comment in a matter-of-fact way ...

So, it is not for me to say and also it is not yet for any of the presidential candidates to say because the cabinet head, the premier, is not part of the ticket. We vote for president and vice president but they don’t say who will be the head ...

Well, I’m a double appointee, as you know, so people directly elect the president but the president appoints the premier or the head of the cabinet and then that person assembles their cabinet.

Yeah, I think we’re very forward now. We’ve all embraced generative AI and as I mentioned, we focus on edge AI, local AI that can be tuned, trained by the students and also ones that can be democratically aligned to fit the social norm.

So, I would say, yes, we changed our education just in time for generative AI because anything that requires memorization and comprehension and whatever probably can be delegated to personal AIs and it is the creativity, the autonomy, the common good, the competence that makes sense now.

Exactly, exactly. So that’s why we made it a focus to switch from literacy, comprehend something, to competence, make something. Education, I was part of the basic education curriculum committee that in 2019 have this new curriculum that focused on the sort of common good, autonomy and interaction, competence-based education.

So, this had an impression on me in that, oh, actually the children can make important decisions concerning themselves and we should trust children to join also in public participation before they turn 18 because if you shield them from the democratic and civic process before they’re 18, they don’t ...

In Taiwan, the kids stay kids in their family until at least 18, but sometimes older. But in Germany, I was 12 when I was in Germany and my classmates were 11, I believe. No, I was 11 and my classmates were 10. But the adults are treating those 10-year-olds ...

Yes. I had a very good education and experience in Dudweiler near Saarbrücken because it’s close to the France (34:30-34:33) border. So, we had a bilingual education actually. And it’s very nice because even though I don’t speak any bit of German or French when joining, still at a very ...

And the second thing is that on, say, Facebook and so on, I don’t have a newsfeed. I use a software called Newsfeed Eradicator that removes the newsfeed. So, I use Facebook like a blog. I post something, a video or some thoughts. I go search, look for hashtags and ...

So, ever since the days of Palm Pilot, which is long ago, I’ve always used the stylus on the screen, right? So, this screen is actually also a tablet and I always interact with it through a stylus or a mouse or a keyboard, but never a touch screen. And ...

Yeah, so I use social media in two conditions. One is that I never touch the screen because when I touch the screen, very quickly, it becomes the screen controlling my finger, not my finger controlling the screen because they were designed by a persuasion technologist that are designed to ...

And so why people quickly trust each other and distrust each other, that becomes the main fascination.

And so that really fascinated me and how the researchers, as I mentioned, are willing to share, even before they publish to the journalists, their ideas with completely random people they met across the internet. So, I made it my research focus to focus on what makes the swift trust ...

However, because across the screen, you cannot abduct me anyway, right? So, the harm is limited across the screen. And because of that, people come to trust the people they just met across the screen and talk about the most intimate and personal things because they know that it’s harder ...

How quickly people trusted complete strangers online was the thing that fascinates me. It’s called swift trust, right? Because face-to-face, my parents would say, don’t go to strangers’ homes. If the stranger gives you a treat, don’t take it, and so on. I mean, there are social norms in the ...

Yeah. 15 is important for legal purposes because in Taiwan, child labor legally begins at 15.

Yeah, they’re much older. They’re 25.

So, I quit school, quit attending school when I was 14, but I started my company, co-founded really, when I was 15.

And because that was very early days of the World Wide Web and of archive, everybody was very open, very eager to make new friends. Still nowadays, ARXIV, hosts the leading edge, not just artificial intelligence, but many other fields of research. So, the head of my school said, yeah, ...

Yes, certainly. So, I remember when I was 14, 15, I talked to the head of my school, Principal Du Huiping, and I said, “Madam, I don’t want to go to school anymore.” And she’s like, oh, did anyone hurt you, were you bullied? And things like that. And I’m ...

And so, this is a new form of hybrid multistakeholder and multilateral relationships. Our membership in the DFI, our membership in the Democracy Summit Declaration, in many similar recent arrangements, simply joining as a full partner or the full democracy.

In the Declaration for the Future of the Internet, the DFI, there are more than 60 democratic partners, and Taiwan is one of them. So, instead of saying that Taiwan is a jurisdiction, slash area, slash country, slash self-governing island, or whatever, we simply refer to ourselves and each other ...

No, no, it’s just scientifically, we only know that these come from outside of Taiwan, from the subsea cables. Its IP address may show that it belongs to this jurisdiction or that jurisdiction, but we also know that the attackers use botnets across different jurisdictions. So, we wouldn’t simply, because ...

I would say, as I mentioned, quoting Wellington Koo, Secretary General of our NSC, there’s more than five million cyber-attack attempts every single day from foreign sources.

So, not just the existing geosynchronous satellite, but also middle-Earth orbit like SES, or low-Earth orbit like OneWeb, but we also say, you know, the more, the merrier, right? If one spot has three, four, five different satellites, and if the data and the system that we need running are ...

One way we learned from the Ukrainian experience was that there’s a strength in plurality. So, right now, as we speak, the more than 700 satellite receiver project, the emergency resilience project, the 700 spots are specified to have more than one satellite provider as backup.

