Looking, now. Just look and see how far out of the window you can see.

Oh, Misty.

Yes. Maybe it’s not so far now.

It’s raining.

Oh, is it raining?

But as you’re looking, I was just going to ask if you can try and imagine a sound which might be in the far distance. And even if you can’t hear it, to use your imagination of how far you might be able to hear or listen. Maybe it’s the sound of the birds. The sound of rain. Or even the leaves far in the distance on the trees.

Oh, yes.

Yes. So now that you’ve had that sound, maybe you can just bring it back into the room.

Are we going to start? Can you hear us?

Yes, I hear you just fine. Can you hear me?

Yes.

Yes, we can hear you.

Shall we start or what is your feeling?

I don’t mind. We’re just testing video and audio. But this is a rehearsal that lasts for five seconds.

Well, maybe it’s very nice. We’ve zoomed out, and we now have a very far away voice, which is here all the way from Taiwan.

So good to see you.

Yes, very, very good to see you. Okay, so maybe if the sound and audio, everything works well, I would just get a cup of coffee and I will be back in a couple of minutes, and then we can start for real.

Good idea.

Okay, good. See you in a couple of minutes.

Yes. Okay.

I was going to play a little segment when we were thinking about technology. And this is the question of Direct Democracy. Of course, there are a lot of voices in the room. But maybe it’s fitting. When I woke up this morning, I was thinking, oh, what could we listen to as a way to think about technology of the digital, and I actually started to think about, what was the first recording we have of a sound.

So, when we think about our technology, why are we using it? What does it aid us with? Is it there to allow us to remember, to inscribe, to use as a tool for continuation or for connection? And I found the first recording ever of a bird which was made, it was actually done by an eight-year-old child from Germany, called Ludwig Koch. And yes, he made this as an eight-year-old. Probably he had access somehow to this recording device. It was made in 1868. The recording is only ten seconds long, but I thought it was a nice way just to think about listening in relation to technology and why do we use or how do we kind of use technology as a bridge between time and place?

Oh, there’s Audrey again.

So, if you just want to close your eyes, or look, for ten seconds we will listen to the first recorded bird.

We can listen maybe together.

Yes, it’s ten seconds. Okay, everyone ready?

Maybe you can explain again because, is Audrey joining as well?

Yes. Hello, Audrey.

Which way do I look, do I look this way?

My name is Rory. We would just as a way to prepare for thinking about Direct Democracy with the digital technology, I found a recording, the first ever, of birds from 1868. So, it’s ten seconds long, and I am just playing it from my laptop. Okay? So, three, two, one.

What a good song to start with.

Very much so. I think this is a great meeting between people practicing democracy and technology. To me democracy is a kind of technology, a social technology. And the more we practice, the better it is in terms of bandwidth, in terms of how much information can be transmitted between people. So, I think this recording reminds us of the possibility to have communication across not just space, but also time. And this is essential for making good decisions across different time zones. So very symbolic. I thank you for this opening.

Beautiful. So, we are talking about Digital Direct Democracy and Universal Basic Income. Audrey Tang is Taiwan’s minister of Digital Affairs in charge of social innovation. I think that is the most important that you are in charge of, social innovation and that you are working on so hard. The subtitle of this is: Creativity is Our Real Capital. It is a slogan of the German artist Joseph Beuys, who I’ve worked with for 18 years. He wanted to make Direct Democracy by Referendum work in conjunction with Universal Basic Income for Everyone. So that people everywhere would be able to access their creativity again.

When Beuys said, “Creativity is Our Real Capital,” he warned us that money has nothing to do with capital. “Money is a legal instrument,” he explained. This is 40, 50 years ago. You, Audrey Tang, have brought us Digital Direct Democracy, and suddenly Direct Democracy seems so much more real, because it is digital. Now we, the citizens, can ourselves start to show our ideas for our future society. Do you have a vision how this can work?

In Taiwan Mandarin 數位 Shu-wei, which is the name of my ministry and of my role, means both digital and plural, it is the same word in Taiwan. So, a digital minister is also a minister for plurality. Plural means more than one. As Hannah Arendt did in a beautiful exposition on the human condition. Plurality is about analyzing the human condition, not as individuals, not as an aggregation of individuals, but as plurality, as people sharing common knowledge, common identities, together and acting in association instead of just as individuals. Money as an instrument often only characterizes individual accounts, which is why it got a private sector, right?

On the other hand, our imagination of democracy and digital, plural democracy stems from enabling people to take collective action across differences. We have seen in some applications of AI, like supervised learning employed by Facebook, they make people more and more polarized, because they want to maximize addiction to people’s loneliness. The more lonely people feel, the more addicted they become to their touch screens. It encourages this isolationist thinking by trapping people into addictive content that reinforces this sense of isolation.

On the other hand, there are systems like Polis, like AllOurIdeas, like Talk to the City, many digital democracy tools that do the opposite. It is still AI, but it is not authoritarian. It is assistive. It brings people together naturally.

So, people who start with very different ideologies find their common values in plain sight simply by participating in such conversations in the digital realm. So that is my vision of Digital Democracy. It is the democracy based on collaborative diversity, which is plurality.

Wonderful. Would you agree that Digital Direct Democracy is much more democratic than Direct Democracy by Referendum? Of course, as it is now. You have mentioned that in a way. But maybe because so many people have difficulty seeing the digital form and you know it…

Yes, I think, if you have used Twitter now called X.com, you sometimes notice that when somebody posts, like Elon Musk posts something, you sometimes see a note attached to that post saying, ‘what Elon says is not true’. Actually, it is something else. So, this is called Community Notes. This is a way for a citizen’s assembly, like a jury, to look at each other’s tweets and suggests context that may be missing from that tweet. And in this contribution to the contextual commons, this epistemic commons, people’s ideas float to the top if they can get acceptance, resonance by people of very different polarized ideologies.

So, if both left and right think this is a good context, then this context gets attached to the tweet and cannot be taken down. So anytime you re-post that tweet it still retains the community notes. So, if people find it hard to imagine what plural technology looks like, I would encourage you to sign up for jury duty, either face to face if your jurisdictions have a jury, or online like in community notes, and suddenly you will find sometimes you get randomly sorted consultations into a smaller assembly, and that can have this kind of deliberation like we’re having now. But the result becomes ‘the Commons’ that everybody can see.

This is a form of Direct Democracy that is also deliberative, meaning that we spend time to listen to each other.

You have warned us that the formulation of questions the citizens will have to answer digitally with ‘yes’ or ‘no’, that its formulation is very important. Could you please explain that further?

Certainly. In 2015, when we first used this plural technology called ‘Polis’, we talked about what to do with this shared economy or gig economy, where there’s a new algorithm called Uber that lets people with no professional driver license pick up strangers they meet on the street and charging them for it. Now, many countries have trouble interacting with this innovation because this change is faster than the law of labor or of taxi changes.

