It’s a sure way for people to get 5,000 counter signatures all way into a radically transparent discussion, all the way into the Prime Minister’s desk, so this is a binding power of transfer.

Collaboratively, use design thinking as a design method to map a policy map of why exactly are we here. Where can we move? We ideate on some possible solutions, and I bring it to the Prime Minister and my colleagues the next Monday to make into national policy.

That connects with the wider participation office. I work in every ministry, whom we meet every Friday. Every Friday, we work on an e-petition case that is proposed by 5,000 people or more to solve a regional or a national problem. We convene with the participation office and all the ...

Every Monday, we list on the dashboard what we have, what still needs doing, who are the project owners. The ones are left, usually I do it, but that’s less frequent nowadays, so it is a very free weekly iteration, working task force.

If it’s a Monday, then I wake up at 8:00, go to work at 8:30, enter here at 9:00, and start those lunch meetings, and because I’m an Anarchist, I don’t give commands to my staff. They do whatever they want, but they need to keep everybody posted in our ...

Everybody in my office, the public digital innovation space, the PDIS works like this. There’s 25 of them. They’re all like volunteers who comes from all parts of the ministries and industry. Basically, we maintain a virtual workspace that allows us to still continue working, whether I’m in the Administration ...

Second, it makes those paper-based forms and what we call just paperwork go away, because through paper, you can reach me maybe three days in the future, but through email, you can reach me instantly. That changed our working culture.

That builds quite a few interesting repercussions. First, the cybersecurity departments get very anxious. They moved in and paid a lot of penetration testers and so on, to make sure that the everyday system that I use is provably secure. [laughs] Which is great, because that increased confidence of the ...

Very few people know about this in the public service. It turns out that whenever any public servant’s work relates to Internet in some way, they can work in whatever hour, in whatever place, and there’s already a ruling on that. I negotiated with the Prime Minister when I entered ...

That depends on which day. [laughs] Every Wednesday and Friday I’m not here, regularly, WCI team notwithstanding. The idea is that I’m a teleworker, and there is a teleworker regulation back in 2015 in Taiwan, and even earlier for public servants.

That’s our general plan and the DIGI⁺ plan is now devoting a whole chapter, and we’re doing this through multi-stakeholder consultation. In the upcoming months, there will be forums on the DIGI⁺ website where you can see more captains of industry chiming in of where they want their special interest ...

If it’s a mesh or a fog it actually makes the local community is like a pool of common resources for their IoT things to talk to each. They see this as a more diverse ecosystem, and that ecosystem-building play is beneficial to those manufacturers of those semiconductors and peripherals, ...

That, for them, means more product lines, more specialized, sensor-specific development of chip sets. That means a lot more utilization of 5G spectra, and so on, because there’s it’s the cloud, and the computation is actually minimal.

The semiconductor people that I’ve listened to during the SRB said that they’re very willing to make the edge devices and make AI, the computation learning algorithms, run very efficiently, both in the energy efficiency sense and also on the computation sense, when it’s integrated into one person’s life, without ...

If it’s done just in the cloud, then it is actually very dangerous, because people develop a learned helplessness. The news feed is that way. I’m not saying which company. The news feed is that way, and there’s no way for me to tune it, and so people become more ...

If it’s on the edge, then it’s still part of the overall personal computing mission. It’s still something you can understand, you can interrogate, and it’s like a personal assistant that will never tell your secrets to some other parties, even it’s just for learning purposes.

Whatever that we move outside, we’ve also identified as part of ourselves, because it’s still the same cognitive function, just as the relationship of many people with their cell phones. It’s the same idea, just an extended personhood. With this, comes the idea of whether we need to perform those ...

Now, with AI, what we’re seeing is specific parts in our cognitive function, in our cortices, for example, looking at your face and thinking of your name, for example, hearing some English and translating it into Mandarin. That’s some of those cognitive functions that we do, and we’re moving it ...

In the primitive society, whatever could not be cooked just was left to rot, and there’s no civilization. When fire was invented, people externalized something that was happening internally, but people can do it in batches, and so prepare food so it lasts longer and people gets healthier.

AI, to me, is like fire, to make an interesting comparison. Fire is something that the human beings fit internally. We eat raw food, and do something like that, decomposing it into smaller molecules internally, but human beings can only do so one meal at a time.

Yes. We had a very long meeting, a multi-day meeting, the SRB meeting to review the semiconductor industry and the hardware manufacturer industry, and how they respond to AI. I think there’s a few key takeaways.