So, the DIA team, before they repurposed DIA for this purpose, they actually already were part of the Open Government Partnership, and we had met, like, the ProZorro system and so on. That was just all before the illegal and brutal Russian invasion. So, there were already some connections, as ...

So, when our civil society gets into contact with these people, they don’t have to, like, send an official MOU or something, because it’s all out there in the open, and it’s literally just some URLs, some hyperlinks. And once they develop this, we call it civic technology, then our ...

And because many of these are what we call public code, meaning that the software and the policy that enable the software are out there, like, transparently. Estonia very famously shared the X-road system with Iceland and Finland together. So, this is a democratic alliance maintaining the same software public ...

Yeah, I think one of the main strengths in Taiwan is that we have a very, very strong civil society. So, when the civil society people, like the ones you mentioned, finds, for example, Ukraine has this new way of doing things, they immediately get into people-to-people contact and exchanges ...

And we also learned from Ukraine in working with non-terrestrial networks, specifically non-geostationary satellites. And so, before end of next year, we will have more than 700, some fixed, some mobile, satellite receivers in Taiwan to provide emergency communication, especially to journalists and disaster response teams if our subsea cables ...

Yeah, we learned a lot from the Ukrainian experience. As you know, Ukraine also has more than one telecom provider, and they enabled what we call disaster roaming, right? So that even when your SIM card is registered to a telecom and that telecom’s infrastructure is gone, you can still ...

And this year, although we saw comparable DDoS attacks and other assaults, it did not achieve the kind of results, as you said, last August anymore, because, as I mentioned, we switched to zero-trust defense systems, as well as asking people to help keeping us afloat, right, by making sure ...

So, the cyber-attack arm and the information manipulation arm, they work in tandem, very coordinated, last August. The goal, of course, was to make our people not believe in democratic institutions, to make our people panic, to make the stock market crash, maybe. But on that day, the stock market ...

Yeah, I mean, that was just a few weeks before the Ministry of Digital Affairs started last August. And we, of course, saw that it was highly coordinated, right? It first disrupts the websites. It’s called denial-of-service attacks. And then it posts the hateful messages and so on, as you ...

Yeah, I think so. It’s certainly one of, if not the, right, the hottest spots. If you look for the varieties of democracy or V-Dem research, the V-Dem research has consistently placed Taiwan on the top, under the kind of threat. It’s, I think, a Sweden-based institute. So, if you ...

But where did it originate outside of Taiwan? Did it go through what’s called botnet or zombie network, whether it goes through Tor or VPN or things like that? That varies. So, to be scientifically accurate, we just make a distinction between domestic and foreign interventions.

We say foreign manipulation and foreign cyber-attacks because we’re a bunch of islands, right? So, we can tell whether an internet traffic is domestic from within our jurisdiction or external, that’s to say, travel to Taiwan via subsea cables, for example.

And so, these three doors, they don’t belong to the same company. So, because of that, even if the cyber-attack compromises one of the three doors, it still gets stopped by the other two doors, and they’ve wasted an attack, because then we will share the threat indicator with the ...

But, like, this year, all our ministry, our underlying administrations are completely password-free. So nowadays, when I want to use official systems, I use this phone that checks my fingerprint, but my fingerprint stays on the phone. And another software checks the phone so that it’s not changed or replaced, ...

We already adopted what we call a zero-trust posture, meaning that we’re shifting away from passwords. Passwords are very easily phished or scammed or things like that. And after they gain the username and password, they can escalate its privilege and then post hate messages or some other stuff on ...

Yeah, it’s not specifically leading up to any big day or something. According to the Secretary General of our National Security Council, Wellington Koo, every day we face, like, five million attack attempts. So, it’s not like there’s no cyber-attacks, and closer to the election we get some, we get ...

So, this kind of personal computing or assistive intelligence is why we have this positive outlook, and maybe because we make most of the chips, I guess. [laughter] So, this is not a mythical thing for us. This is just a product that our supply chain makes.

First, it must never replace people. It must be assistive, not automated. And second, if it pertains to personal data, then the entire running and training and everything need to happen off the internet. It needs to be done, as I said, on my MacBook, closer to the edge, not ...

But in Taiwan, thanks to the kind of collaborative fact-checking, literacy turned into competence, education, resilience, we successfully overcame the polarizing effect of social media AI on our society. So, this time, when faced with generative AI, for example, our cabinet passed a regulation, a guideline on public sector use ...

I think part of our positive outlook is that we have successfully countered the threats posed by the previous engagements of AI. For example, the social media recommendation algorithm is a kind of AI, right? It’s not generative, but it chooses what kind of posts will get the most clicks, ...

And so, I think the main point I’m making is that first, it needs to belong to the people at the edge, closest to where people are. And second, it needs to be democratically aligned, meaning that people should be able to train it themselves and in a scalable way. ...

But for the community, we also do what we call alignment assemblies, which we gather in a city. We’ve done this in Taipei and Tainan. We ask people for a month online to see what they feel about generative AI. And we invite the people who raise very good points ...

Now, what we are essentially saying is that it needs to be closest to where the people are. The people need to have ways to not just run their own AI, like the way that I, on my MacBook, as we speak, run the local AI, that not just transcribe ...