But in Taiwan, we make the Polis conversation starting with the Uber drivers, the taxi drivers, the passengers and so on. We ask them very simple questions, like, I have taken an Uber before, or I am a taxi driver and so on. Very easy. Yes, no questions. But a key is we open the questionnaire, the agenda setting to everyday people, so anyone can also type a simple question for other people to answer. And so, people type: “I think liability insurance is very important.” And then people upvoted it even though they started in very different ideological camps.

Imagine, if we started with abstract questions like, I think Uber is extractive economy instead of sharing economy. Okay, this is beautiful academically, but it will lead to no constructive conversations, because everybody feels different when they see the term extractive economy or gig economy. On the other hand, whether it is about insurance liability, not undercutting existing meters, everybody has direct personal feelings they can talk about. So, any question that enhances the citizen storytelling capabilities, their narrative capabilities, is a good ‘yes’, ‘no’ question. And everything that is too abstract, that cannot be mapped into personal experience, is perhaps not the best to start with.

Great. Good.

What I wonder is: is Uber operating now in a different way in Taiwan as it is here?

So if you’re asking about Uber. Uber is now a taxi fleet called the Cue-Taxi. It never undercuts existing meters, and it is fully registered as a taxi fleet. At the same time, we change our laws so that taxis don’t need to be painted yellow. They can enjoy surge pricing when there is fluctuating demand. And critically, the same law enabled that in every rural area, people who do long term health care to the elderly and so on, many of them immigrant workers, can now become co-ops. They can form co-ops that enjoy the same law that Uber is enjoying from and use app to dispatch and charging for extra income, picking up tourists or having their elders take care, along with other elderly in the same village and charging them collectively into a nearby hospital and so on. Such local taxi co-ops were illegal before, for the same reason why Uber was illegal.

And so, in doing this conversation, we employed this Polis conversation that doesn’t count the head counts of very different clusters of opinions, but rather the plurality. That is to say, the more dimensions they can include. So, if Uber mobilized 5000 people to vote exactly the same, it doesn’t matter because we look for the diversity of the statements they propose. So, the statements of solidarity-economy, of co-ops, of unions turning into co-ops and so on, although smaller in population, they cover a wider range of plurality of ideas and therefore are more bridge making, more bipartisan, less captured by ideologies.

So, just like community nodes float such bridge making bipartisan statements to the top, so did Polis in our Uber conversation. So, these become the agenda, which then after a multi-stakeholder conversation became law. And so, I would say, as much as Uber benefits from the new law, the local co-ops and unions turned into co-ops benefited more. I hope that answered your question.

Certainly, very much.

Do you agree that a Universal Basic Income will help the Digital Direct Democracy spread more easily and more evenly?

That is a great question. In Taiwan, we already do quadratic voting and quadratic funding, recently renamed ‘plural voting’ and ‘plural funding’ in a way that does something like the UBI (Universal Basic Income), but it is not the UBI. I will explain. For example, every time we have a presidential hackathon, we ask the society to bring us like participatory budgeting, good ideas that solves climate or open digital green and so on.

And after we get to 100 or so of those ideas anyone, all citizens that want to participate, get 99 tokens. These are not money. They cannot be bought and cannot be traded, but they are issued universally to anyone who wants to participate in a round of voting. Now, you support one project, you can vote 1 vote, which costs you 1 token. But if you want to vote 2 votes, it will cost you 4 tokens in total, 3 votes is 9 tokens in total, four 16 and so on. It is quadratic. So, with 99 tokens, the most you can vote on a single project is 9 votes, which costs 81 tokens, but you still have 18 left. So, nobody wants to squander their money, even though it’s just tokens.

So, they find some other project to vote for votes, which costs 16 means you have 2 left and then you’re probably finding another 2. But most people at this point discovered there are synergies between many projects. They will take back some of the 9 votes. Maybe they do a 7 and 7, maybe they do a 3 and 3, and 4 and 4 and so on. And so, I think the problem with money was that it is too linear, it is too easy for someone to aggregate money. So even if that project doesn’t have popular support, they can still dominate most of the matching grant schemes by the state. Because if we have a matching grant and if you are very rich, you can easily, I wouldn’t say extort, but just get, capture, most of the matching grants if you start being rich.

But in quadratic voting and quadratic funding, you have to mobilize as many people as possible, because otherwise your own money is only worth a square root, which is not many. So, what we have seen is that projects very actively work with each other to build synergies, to build coalitions, to turn zero sum games, as would in a matching grant into something that’s like a crowdsourced cooperation.

So, I totally believe in annually or even monthly giving out credits, or tokens, or things like that. But it needs to be community money that is governed by a way that is not simple linear extrapolation, because otherwise the linear tyranny of money still enters play, even if it is UBI.

With UBI you mean Universal Basic Income?

Yes.

Yes. Interesting.

Very beautiful.

I would like to elaborate on this one. How do you organize that if you want to make this multiple functioning token? Do you already have examples of that or…?

Yes. It already exists. If you search for a Gitcoin, g-i-t-c-o-i-n, Gitcoin, it already exists. Every month, or a couple of months, they do a crowdfunding, but with no linear property, but rather with quadratic property. So, people would be encouraged, incentivized, to support as many projects as possible as long as they have synergy.

So, there is no dynamic that leads to one capitalist dominating the matching grants discussion. The source code is open, it is free software, and it is not only done on Ethereum, or the crypto space, but in Taiwan we already use the same formula for crowdfunding, for state sponsored matching grants that also uses the same quadratic funding as a way to measure popular support and how much the state should match, should donate.

So, if you want to know the details, the Gitcoin is available on the internet and our scheme is available in 100 API that you have, that I have pasted into the chat.

Great. Thank you.

Thank you.

Can I ask, how do you, engage or work with this with people, like on a societal level, with different relationships or access to digital technology?

Oh, yes. That’s a great question. In Taiwan, broadband access is a human right. Anywhere in Taiwan, no matter how remote, like the 4000-meter mountain, the Jade Mountain, you still have ten megabits per second broadband that you can enjoy for just 14 Euros a month for unlimited data. So, this is the currency of universal access. If we do not have that, we cannot have a Digital Democracy. It would just be an elite rule or something. And also, in basic education we stress, the idea of competence, not literacy.

Literacy is when you are consumer. Competence is when you produce. So, the primary school student that measures air quality using Arduino or Raspberry Pi, the middle school students that fact check the presidential candidates as three of them are having a debate or a forum, they are all competent students making productions to the society even before they turn 18. Because people don’t magically become informed citizens when they turn 18. It is only possible when in a very tender age they learn that the only way to master an art or a technique is by contributing to the commons. So, it does require an educational reform. Shifting away from standardized answers or individualized competition toward co-creation, toward the common good. And this is something that enhances the societal resilience as well.

So, for us, the technologists, what’s important is we always need to build with open API and public code so that the local people who prefer to interact in a different way - we have 20 national languages, 16 Indigenous Nations, 42 language variations - it’s impossible for us to write a solution that works with all of them. Sign language is also a national language here, so we need to work with the civil society and the social entrepreneurs, so that they can remix our services to make more sense to their community. So is technology fitting the local needs as appropriate technology, instead of asking people to conform to our technologies.