That’s the basic idea. It’s not just one technology. It’s the society’s way of integrating technology. Yes?

We create a regulatory environment that encourage this kind of sand-boxed experimentation that is set with the consent of the population involved in that region. That brings then people to the streets to experiment to work with these kind of new animals, but in a way that is fun, that ...

What I’m saying is, instead of bringing everybody to the street with pitchforks perhaps, we’re trying to make autonomous vehicles in a way that respects local needs. Like if one city, what it needs is tricycles, or the other regions, what it needs is a minivan or whatever, we work ...

When it perceive a complex situation and stop cold on the middle of the road, what exactly is going on? If we see it as a integration of a new kind of animal, then it could be either like a dog, who domesticate us when we domesticate dogs, or it ...

Just how people working with animals can somehow speak and translate for the animals’ feelings and nonverbal cues, we also need people who are not programmers who can interrogate with just laypersons these kind of autonomous cars. What is it seeing? How does it perceive the world?

In effect, what this creates is a new intelligent species, or a new intelligent life form on the streets, that reacts with people’s signals, with people hailing it, with police whistling them and asking them to stop, and we need to find a way to interrogate.

I’ll take autonomous cars as the example, because it is both IoT and AI. If you are in a car with no steering wheels, then it’s also a VR because the car itself is a surrounding immersive experience. It is something that takes all those elements, a little bit of ...

I’m never of the techno-Utopian view. I always see technologies as not neutral. They are like Pokémons. They evolve. They work with each other in interesting ways, they have specific properties, and it’s only if the society in general partake in the development of a technology can it actually integrate.

The whole idea is not one single singularity-like technology that transform the society. It’s the other way around. It’s the plurality. The society with sufficient data literacy, computational literacy, and critical thinking demands something of the technologists.

When we hear "the Singularity is near," let us remember: the Plurality is here.

When we see user experience, let’s make it about human experience, and

When we see machine learning, let’s make it collaborative learning.

When we see virtual reality, let’s make it a shared reality.

When we see Internet of Things, let’s make it a Internet of Beings.

It’s something I wrote in New Zealand, and if you go to my Twitter account, @audreyt, that’s pinned on my account. It goes like this.

On a bigger scale? I’m going to read you a poem. [laughs] It’s something that I composed just a couple of days before becoming a digital minister.

Yes?

We start from a very conservative position, and even as we expand for data for social good, we never let the citizen feel that their personal data is somehow a asset of the state that the state can capitalize on. This is a very dangerous metaphor to work with. That’s ...

This is the superior model than just turning things into, "You have to sign a lot of NDAs, and we have to basically make you a ministry or associated with those two ministries, and for you to do your research with access with all the data." We were not looking ...

There’s a lot of computer science advances in recent years that allow us to bring those code published and into the open for peer review, and then for those data silos to run it locally and just publish the statistical or aggregate results.

Of course, there are a lot of people who say they have good algorithms that can improve people’s lives, cure cancer or whatever, only if they have access to these kind of personal data.

That also means that people are, by default, pretty safe, because the data silos are there and the personal data never leaves the silo. It only gets exchanged upward. It’s upheld by our supreme administrative court, so we’re in pretty good hands.

Many other countries have a data protection authority. We’re working on that, as well. At the moment, all the 32 ministries are their own DPAs. It means, of course, there is very little -- I would say almost nonexistent -- cross-ministerial data linkage for analysis and social good purposes, which ...

Private data, that is the harder problem. In Taiwan, we do have a privacy law. We’re even more strict than most other country with a data protection law, because every ministry that holds personal data doesn’t even exchange, by default, with other ministries. (laughs)

Taiwan is home to Trend Micro and a lot of cybersecurity industries, and we’re looking to integrate it with IoT even more now that the autonomous cars will be everywhere. Cybersecurity, it’s life and death if it’s an autonomous car.

There’s a market shaping play, and I think it’s been pretty successful, even without this act being passed to introduce sufficient cybersecurity training to public servants, especially on the local level. As part of our special budget, we also allocated the necessary hardware and infrastructure upgrades for all the last-mile ...

For the infrastructure, we are now looking for the legislative to pass the Cyber Security Act, which will secure for the critical infrastructure, as well as for all the government systems, sufficient people who are versed in cybersecurity. We’re trying to create a market where if you learn cyber security ...

There’s two different layers. There’s cybersecurity, which is the infrastructure and the personal data and privacy protection, which is in the content, in the layer that runs on the infrastructure.

That’s right.