Yeah. There’s this system where in every petition they have a vote on the plus side and vote on the minus side, but they can’t reply to each other. There’s no fighting. It’s like Polis. You can’t reply to anyone else. The only way to refute someone is to propose ...

It’s now spreading, mostly on the city government level. We’re also learning from the Icelandic system of their better...I can’t pronounce that word, Reykjavik or something? It’s their capital.

Then, from there, I went to Madrid and also to Coimbra, and to London. People there are very interested in this idea. I think Corbyn worked this into his platform. Also, the New York City, Ontario, Canada, and Barcelona, of course...I visited Barcelona as a robot during the very hectic ...

Who is facing very much the same problem with the taxis blocking the Champs-Elysées and things like that.

The idea is very simple, that when other governments see it, they will want to institutionalize this model to fit their local political climate. I think the first interest I got was from the Paris City.

After we did this and all the different countries saw that, I only answer questions publicly. That way Uber approve, at the time visited me. It’s not only on the record, it’s on 360 record. Everybody can just be put on VR glasses and re-experience the discussion. That’s Yeh Ning ...

When we translated this into the ratification in office, 2016, everybody saw it coming. Uber can’t help but just obey the rules. Now, Uber is legally operating using only professional driver-licensed drivers and paying their taxes. On the other hand, the existing taxi companies and co-ops are also operating to ...

Check their understanding, whether it’s feasible or not. They basically are all committed to it, and because it’s all live stream, they can’t really take back their words.

The stakeholders have to show up, because if they don’t show up, they know thousands of people are looking and that they will be villains if they don’t show up to validate the people’s consensus. All the stakeholders has to show up, and then we go through each consensus item, ...

All these are very commonsense things, but it’s collaboratively decided by thousands of people voting on each other’s idea and competing for consensus. After three weeks, everybody agreed on those ideas. Then, we collect those ideas and present them to the stakeholders.

The second thing is that professional driver’s license is important. Insurance is important. Taxation is important. Choice is important for the existing taxi companies and co-ops to also operate in the Uber style, so they don’t have to be painted yellow if they’re going only to be held as an ...

For the Uber case, after three weeks, they converged on five consensus items about the sharing economy being sharing only if you just incidentally drive to work, drive back and carry somebody else. It’s OK to call it sharing. Otherwise, if you’re going to 50 trips a day, it’s not ...

Even for people who are ideologically very opposed, 88 percent, everybody nearly, agreed that if government publicly discusses this, then everybody knows whether this is a good idea or not. They can at least agree on the necessity of a public discussion and things like that.

Second, it shows the people’s position can change and they do change over time. Instead of just shouting very extreme ideas, actually once you propose yes or no and you get grouped, you get to see people’s common ideas.

First, everybody here are your Facebook or Twitter friends, and they’re all over the place. It means that they’re not faceless enemies. They’re not antagonist parties. They’re your friends. You just didn’t talk about this over dinner. It brings some cohesion.

We produce the facts, and then people can look at the sentiments and answer yes or no on each sentiment. As you answer yes or no, your position would move across the different groups. This has two psychological effects.

It’s one of the petitions. About 27,000 people petitioned. Then, we use Polis to try to get people to at least agree on some basic understanding about not just human right versus crime prevention or retaliation, but whether it actually produces measurable outcomes.

The Polis system, I think it’s easier if you get to see the same action. We actually just ran a Polis for a very controversial project, whether we need to use flogging on repeat drunk driving, Singapore style.

First, we curate it. Like you just said, just saw on my map a collective fact that everybody can agree with. Then, we run AI deliberation using the system called Polis.

Ideas become ideologies. That blinds people to new facts and blind people to each other’s feelings.

The main problem of this ideal conversation is always the translation problem, because the professional private sectors, governments and people, they usually talk in a professional language, while people on the street talk with another language. As long as these people are being not as open or radically transparent as ...

Then, the feelings, we use AI -- which I’ll explain briefly -- to get people’s feelings towards the same facts. Then, we get people’s ideas, and the best ideas are judged by how much of their people’s feelings can this idea take care of? Now, we have a ranking of ...