So, the mechanisms are decided. But the way the crowdfunding works and so on, there’s more than two things. Three…

In Leeuwarden there is no broadband access whenever you need it.

We see you again.

Well, I continue to see you, there’s no human rights violation.

Can I ask a question?

Yes please.

Hi, Audrey. Do you have an example on how education has been reformed in order to achieve that, contributing more to the commons and that whole different attitude?

Yes. Definitely. We completely changed our basic education curriculum in 2019. I was part of the Education Curriculum Committee, before joining the cabinet in 2016. The way the curriculum has been co-created is remarkable in that it is very transparent. All the preparatory meetings publish their transcripts. We have representatives from the school children, their parents, teachers and so on. And the most, I think, evident thing is that we don’t have a standardized form of what needs to be taught anymore. We have just the core competencies and the local schools, and local teachers, can even decide to ignore the curriculum and focus only on the competencies. If they want to have a high school that does not have a campus, everything is online, that is possible. If they want to have a campus that is in the nature, that is possible.

Up to 10 percent of students in Taiwan can choose this kind of experimental education that take care of the competencies without adhering to the standardized curriculum. And they, these alternative schools, join in a collaborative sharing with the basic educations that are published. But having to enroll in this kind of experimental curriculum and experiment. So, there is a full spectrum of homeschooling, institutional experimental schooling, group experimental schooling, all the way to the public schools that are engaging with these teachers. I am the prime example. I’ve only stayed in public school until I was 14 and I dropped out. I started homeschooling. I never attended a senior high school or a college, but obviously I still know what I’m talking about. So, I think, alternative education is no longer alternative in Taiwan, but rather works like a research arm to the R&D of experimental education.

Great.

Thanks so much.

Iemand die iets zeggen wil?

Hello, Audrey. I was wondering, is it possible to involve everyone, or are there people left behind in their poverty, and how… Because you said about basic income, it’s linear. And how does it work with people with less money to have the security for a living?

Yes. During the pandemic times, many people wondered why Taiwan never had a single day of lockdown. People still move across cities, all for three years, and we never had anything that is a mandatory contact tracing program. You just voluntarily scan the QR code, or write down your contact number, and so on. But yet, anyone who developed symptoms simply reported themselves and self-isolated.

And I think we’re next only to New Zealand in terms of the health impact, and second to none when it comes to economic mitigation. And the reason why is that everyone here, residents and citizens, know it costs them nothing if they report this symptom. We have a universal service that covers not just the dentists and dentistry but has been practiced since 2003 in a digital form after SARS.

So here in Taiwan, we all understand, a single player universal service for health covers all our health needs, and therefore people voluntarily cooperate with the public health system, because even if they have not actually Covid, or whatever other illness they are suffering from, it will cost them nothing anyway, including the free testing and checks and so on. So, I use, just this one example, but when in Taiwan we say something that is social, in our constitution we make a very clear separation between dentistry and so on, which is social medicine, and artificial beautification, which is not covered by the health coverage. So, we have a capitalist part, but also a socialist part, in our constitution.

And so, access to health, to education, to public representation, and so on, are all free of cost. It reduces a lot of the pressure that people have, the kind of things that you mentioned, like lifting off poverty and things like that. Of course, we’re not perfect. We still have a lot of transition justice to do, especially toward indigenous nations, and new immigrants, and offshore immigrants working on fishing boats, for example. But at least for people physically, as a resident living in Taiwan or a citizen, I think our safety net is pretty good when it comes to not looking at how much money you buy, because it doesn’t matter, you get the same treatment.

Can I ask a question? My name is Hilde Latour, I’m a deputy chair of Basic Income Earth Network (BIEN). We are approached quite regularly by big tech companies that say that they are going to implement the basic income, and our experience is that the hidden agenda is track and trace of transactions that people make with their money. How can we protect people from that hunger for people’s data, behavioral data as well as biometrics and things like that?

If it is cash, how can they track you? Or are we talking about Worldcoin?

Yes. Well, a Worldcoin is a perfect example. And yes, I know you are aware that in the definition of basic income, we have cash just to protect the freedom at the spending end. But if we move to the digital world, is there a is there a possibility that we can use digital money and at the same time protect the people from this data theft?

Well, there is digital cash, right? Anything that offers what we call ‘zero knowledge protection’ means that I can prove I am 18 years old without telling you how old I am. I can prove that my accounts still have at least this imbalance, without revealing the balance. I can prove that I can enter into this contract freely without revealing exactly how I satisfy the requirements. And there are even technologies like designated verifier, meaning that if both of us trust an intermediator to arbitrate, we don’t have to make public the fact that we have entered into a contract, and so on and so forth.

So, there are a whole suite of technologies, called privacy enhancing technologies, or PETs, that specifically want to recreate the condition of anonymous cash in the digital realm. So, my suggestion is just to invest only in the companies, or the social entrepreneurs, that utilize a full suite of zero knowledge technologies. There are mature technologies, these are not research level, but they did not get as much investment as they should, because exactly as you say: it earns more profit if you can persuade your so-called customers into buying more things they don’t need. So, because of this surveillance capitalism profit motive, the zero knowledge and privacy enhancing technologies need a different source of funding. And Bitcoin, and my public infrastructure projects the India Stack and the GovStack in the ITU, and so on.

Many of us in the digital public infrastructure realm are now looking at it, and I think Netherlands is also part of the movement. There is a wallet called YIVI, Y-I-V-I, which used to be called IRMA, I-r-m-a, which is this kind of zero knowledge wallet. So, I would encourage you to get in touch with such privacy technologists.

But zero information currency is a bit a niche. Can you be optimistic about the usage of it in the future?

Yes, definitely, because now it costs nothing for random people in a random country to impersonate another person in another country. Last year it was harder to scam people. You have to know their local culture; you have to carry a conversation and so on. But nowadays, with a new technology called ‘Gen AI’ or generative AI, it costs practically nothing, anyone can run in their laptop a convincing deepfake of anyone with just three seconds of voice or sound, which means that anything that does not have this kind of digital provenance or verification, or the zero-knowledge proof that I just described, will soon be worth nothing.

What used to be sellable as a scoop may now be all discredited when anyone can Photoshop any video from any description involving any person. And so, I would say: yes, this kind of community minded digital verifiable communication in a couple of years may become the most valuable and maybe the only valuable form of communication exchange, because the public surveillance capitalist source is going to be polluted by generative AI.

Very interesting. Thanks.

Shall I go a question again? What is it that is solved mainly by Digital Direct Democracy?

I would say, it is the capability of coming together to common knowledge and common values in any decisions involving more than 150 people. That’s the number. As humans, we cannot reliably track the theory of mind, what is going on in other people’s mind, when there are more than 150 people over a long term, which is why juries and so on are always selected to be smaller groups of people, because you cannot get consensus when the room is 1000 people. On the other hand, there are deliberative or facilitation skills that use like smaller rounds and then larger rounds and then larger rounds to achieve a compression of consensus.

