My main achievement is, I would say, that these three working conditions, far from being experimental, are now ratified as national-level regulations. For the open government, we have the participation officer network in each ministries, and some municipal government, too.

I’m mostly in the Social Innovation Lab in the Ren’ai road used to be the Air Force headquarters, or I tour around Taiwan to bring, through telepresence, the 12 ministries related to social innovation to everywhere that’s not as connected to the Taipei City to make sure that we empower ...

The third thing, in addition to radical transparency and voluntary association, is called location independence. Wherever I’m working, I’m working. This is more like our recording studio now. I’m not here most of the time.

The second is voluntary association. My office is one secondment from each ministry that voluntarily participates. For example, the Foreign Service is Joel, before Joel, Aurora, and so on a rotating basis in the sense that each ministry can send at most one secondment. All innovations are actually done by ...

As for achievements, I entered the cabinet upon three conditions. First one is radical transparency. Everything that I chair, including this very interview, is published to the public under the Creative Commons Zero Public Domain License so that everybody can learn from it.

Also use engagement, like when the younger people determine there is a better way forward for the society, we, the older generation, make sure that we realize whatever their ambitions and directions are, like through reverse mentorship. These are my main duties and obligations.

My three main mandate is open government, meaning that when we don’t know what’s going on, we ask the people what to do, and social innovation, like when people have a better idea, they tell us what to do.

We in the cabinet – all of us are on the ground floor – work on cross-ministerial issues, that is to say things that are not very clearly cut when it comes to the responsibility and their roles. When there’s emerging digital technologies that threaten to disrupt people’s lives, or ...

My office, the Public Digital Innovation Space, is not a ministry. I’m one of the horizontal ministers, at which there’s eight at this moment called 政務委員 or ministers without portfolio, whereas there’s 32 ministries with their own minsters that are vertical.

That’s right. We’ll be sending you a transcript for co-editing. We can embargo the publication of the transcript after you publish. That’s fine.

Functional? Yes.

We have an entire hour to ourselves.

Awesome.

Yeah, he keeps saying, you say it applies to all the cases. What about this? You just said that, but it’s a correlation of the position. And so on and so forth. But he taught me to really not just think, but also communicate in such a way that makes ...

Very much so. Very much so, yeah. My dad raised me using the Socratic method. So, he never gave me any answer to my problems. But he kept asking.

I’m really pro-journalism.

So, in such arrangements, it’s difficult to imagine how they could then get accurate preference data that respond to people’s needs in the here and now. So, that’s going to be another advantage in addition to the chip advantage.

And so, that would create an advantage over authoritarian jurisdictions when it comes to data collection, because for authoritarian jurisdictions, they don’t even know people’s true preferences. People are not going to say their true preferences to authoritarian regime. And the people who really know about this, currently doesn’t enjoy ...

And I think this kind of data altruism setups are only possible when the government clearly signals that the privacy violating surveillance capitalistic way of doing the same thing, so that people doesn’t even know about their data being collected is to be sunset quickly. So, I think the new ...

Like in Taiwan, we’ve been doing this for a year now. There was a pilot project called the Sports Data Altruism Project. You can see online. It’s at data-sports.tw. The main idea is that you can go to the gym or local schools, sports center, or whatever, and do some ...

I am also quite optimistic about now the new executive order that says that the agency need to invest in privacy-enhancing technologies in a way to collect data, but use it in a way that doesn’t compromise privacy or confidentiality because that really is the only way that we are ...

So nowadays, the national security concerns mostly focus on the hardware part because it’s tangible and also the most advanced form of cryptography and AI and whatever code relies on specific hardware capabilities. And so, even if the code is all published on GitHub, it does someone no good if ...

Well in terms of AI, which is just data, and code, and compete, code is almost impossible to set up export control, right? I mean, there are jurisdictions that try to restrict export of cryptography and look at how well it went, right? So, it’s when you restrict export of ...

Yes. Or you can buy everybody a Vision Pro and get codec avatars.

Of course, all that may change is codec avatars. But this year, we’re still working with the constraint of the physics.

You can. You can converge easily. That is to say, we set up a video conference, we have an agenda, we have things done and so on. But it’s difficult to brainstorm. Because to brainstorm means to express something creative and novel that requires a mental model of the other ...

But I think it feels much better to meet in high definition. Because I think it was a paper in Nature that says when you’re a 16 by 9, you can only converge, that is to say, to do something that both sides understand is to be done. But it’s ...

But now, I can then visit the US on the, for example, around the UNGA time, we’re an observer in the freedom online pollution. So, I met fellow foreign and cyber ministers by ball on the big table. And we recognize each other because we’ve been meeting each other as ...