The discussions tend to be more divergent over time, instead of convergent over time. The basic methodology that we use is called the focused conversation method. It’s invented in Canada. That says, "First, we need to do a stakeholder mapping that absorbs everybody’s facts, and everybody validates those facts."

The other side is always saying, "There’s no insurance. There’s no taxation. There’s no professional driver’s license. Nobody caries the liabilities. What do you do?’

The idea is essentially saying, "We need to have a thorough discussion because otherwise, people are just looking at the size of this discussion." One side will say, "This is the future, this is our road to self-driving cars and whatever. It’s very cool, very hip."

The driver, after driving for three weeks, they decide it’s not a really good idea anyway, but it already affected many people to install this app. There really is very few things that a sovereign nation can do to an app. It’s an idea that counts, that this idea lets ...

The idea is that this sharing economy is a meme that says algorithm dispatch better than cars, better than the regulations for cars, so people don’t have to obey regulations, just algorithms. It spreads from drivers to passengers to drivers, just like a common flu maybe.

Very quickly then -- just a second -- using AI, incidentally.

We got a lot of interest there after we solved the Uber case because Uber is a global epidemic. The fact that we contained it through deliberation is critical.

Yeah, definitely.

I’m interested, whether I’m in this position or some other position. I’m always interested.

Meaning that any child, anywhere in Taiwan, a year afterwards, can use AI or personalized AI as part of their curriculum, without leaving anybody behind.

Combining these two together, what we did was that in our new K-12 curriculum, we’re making ICT awareness and media literacy into the core curriculum of all the different fields. Also, using a special budget to ensure that all the remote schools and aborigine, indigenous villages and rural, remote islands ...

Definitely. I mentioned also very briefly that our petabyte-scale, super-computer center is actually primarily a GPU cluster optimized for AI research. Our idea is that because President Tsai has in her platform broadband access as human right. Taiwan traditionally has allocated, I think constitutionally, a budget for education.

Of course.

That’s right.

[laughs]

No, not really. [laughs]

Global Futures Council about the future of computing, I contributed to a report about using AI in politics.

Working, I think I was in the Global Futures Council.

Then, I went to the cabinet, but there was no onboarding stage for me because I’d been working with this information and data for three years now.

That incidentally also enabled me to study, because I didn’t know it at the time. I joined the cabinet six months down the line. Everybody has access to the basic directions of where the nation is going, the basic data, the raw data. The handoff was really smooth. There’s no ...

Then, the premier that carries after the election, Dr. Lin Chuan, is also independent. He also has no parties. What they did was something new. Simon instructed all the ministries to using open data and free information to produce a checkpoint document. They upload it to the public Internet for ...

The very fortunate thing that we have is that during the presidential election and transition, the previous minister before the voting was Simon Chang and he’s a director engineering at Google. He is independent. He doesn’t have any parties.

It’s hard to say because in the previous cabinet my role was, I would say, a private sector consultant, perhaps. I’ve been working as an understudy, you might say, since late 2014. I’ve been virtually in similar positions and co-designed the initial, under-a-million-euro Open Data by default policy. That was ...

Just the volume itself is very, very large.

Automatically, of course as part of the pipeline. You just upload a container script or whatever to the super-computing center at the NCHC. Then, you automatically have access to lots and lots of the environmental data without having to download it, because it’s impractical.

Instead of bringing data to people like the previous generation, we’re now also working on this style, peta style, peta-scale data. It lets the algorithm bring to the data, and then run the algorithms there and publish their statistics.

We are setting up a four-year program, where we use a national petabyte super-computing cluster to absorb all the data that’s indicated there and normalize its vocabulary using the state-of-the-art XML vocabularies. Then, allow the mission learning people to use the NVIDIA Tesla accelerator GPUs in place.

That’s exactly right. We start from the air and the water, earthquake disaster recovery data, because there’s no privacy concern. The river will not wake up and say, "You invaded my privacy." [laughs] It’s all public environmental data anyway.