The problem is, even the best facilitator cannot in their summary, have the nuance of their individual participants in a deliberative round. So, every time you compress, some nuance is lost, but to find the solutions to wicked problems, meaning coordination problems involving many stakeholders, the solution is necessarily very nuanced. In the Uber conversation, we have solutions saying, you know, not undercutting existing meters only works when the rural places have their self-determination that involves them in decision making and the road planning and blah, blah, blah, blah. So, all this is like 40 dimensions when you listen to the solution statement.

But in traditional deliberation, these consensuses are difficult to make, especially when it involves randomly selected citizens. On the other hand, using Polis, using All Our Ideas, using Cock To The City, you can compress these without losing the nuance. Every time you compress, the newest just adds to it. And if you want to inquire the nuance, you can like ChatGPT have a direct conversation with the mathematical model of the blended volition.

So, it enables more than 150 people to talk as if it’s just 50 people or five people in the room. And that scales the possibility of nuance and still makes it possible to solve problems that have very unobvious solutions that would need the collective intelligence for more than 150 people to come together to find out.

Beautiful.

I also have a question. I am Nicolai from the local basic income movement. I have also a question about the urgency. In my opinion, democracy is fading away in the Western world. Can democracy exist without Digital Direct Democracy? Is democracy without digital possible or is digital the only solution?

Obviously if you practice democracy constantly in your workplace, in your art club, in your union, involving 100 people or 200 people, you don’t need any digital tools. The human brain is perfectly capable of coming to common decisions when it is a small community, in which case the most digital can do for you is just to take meeting notes or something like that. On the other hand, for national scale democracy, yes, I believe digital is a necessary assisting tool here, because without digital it is very asymmetrical.

Every four year, if you only vote once from eight candidates, it’s just three bits of information uploaded every four years. If you have a referendum with five different propositions, it’s just five bits uploaded. But these uploaded bits result in decisions that affect everyday people in a very quick way. So, it’s like having a very high-speed download, but no uploading or very limited uploading. But when there are societal scale risks, like the pandemic, the ‘Infodemic’, the generative AI caused scams, and computer virus, we need to know what’s happening on the ground every day, even every hour. With no good uploading and only a way to course correct every four years, it is impossible for democracy to solve emerging problems at a scale and a speed as they become.

And so, it is not a coincidence that the states that did not have a good counter pandemic plan, fell back on the democracy scale. People don’t believe in democracy anymore because it didn’t deliver during the pandemic. Whereas in the democracies that did deliver during the pandemic, like Taiwan, we see a boost in democratic confidence.

Great. Beautiful. Is er iemand die iets wil vragen? Is there anyone who wants to put a question?

Yes, I have another question. We see big tech, of course, implementing all these algorithms and robots and generating money for the happy few. So, what are the challenges is to bring those algorithms into the commons and have these machines generating basic income. That is my dream. What would be the low hanging fruit? Where would you start to generate value for the people? For example, you know, with the Uber taxis software. What would be the low hanging fruit to start with?

The lowest hanging fruit is instead of directly messaging each other on Twitter, we switch to Signal, right? And I’m not joking, because Signal or other end to end encrypted technologies, is the most basic of privacy enhancing technologies. The Signal Foundation, Meredith Whittaker, does not even know when you’re talking to how many people, right? Even the metadata is encrypted. So, there is no way for them to profit from eavesdropping all your conversations or the way you converse, and therefore the incentive shifts toward the community.

Whereas anything that let the intermediary capture what you’re talking about, even though they don’t plan to monetize it or to train a supervised model to let you click on the advertisement or whatever, they still retain the data and it always adds to their shareholder, their board meeting and pressure, saying, we’re sitting on so many direct message data, why don’t we monetize it? And so on. So just making a habit of using good privacy technology is a good first step in denying those big techs the kind of material they can use to build precision persuasion machines.

And if you do that, which is very interesting perspective, what consequences will it have for the economy? How do you see the development of consumerism in a model like that?

I think, first of all, the local telecoms will be more free to serve their community. Currently in the European Union I believe more than half of the cost of running a telecom is just by those few big techs that run their platforms. That makes it impossible really for the local telecom to focus on building, to reflect on local needs, because everybody is just streaming from the three platforms that everybody uses in a lot of downloads and not many uploads. And so, in Taiwan for example, we have dedicated plans for anyone to be a local telecom to their community.

They cannot stream Netflix of course, but they can offer real time interpretation for the outdoor exhibition’s hours, or the conference rooms, the summit venues, and so on. Or they can make XR virtual reality to merge many different cities together into this very huge room and so on, and they get to use the same 5G equipment as the telecoms use, but they don’t need to pay a very expensive license and they don’t need to satisfy the need to stream YouTube or Netflix and so on.

So, this kind of community scale of technologies makes it much more possible for the local people to think about your individual needs when planning technologies while still connecting to the cloud. So, I think the cloud will need to be a place where people do offload the computation but without dependence on it. If you become dependent on Google and Facebook and so on, there really is no way for the local communities to reinvest their profits into their communal needs.

So, you say that if you want to develop a more local economy or a more regional economy, you should invest in independent local networks?

Yes, definitely. Either a local 5G network, or a Wi-Fi 6E network, if you don’t need that many outdoor connectivity, or even peer to peer sharing networks, mesh networks. These are all very inexpensive technologies because, you understand, if you use a public telecom, then you’re essentially subsidizing half of your subscription fee to Netflix and YouTube and Facebook.

Great. Thanks.

What guidance does society still need in the Digital Direct Democracy era?

I think the most important idea here is to collaborate across diversity. To see diversity in even Flame Wars, fights, as a source of energy. Many people are addicted to Instagram or Facebook and see conflict as something harmful, hurtful. They evade from it, essentially becoming isolated bubbles, that do not enjoy diversity at all and instead become very lonely or becoming competitive in terms of status and things like that. Well, we all know the symptoms.

If we see instead that there could be a public square, a public space, that is not public in the sense of universally public, but only public in the sense of a local park. That is to say, the participants are people who either know each other or know a common friend. So that means it’s at most around 20,000 people or so. And so, in that Dunbar’s number square, we can have a public square that still preserves the contextual integrity, meaning that you will not face a random person nobody knows suddenly shouting at you and trolling your conversation. And so, in this local context, people can speak more freely and enjoy association with people who are very different from them, because they feel safe in associating, because at least you have a common friend, right?

So, in such local integrity of contextual union, we can then foster conversations that are collaborative, and people can enjoy diversity a little bit more. And even if they fight, they become contributions to the community, to the code of conduct and things like that. It’s easier to repair relationships when all of my associations are of the groups ranging from 100 to 20,000 people in size. That would be my main observation.

I have a question about some issues which are still related to social stigma. I’m thinking about, as an example, sex work, where in a context, as far as I understand in Taiwan is practically illegal to do. In this sense, how do you mobilize majority voting on an issue where the minority are at risk of being criminalized practically discussing the situation they are in, and most people would also deny any kind of association with the industry, even though it’s a huge market that operates in a kind of black market for example. So, in that sense, how, could Digital Direct Democracy then function in that way?