Because previously, to meet fellow ministry-level, cabinet-level people, they preferred face-to-face. But during the pandemic, there was really no choice, so everybody learned through media conference. Previously, if I can only video conference, I meet more junior-ranked people. So, I don’t think this is an executive order or anything like ...

How things changed? During the pandemic, it’s mostly online. And after the pandemic… So, I was able, as a minister, to participate in many ministry-level conversations during the pandemic, which is a new thing at the time.

So, now, when we stop those in their tracks, similarly configuring allies on your networks, they can get an algorithmic warning and reconfigure their network in such a way that would make it impossible for them to be contaminated by lateral movement.

So, if they suffer the same kind of… Some kind of mobile forms of attack. As I mentioned, the generative AI-based living of the land attacks are almost impossible to detect, because it uses existing tools in your own network. So, when they start to mount an attack, all we ...

And also, our mitigation measures. Yeah. And in forms of like code snippets or configuration measures or whatever. And so that’s after quickly verifying it, then it’s just like how immune system works, right? So, like white blood cells and so on, in other allies’ computer networks can harden itself ...

As I mentioned, ultimate threat indicator sharing. There’s now a common format, a common understanding, a common ontology, the sticks format and mutual attack respectively. And we’re now also working to extend the mutual attack, like internationally agreed on metrics, to also include coordinated information manipulation attacks, which is also… ...

So, to set up ultimate threat indicator sharing such that within a minute or so that once we figure out what’s going on and we have set along an emergency way to resolve this or to mitigate a threat, how quickly can all the allies deploy it? And at the ...

Because unlike in the kinetic world, where something impacts Taiwan and earthquakes, it takes quite a while to propagate to the US or to Europe. On the internet, everything travels on the speed of light. So, something that impacts Taiwan next minute will impact the US and Europe, be it ...

Yes. And even more importantly, we’re in a situation where we are now sharing much more threat indicators with our allies. And so, the allies that participate in the code exercise is not just about sharpen your skills and so on, but rather about settling on common principles, common ways ...

And there were a lot of fear I certainly had. And after, what, four years now of rolling out the new curriculum, not only, of course, it increased civic participation to the degree we anticipated, but it actually also resulted in better PISA scores. So, again, no trade-offs needed.

And really, we’re quite proud of the work of the teachers because this is really, to me, it feels very assuring because before entering the cabinet, I worked on the basic education curriculum, the so-called 2019 basic education curriculum. And that reform is a comprehensive switch from rote memorization, so-called ...

It was ICCS (International Civic and Citizenship Education Study), published along with PISA. PISA is education. This is the civic measurement or something, but it’s published on the same day as PISA. It was announced in the cabinet meeting a week or two ago. Last week, exactly. So, we have ...

Now, with that said, there are parts reviewed by the survey that we still need to improve on. For example, the students and so on trusted the democratic process and all this, but not mainstream media. So, the mainstream media trust level from our students is lower than the OECD ...

And on that, our students rank the top of the world. Like they want to actively participate in politics. And this is, I think, to me, a direct measurement, because if they or their family feel a certain apathy against the democratic institution, we would not be top of the ...

And you can also see partial reflection on this, on how much our students, which belongs to families of different political parties and affiliations, participate in civic matters. And so, recently, I think the OECD just published the competence of not just mathematics or reading or whatever, which I think ...

Yeah, there are many ongoing investigations, like ongoing surveys. There’s one from our national academy, there’s one from NCCU, so on and so forth. I think the Taiwan Foundation for Democracy maintains a tally of those measurements.

So, mostly that belongs to the national security apparatus, the intelligence community. Our Administration for Cyber Security is part of the conversation, but we focus, as I mentioned, on defending information systems and information against attacks on integrity, confidentiality, and availability. Anything beyond that, we are, I think, the cyber ...

And so, this is the main thing that I’m focused about. And so, which is why, of course, the work on information integrity and so on are so important. Because when people agree that there was a fair election down to their MPs, whether at large or from local constituencies, ...

And so, my main concern is now that there’s three viable presidential candidates, whether it results in a more pluralistic composition after the election, so that each side feels that they have not lost all, but have win some, versus a zero-sum result, where it, again, could tear apart the ...

So, there were some presidential elections that just tear apart the society, that people just deny the results flatly and many of the wounds are not even scarred, even it’s many, many years after those elections. But there were also elections that I would say that made the society more ...

Yeah, wants to run for president. So, I think one of the key metrics that we’re measuring is whether the society feel that the democratic institutions is strengthened after each election. Because as you know, Taiwan didn’t have a sudden transition of the state’s composition, let’s call it that, but ...

I thought you were about to say, if we have produced artificial superintelligence, they would want to run, right?