Fact Check. Legally, on the national level sex work is legal in Taiwan, like in New Zealand. Like in New Zealand it requires a community permit. Our difference with New Zealand is currently, all the existing permits have expired and there’s no permits from new communities. So, technically you are correct. There is no place in Taiwan in which sex work is legal, but it is not because it is illegal by law, it is because there’s currently no community that issued community permits for sex work.

And so, that changes the conversation, right? The lobbying would not be to the legislators. They’ve already done the legislation. The lobbying would be up for the city councilors and so on to run with a platform of legalizing sex work in their communities. As I understood, there are many city councilors that run with such a platform in the next upcoming election. So, I can, of course speculate, like why no communities want to issue these permits. But I would simply say that this is not a taboo topic in Taiwan and people do have regular conversations. This, I think, enjoys more community involvement and so on compared to other interesting issues such as legalizing marijuana.

But then, in the context, even though it is legal and there’s… Oh, are you still there?

Nou, daar is ze weer.

Sorry, I missed the other half of the context.

I was just saying that, yes, it’s difficult because, I think, it corresponds to discussions here, where sex is legal, for example. But when the public are asked, in general there’s an overwhelming resistance. So, it’s like everybody doesn’t want any kind of sex work to happen in their neighborhood for example. But there is an enormous market for sex work. And I can just imagine it’s the same thing in general, because of social stigma. So, I understand that it’s possible, but it’s like in the context of allowing communities to decide actually, it means that people operate in…

No, no, I totally relate because, you know, when I was a teenager, Taiwan was not that tolerant to non-binary transgender people. So, the fact that I today face no discrimination doesn’t mean that 30 years ago I faced no discrimination. And the great thing about the Internet is that it enables us to make neighborhoods of values, even though physically very distant, because on the Internet everything is light speed. Well, except when there’s Internet troubles.

But when there are no Internet problems, everything travels at light speed. And so that means people who are discriminated against in many different countries, even though maybe the general sentiments in all these countries are against them, they can still find each other and build a vibrant Internet community using privacy enhancing technologies. We have seen that in LGBTIQ communities. We have seen that with people who worry about climate change, even before climate change becoming a mainstream thing. People who worry about Generative AI, even before Generative AI is becoming a mainstream thing, and so on. There are parts of the Internet that become a safe haven for such communities. And recently we have found out that such communities now make full use of the decision-making tools that we just talked about, Polis and things like that to come to terms.

Some of them even form DAO’s, decentralized-autonomous-organizations and so on, while protecting their pseudonymity. So, I think I am optimistic to say that the online to offline movements that take some of those style ideas and to organize in-person meetings, like the Zoo-project, or whatever. I think that makes a lot of sense in that, if we can develop strong personal links using deliberative direct democratic tools online, we will feel like a community, a neighborhood, neighbors even before meeting each other physically for the first time. So then afterwards, we can mobilize offline action later, when there is the right action to be made. And the incubation period can be as long as a few decades because Internet will probably still be around for another 20 years. So, I’m optimistic. But I do hear you and see the challenge in the immediate physical neighborhood.

Could you tell us a little bit more about the presidential hackathon and what was the best idea that came out of it and was implemented?

Okay, sure. And I’m wearing the presidential hackathon shirt. Yes, this is the zero and one of the presidential hackathons. Presidential hackathon has a long tradition now. We’re on the sixth year, and every year has five brilliant ideas. It’s like asking a parent: Who’s your favorite kid? It’s impossible. But I will nevertheless highlight something that may be useful to know.

For example, I think last year, one of the champions was a very simple idea called CircuPlus, Circulatory Plus. What it does is that it asks people to register on a shared map that they want to offer free drinking water to the citizens, to anyone. It could be a fountain, a self-help fountain, it could be a local store and so on and it used the term 奉茶, giving tea, which is an ancient Taiwanese tradition for people who place a huge teapot and some cups under a tree so that people who walk nearby can help themselves with water and this direct action prompted many local social entrepreneurs and community builders to use this common map as a way to basically direct elicitation of association members.

Because once you stay for filling a cup of water or things like that, you hear their story and things like that make the ideas much easier to disperse. And because there’s a push to ban plastic straws and plastic cups and bottles and so on for environmentalism. So, every time you open an app, it shows you how many other people saved, how many tons of CO2 and know how many are around you, and if you just go out and refill the water, you get to know the fellow people saving the earth or things like that. So, it has become an association tool and sooner than later, many different tools, like a heat stroke warning system was added, which is another presidential hackathon team, added to this space app. And this space app also introduced people to other possible collective actions as well and so it became a mobiliser of sorts of citizens. And so a long story short, I think the greatest ideas are the ones that transcend boundaries.

So, we learned that in Japan there is mymizu, mizu means water, which does the same thing in Japan. And this year the international track also brought someone from India doing a very similar but slightly different idea in India and then using blockchains or other distributed technology. We can then do global coordination based on the local participation and so on. And so, I think this is a beautiful term for data altruism, people who donate non-personal data to make the earth better. I think this is one of the best open digital and green movements that started as part of the presidential hackathon.

Data altruism. Great. Great term.

I have a question to you that comes from Jan Atze Nicolai originally. It says: What is your motivation to do this? What is your goal?

There are 17 global goals and 169 targets. I’m not going to list them all. I’m speaking very personal. I was born in 1981 with a heart defect and my earliest memory was when I was four years old and I was at the doctor visit and the doctor looking at my X-ray and so on, was telling my parents that this child only has a 50% chance of growing up to be mature enough to have the heart surgery. And so, this is like having an existential crisis as your first memory. I eventually grew up to when I was 12, in ‘93, when I did get a heart surgery, and I’m perfectly fine now.

But for the first 12 years of my life, I go to sleep without knowing whether I will wake up. This existential condition instilled in me this habit, that I need to make public everything I learn every day, because otherwise I will not be around the next day. Publish and then perish. Right, so this idea of publishing before I go becoming a core motivation so that I think of myself as a conduit, like the good ideas entering my mind, I publish it every day and then I go to sleep and I can feel safe, because even if I don’t wake up, it’s already in the public domain. And so, that’s why I renounce copyright for all my work, because I cannot deny 70 years of people who want to enjoy my work when I go, right?

So, my point being, I want to be a good enough ancestor. I want the future generations to enjoy more possibilities than I currently enjoy. I don’t want to foreclose them with a perfect AI design or anything like that. So, a good enough ancestor is someone who leaves the world a better place with more possibilities when I log-off, compared to when I log-in to this world.

Beautiful. Wonderful.

Thank you.

Normally it is said that when we speak to each other, 60% of our communication goes face to face and mind-direct, only 40% is through the meaning of the words we exchange. Would digital communication be the same or different?

It will be the same…

The same?

Yes, the same. I had, I think, five years, six, almost six years of psychoanalysis, four days every week with my analyst in France, in Paris, Giselle. She insists that we must meet every six months for a month or so. I visit her in Paris and have a classical Freudian or Lacanian session. But then, the other five months we get to do, like this, through video conference.

That is because in video we don’t have the micro-expressions. So, the smaller expressions are lost. This is the kind of loss in compression. So, what we do, is psychological projection. We project like in the dreams what your actual feeling is. But because we don’t know each other, those projections are probably already wrong. So, it is possible to do creative work on video conference alone, but it is usually within a given scope.

To think outside of the box, you need, at the moment, face to face interaction, which is the main insight we got from five years of tele- psychoanalysis. But to think outside of the box, doesn’t mean that we cannot extend the relationship, because every half a year I calibrate my mental model of Gensel and Gensel of me, so that’s for the next few months, even though it is just video link, we have pretty good mental models of each other without suffering from psychological projection. So, a hybrid mode is probably the best to go.

It’s something you have to learn?

Yes. And with virtual reality becoming more commonplace it’s easier and easier to enter into a hybrid mode with some people in the room and some people online.

Yes. And then: Would Digital Direct Democracy be a better chance for us to understand each other, than today’s use of many words, long sentences and written reports of thousands of words?

I totally agree. I mean, for me, Direct Democracy is just another word for Daoism, right? Spiritual Daoism and not religious Daoism. Which is my main belief system when I grew up. And then later on, I find that there are branches of early anarchism that sounded exactly the same as Daoism. But I use the term ‘conservative anarchism’ not just to have some fun in bringing polar opposites together, but also to highlight the fact that you do not need to violently disrupt an existing system, if you can show that an older system can interoperate with a newer system that gradually makes the old one obsolete. This is the Buckminster Fuller insight, right? That’s the ‘trim tab’ insight. And I think this kind of ‘trim tabs’ are easier and easier to make now that with digital tools, we can find fellow ‘trim tabs’ simply by you writing the email to me and then we have this conversation.

Zijn er vragen? Of zal ik gewoon verder gaan? (Are there questions, or shall I just proceed?) The film ‘The Rocky Road to Democracy’ of 2021, said: ‘Audrey Tang champions policies in which citizens play an active role in political decision making’. Maybe you can say more.

Yes, I think my politics is that of credible neutrality. I don’t belong to any political parties. When I filed my cabinet HR form in 2016, in the gender field, I wrote ‘not applicable’, and in the party field also ‘not applicable’. So, I am not binary, not just in gender, but also in left and right wing and so on. Because I believe a bird needs two wings to fly. So basically, the idea here is that I take all the sides. If there are some parts of Taiwan that I cannot fathom why they have this ideology, why they form this party, I always think it’s my problem. It’s not these people’s problem. And I always spend some time to hang out with them, to live with them, to ethnographical just hanging out, to hang out and make stories together. And then I begin to see the world from their perspective. And only then, do I make judgments.

So, I think it’s important for a governing person not to see decision as coming from a mandate of sovereignty that makes us the representative of people. I don’t believe in that legitimacy theory. I think we should make room, make space, for people to represent themselves as themselves, not through a representative person. So, I am only making a space and not representing anyone and therefore I’m taking all the sides, because all the sides can project into the spaces like the petition platform, presidential hackathon, every work that I do.

So, there is no other ideology than democracy?

Yes. And by democracy, I mean, of course collaborative diversity. Yes.

Very interesting. I have to think about that a bit. I mean, our democratic system is based on the clash of ideologies, more or less. And saying, what you are saying is for me the next question: How do you see formal democracy then?

Yes, I believe in a blending of ideologies. And in Taiwan, I’m not unique. There are more non-partisan or independent cabinet ministers than ministers of any party in Taiwan. So, this is the norm. This is not just me being very weird. The way our Constitution is designed is the citizens directly elect the president, who appoints the premier, who assembles a cabinet. So, I am a double appointee, and my constituency is anyone with an email address, right? I don’t need a constituency in the formal democratic sense.

So, if we design the constitution such that the ideation and the first draft, finding common purpose, is done in the politically and ideologically neutral way, the executive branch, then it is sent to the legislative branch, which does have four major parties with the usual party politics. But we separate these two very clearly in the double diamond design thinking in ideal. It means that you have a very clear point between the first diamond, which is about discover and define and the second diamond, which is about to develop and deliver. So that develop and deliver is still in parliamentary politics, but the discovery of citizens’ needs and the definition of the common goal, that belongs in a political and ideologically neutral cabinet, which is the executive branch. This is our constitutional form.

Okay. And then elections, for the part that is not the political one, then not a clash of ideologies. How are you elected? Because there must be something that you distinguish yourself from somebody else.

No, I’m not elected, right? I’m a double appointee. Okay? People elect a president, who appoints the premier, who appoints me.

Okay. Clear.

In Taiwan, this is when I say, peaceful coexistence with old systems, I really mean it. Because every year we vote. One year we vote for mayors, another year for a general referendum, then the next year for president and legislators and another year again for general referendum. So, it is representative, direct representative, direct on alternating years. That means that the parties will not hijack the conversation when it is the referendum year and vice versa.

Sorry, to understand it: You are appointed by somebody? So it is in your interest, the next elections, that the same person is going to be elected again.

I don’t really care.

Okay.

We have now four presidential candidates, and I was part of the previous cabinet in 2014 as well. Not a minister, a reverse mentor and advisor to a minister. But it is normal. I mean, the minister of Economy in 2015 is still the minister for Trade Negotiations in 2016, even though a completely different president and party became the ruling party. So, if someone in the cabinet doesn’t belong to a political party, it is normal for them to continue in the cabinet, even if a completely different party become president.

Thank you.

It’s weird. It’s very different. Yes.

Well, not that much. I mean for the Netherlands, yes. But if you go to Germany and you look at how a city is governed there, it’s quite similar to what you describe.

Yes. I think it helps that from the north most of Taiwan’s metropolis Taipei, to the south most Kao-hsiung, by high-speed rail is just an hour and a half. So, in many senses our constitution is designed like a larger municipality and not like a federal government.

Yes.

In an interview you say: working from a distance doesn’t mean that you don’t meet people face to face, it only means that we transcend space, boundaries, when we are talking to each other.

Yes, like now. Right? It also means that I meet people where they are. Because I can work anywhere as a minister. So, if I am to travel, and I do, every week on average in the past few months, I spend two days a week in Tainan in the south part of Taiwan, so that I meet the local neighborhood. If I cannot work in a telecommunication manner, everybody has to go to Taipei, which is unfair to their time and they only have an hour, but they have to spend an entire day to meet me. But only by telecommunication can we bring the attention of the central government to all places in Taiwan, and beyond when I travel abroad.

So, it’s double.

Yes.

The entire world’s population is at home on the Internet. Can we believe a global democratic approach is an adequate answer? Can we free the future together? How to involve everyone?

Yes, I think it needs to start at the lowest scale. It’s only when any 100 people anywhere feel comfortable that they can - with the help of digital tools that assist them, not automates them - can come to collective decisions together. Can we think about 20 thousand people and then, can we think about 1 million people? And then can we think about the world? A lot of the early mistakes that people made in the 2010s is to mistake Facebook or other global platforms as the public square for their town.

Yes.

Because the context is lost. The compression is very glossy, and the profit incentive means that you end up consuming much more than you contribute to the common knowledge. And when we say, ‘assistive technology’ or ‘assistive intelligence’, I mean, specifically looking at my eyeglasses, which is ‘assistive technology’, right? It’s very transparent. And if there is bias, I can fix it. I can repair it with the people down the street. I can learn how to apply super glue. I did a couple of months ago.

So, I mean, this technology fits entirely with my dignity and the dignity of people in the same room in mind, despite it may be broken from time to time. That is well understood. Consider, if my eyeglass is not like this, but rather an optical camera, like the one Facebook just publishes, that captures all the photons, uploads them to the cloud, have the Facebook calibrated to my eye and send it back to my eyes. Then Facebook sees everything I see. And then more. Right? They know how to manipulate and push advertisements to my retina, and it becomes sticky, and I become addicted, and I cannot take it off. If people become addicted to that, then it is not possible to have a world democracy, because then people are addicted to something that is not democratically minded either.

And, I said that jokingly to Nick Clegg, the VP of Global Engagement of Meta, just last week. We had a discussion about it. Yes. He was at the Athens World Democracy Forum, and he said, quoting me, that after learning about my work in alignment assemblies and so on, he is now convinced that Facebook, actually Meta not Facebook, Meta can support this vision. So, I mean, I don’t hold grudges. I always say you can, you know, repent and be better. But I think, it is clear that we need to have a realistic vision of what assistive technology is to 100 or to 20 thousand people, before we think about world democracy.

I have one concern about all the data centers that are using our drinking water for cooling the servers. I mean, in the Netherlands we have Microsoft Data Center using more than 80 million liters of drinking water a year just for cooling. I don’t know if you are aware of New Zealand researcher Veda Austin, who has shown that water has consciousness and can be programmed. How do you, well, you seem to be one of the most advanced countries in digital space. How do you cope with that problem?

Yes, it really is a problem. I think data center and the environment is a very important topic. In Taiwan we import a lot of our power energy sources like gas and so on from abroad, and so security of power sources is definitely a problem here. Now, Microsoft also says that they are investing in solving this problem with, I believe, first small nuclear reactors and then eventually fusion power. That is what they say. It is just their words, not mine, which, of course, uniquely present a challenge in Taiwan, because we had referenda about the nuclear topic, and it is one of the most controversial topics here in Taiwan.

So, yes, your question, I think, does not have a universal answer. It does rely on people’s ability to mobilize and visualize the relationship with nature, in this case with water. We have a team member working on a project called: ‘Say Hi to the River’. And what she is doing is that, to make a community minded avatar of sorts that represents a river, and a river would have some kind of legal personhood, like in New Zealand the Whanganui River or in India the Ganga River. These rivers can represent themselves in board meetings and so on, like companies do.

So, they have some sort of legal personhood. And our intervention is to try to make it such that when they attend board meetings, instead of having humans only representing the rivers, there’s interest to instead have a community of participants, data scientists, primary school children or whatever, to synthesize data sources that would accurately project a language model, or even an avatar with full video conferencing capabilities, that speak to everyone in the board representing the river, including the health status, including the spiritual status, including how it feels as to make a more, I would say, touching the ground way of representing what’s actually happening in the waterways.

So, this is one way, we think, of speculative design or art, it’s very difficult to tell these two apart now, can influence political decisions. So, if you’re interested in how we try to steer a very controversial conversation about water pollution and nuclear energy into something that primary schoolers can create, an avatar, I encourage you to check out the river chat bots I have pasted to the chat room.

Can I ask a question a bit more like this? How do you define a digital society, or a digital community? I mean, we talked about it, about 15 minutes ago, I think. You said, it is up till 20 thousand people, that is a sort of amount of people that works in a digital society. But how do you relate that to borders? I mean, are the communities necessarily geographically ordered or in another way, and how does democracy work in that?

Yes, that’s a great question.

No, I think what I mean simply is, that a community needs to have common knowledge, or common belief, or a common purpose, where common knowledge means that: I know that you know that, and I know, you know that. And you know that I know that, at infinite, right? So, a common knowledge like this bind people together, separating this community from the rest of the world who don’t yet have this common knowledge, which doesn’t mean that they don’t have the knowledge. It’s just, they are not part of the common knowledge. And the same goes for belief in intentions. It is my observation that it is easier to have new association members absorbed into the community if any two people in the community have a common friend.

That is to say, they are just one or two degrees apart and it don’t mean that it cannot work on a larger scale. There are larger communities like the scientific community, of course, that have common knowledge and there are evidently more than 20 thousand people. But my point being in a non-geographically binded community, in a community that is connected primarily through the Internet, it is far harder to build correct mental models of each other using today’s technology. But if people are only 1 or 2 degrees apart, we can make hybrid arrangements that make up for this deficiency. And then, when we do that, we still have common intent, common belief.

That is to say, I believe this, and you believe the same thing and I believe you believe the same thing and so on. And that can still scale to a reasonable size. And as technologies improve, that capture more micro expressions in a privacy preserving way and then transmit across distance, I’m sure that we can extend to 3 or 4 degrees in an online only community. But today is not that day.

So, you need for building communities across borders something like rituals or objects that are tangible?

Exactly, yes. Common experience that needs everyone’s participation that then leads to common knowledge and common belief. When I worked with people in Palo Alto during 2008 to 2016, for eight years, they have a Gordon Biersch, at a restaurant there and we have one in Taipei and we arrange the same time to go to respective TV- or to take out and they even send me Napa Valley, Red wine, like not expensive, a very cheap wine, but they do drink it. And then we arrange a video conferencing where we don’t work, but just drink the same wine and have the same Gordon Biersch food. And this kind of common experience then creates common knowledge, empathy, that can sustain community.

Thank you.

This is in fact, my last question. I hope you have more questions. Democracy gives everyone equal value. That is why the Expanded Concept of Art and Direct Democracy fit so well together. ‘Everyone is an Artist’, because everyone has creativity and talents. The most important work of art to be realized by us is the Social Sculpture, the society as a work of art. Do you agree?

Yes, as I shared my heart condition. Right. Vita Brevis Ars Longa: Life is short, art lasts. And the Social Sculpture is the kind of art that lasts because it is us. It is within us. Yes. So, I totally agree with the sentiment.

Beautiful. That was Beuys. But is there anything else?

Yes, if I may, because this morning we talked about the Social Sculpture and Beuys and his ideas about this, that you all, that we all, contribute and we all are responsible for the society, for the Social Sculpture. We also talked about Basic Income. We also asked you a question about it. But in the idea of Beuys, a Basic Income should free creativity in people. How do you see that in combination with Digital Direct Democracy, that people don’t have to worry about their basic needs, they can free their talents and be creative and cooperative and participate in the Social Sculpture that we all are part of?

Yes. To me, we talk about the universal part, which is democracy and participation in the Social Sculpture. The basic part and the income part to me are two different things. The basic part to me is the socialist core. In the Taiwan Constitution, essentially all the basic needs should be free, and it should not cost money. It should be decoupled from money like the right to health, the right to learning, the right to communication, the right to democracy is not solved by income. This should not cost money to begin with. So, this is the basic part.

And the income part, I do believe that, of course, creativity is sustained by a continuous influx of money, but I do want to share this idea of plural money. If you search for plural money rxc - for RadicalxChange https://www.radicalxchange.org/concepts/plural-money/ or I paste it on the chat - you will see a re-imagination of money that is a sort of community money. Community money is a very old idea. It is money that cannot be taken over by a foreign source easily. It is money that has liquidity only within community and not outside of community. And with digital tools, it’s now very easy to make plural community money.

Unfortunately, most of the people who make them publicly are scammers, but I hope with the FTX and whatever, they are now gone and some people who are still in the web3 space are hopefully people who are more willing to public infrastructures for plural money. The great thing about plural money is that it associates the contribution better with the kind of money that you receive from UBI. So instead of people, you know, getting scammed or persuaded or consumer reason still compels people to spend most of their UBI toward things that they don’t need. Instead, the kind of money you get from plural money cannot even be used to buy Coca-Cola anyway.

So, I think this is the kind of basic income that I would personally more enjoy, and this is the kind of thing that we give out as, for example, the voting credits or tokens as part of presidential hackathon and other ideas on it and so the soulbound tokens.

Thank you.

Heb je nog een vraag?

Yes. Hello, thank you for being here. I’m Janneke and I have a question: you speak about a common experience, and also about the country being very well connected by train. But how is it with indigenous languages or communities? Because we have also a common language when we have a Zoom conversation. We now speak English. How is that with like other languages in your country?

Yes. It is a big problem in Taiwan that if you try to speak to ChatGPT with anything that’s not Mandarin, ChatGPT doesn’t know it, fakes it, and speaks Cantonese, while assuring you, it is speaking Dajing, so it doesn’t work. So, instead we think our own language models should be a national infrastructure. Our science minister is training now, as we speak, the trustworthy AI dialogue engine, which is a language model specifically trained not to be agentic or self-conscious, or frontier, or AGI, or whatever, but for the very simple need of translating between the national languages of Taiwan and summarizing them and so on, like everyday tasks.

And once we have this kind of language model, we can then have simultaneous conversations, even lip syncing. That is to say, my lips will move as if I am speaking an indigenous language and the sound will still match my sound, except I’m speaking the indigenous language. And this assisted interaction is already being tested by our ministry in conjunction with the Minister of Health for sign language.

So, at the moment, what we do is that people can call to sign language interpreters on their zoom, or online, or some, other team’s conversations, and so the sign interpreter joins the conversation and does the interpretation. But because such video channels also have automatic subtitle abilities, so that after some time we will be able to show the correspondence between the Taiwan sign language and the subtitle. And next we will then be able to train such models, so that the avatar can help signing when a sign interpreter is not available, or the interpreter becomes a coach to the sign robot and so on. And that will then enable us to support one more national language with this sign language in our everyday conversations.

So the end result is, like a ‘Babel Fish’ right, a universal translator that takes care of the dignity of the indigenous nations and their culture and the most important part is, it needs to be open source and community governed, so that it is the indigenous nations in control of what goes in training of their language model, what goes into fine tuning of the norms, what is the acceptable way of addressing each other? And for that we have alignment assemblies. Deliberative democracy with online agendas setting like Polis, with face-to-face workshops and the end result is, the whole context goes into training the AI fine tuning, the model, so that it learns to respect the community that it is currently interpreting or translating to.

So, you say, you should improve your indigenous, or your national language instead of the universal language English.

Yes, exactly.

That will be a very interesting message for the universities in the Netherlands, since they all aim for English as the common language.

Yes, I think for Taiwan, I think most Taiwanese in universities, they read and hear, listen English just fine. It’s just that they don’t want to lose the nuances when they express. Right? So, we all read English. That’s not a problem. But when we write in our native language, it captures more nuance than what we were actually thinking. If we’re writing English, we are writing with a highly compression and so on.

I am part of an exception, because I do my psychoanalysis in English, so I can think of English thoughts, but mostly in Taiwan it doesn’t work like that. So yes, with this kind of native language model we can switch to a different imagination of bilingual education in that you just need to read English and not write it or listen to English without speaking it. And then when you speak your native language, it is just translated in real time by these language models.

Great. Thanks.

Het is bijna half vier…

Ja ik weet het. En hoe is het met Yukiko moeten we haar nog bellen?

You know her, yes.

Yukiko is listening. Yukiko from Japan?

Yes, of course.

I thought, maybe she wanted to put a question.

I saw Yukiko’s name ever since I joined the conversation.

Did you?

Yes, because it is in kanji, right? I read kanji.

Oh, there is Yukiko.

Where is Yukiko?

I think here in this chat…

Yes. Where are you?

I’m looking at her.

Yukiko said: “Democracy is based on each nation and is from humans for humans. By the age of climate change people need to think and act beyond national borders.”

Of course I agree. Which is why we have built a chat bot representing a river. A river is a kind of spirit that lives longer than humans, and it is more than humans. One of the most human more than humans that we know. And Yukiko asks, “Can you explain my thoughts and how to realize it?” Yes, certainly, I think, first of all it’s important to realize how important digital technology is to the awareness of the climate extinction, the climate crisis. We now have satellite technology that can count the number of trees that were being cut almost in real time, like five times a day. And so only with that kind of technology can we visualize the Earth and its ecosystem for climate as a single social object. Previously it was blocked by the clouds. People cannot imagine that this is like the first time.

I put on the virtual reality glass in 2016. I immediately opened the star chart and held the Earth like between my hands, and I had this overview effect happening to me. It looks like a very brittle, small thing and suddenly borders no longer matter, because you cannot see borders from space. And so, I think digital technology is essential. Without digital technology, it’s impossible to have an accurate whole of planet social object that people can interact with in real time. So, that’s the first thing and second, we need to make sure there is meaningful impact. Otherwise, it’s just like watching a movie. Whatever you do from the audience, see the movie doesn’t change, right? And so, there’s no democracy. We are all just watching the Google Earth movie, right? So there needs to be some impact.

And as simple as, you know, not using a plastic bottle, but simply refilling from your local environmental action’s office, that simple action on the Fong Cha phone app shows you how much you’re contributing and how much it’s being appreciated by people all over the world who are on the same mission. So, this is another thing digital technology that can help. It can build associations that transcend borders. So armed with the social object that is global and the interconnected local assembly and associations I think that is how we can begin to realize people’s actions to act beyond borders. But it still feels like acting in a small community. It’s just that it’s now a community of value, not of neighborhood, of physical space.

Yes, understandable. And what does Yukiko say? I think she said: ‘thank you’, ‘thank you’.

Are we saying ‘thank you’ too. Or is there something somebody wants to say?

Wow, a thousand thoughts…

Yes, we heard a lot. We have to think again.

Wil jij nog iets zeggen? Want anders gaan we Thank You zeggen.

Thank you. Yes.

Thank you.

Yes. Thank you. Thank you. Very, very good conversation.

It was lovely to meet you this way.

Yes, looking forward to meeting you in high definition.

Wonderful, we’ll be in contact today or tomorrow.

Definitely, Louwrien, definitely.

Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you.