Yes. The point is the short iteration. It’s not how good your decision is, it’s how quickly you can pivot if it’s not.

That becomes a social mobilization. By the time of April, more than 95 percent of Taiwanese people not only had access to masks but know how to use it properly. That’s when our R value went to below one.

The more you include the elderly into the public service design, the more likely that those services will actually be used. What they learn about is they can also teach other younger people, like the 70-year-old can then teach 60-year-olds.

Initially, we designed for a mobile phone scanner, but she has a difficulty in seeing. She use a very large tablet, and so we also worked so that the scanner works with large tablets as well.

We eventually decoupled the authentication and the payment so she would authenticate without having to enter a password using her house insurance card and then she can pay with cash over the counter.

Then the 70-year-old grandmother young told me that she isn’t comfortable, because she have to type her bank card password. She was afraid that this would transfer not only NT$52 but actually NT$50,000 [laughs] to some other account.

My grandma not only helped reviewing this plan but also introduced her younger friends, who are 77 years old, so younger to her but not to me, [laughs] to work as focus group to make sure that, for example, we initially designed, when you’re going to the convenience store, you ...

When we start mask rationing, in early February, we understand that mainly elderly people may not be able to queue in front of the pharmacy for such a long time, if they’re really old. So, starting in March, we started working on ways for them to pre-order the mask from ...

My own grandmother is 87 years old, and she still works with me. We talk every week. I visited her every other week to work on policy issues. For example, Taiwan was able to stave off coronavirus largely because we get three-quarter of population wearing mask in a very short ...

Certainly. There’s a saying that says, and I quote, “Nothing about us without us.” I already talked about the very young people in the kindergartens. Now I’m going to talk about very old people.

Sustainability, inclusion – all are very important value to be aligned for a leader today.

A very responsive accountability is important. Also, when I say “value alignment,” nowadays, even for businesses, the value is not just shareholder value but also stakeholder value, that is to say one needs to take care of the environment for the next generation or the social configuration, because, even if ...

I think, as I said, value alignment and accountability is not only important for AI developers but also for leaders as well. A leader needs to prove in real time that we are accountable to all the decisions that we’re making, that we’re really answering the people’s common values and ...

Back when I was 13 or so, I also went to the streets to campaign for education reform. All that reinforces that participation really makes a difference, and so it’s also part of education.

We start even when they’re six years old or five years old. There’s some kindergartner in Taiwan working with their parents onto petition and also to campaign for diversifying the parks so that it’s more inclusive with people with varying abilities, and so on. That is also a very nice ...

The more that they are included in the decision-making process, especially when it concerns to their welfare, the more that they participate in the democracy when they become 18 or 20 years old. If they don’t have a good experience participating, then, by the time they’re 18 or 20, they ...

A more important thing is that even before they have the right to vote, we need to enable them with, for example, participatory budgeting rights, deliberation rights and policymaking, proposing sandbox regulations and laws, and engaging in presidential hackathons, starting e-petitions, and so on, which are all empowering disenfranchised people, ...

It’s not just in Taiwan where you see. Like European countries, the students refuse to go to school on Fridays because they care about climate change, because they will suffer more from climate change, then either of us will. They will live [laughs] to a more climate-changed future.

In Taiwan, even for people who are just 16 years old, who campaign, for example, to ban the plastic straws for bubble tea because they don’t want the plastic to pollute the sea, the ocean, even without the right to vote, they can get many people into this E-petition and ...

I think it’s the other way around. I support them. They don’t have to support me because they are the future. They point out that direction.

For me, I think younger people need to point the directions of future where the society is evolving, and the people who are older and need to support them with the resources that they need.

Because of that, the younger people see more possibilities to get the social, the environmental, and the business sectors working together, while the people who are not digital natives tend to stick in more siloed way.

With just a single hashtag, people can mobilize and start doing very useful social productions without having to spend a lot of time meeting face to face. It’s a radically different way of social organization as compared to people who are digital migrants.

For digital natives, the solutions that is not something that is top-down. They always think about working in crowdfunding and crowdsourcing and just getting people interested in a hashtag. They very quickly trust each other. It’s called swift trust.

If you are under 35 years old, that means that you are a digital native. By the time that you learn to read and write, it’s already reading and writing IE computer. I am a digital immigrant. I’m not a digital native. I learned about Internet when I was 12 ...

Yes, definitely. If everybody is trapped in their own virtual reality, then there is no democracy anymore because people cannot understand each other’s feelings. On the other hand, if we use VR technologies to meet together, then that enables democracy.

Then, of course, the society would just say no to that particular use of AI because it’s not assistive anymore. Thinking AI not as artificial but as assistive is very important.

If there’s value alignment and accountability that the entire society can shape the norm upon which the AI enters the society, then we can trust the AI as we trust some of our assistance. On the other hand, if they fail to provide the account or fail to align for ...

Also whenever they make a decision that you’re not comfortable with, you will demand a explanation from the assistant. That’s called accountability.

I always call AI assisted intelligence. To your question of why AI works well with democracy in Taiwan, that’s because just like any assistant, you have to make sure that assistant that you hire works according to your best interest. It’s called value alignment.

Mm-hmm.

We will, in a video conference, open the same bottle of wine and drink together, or they go to their Gordon Biersch, and I go to the Gordon Biersch in Taipei and so on. Nevertheless, enjoy some familiarity, but it’s not a substitute for the actual food and drink in ...

When I work with Silicon Valley companies before I become a digital ministry, they will send me, for example, red wine from the Napa Valley.

Also, vendor neutrality is so important when making democratic innovations. Finally, what are the things that can only be done face to face? Definitely, enjoy food and drink together. Even though we can’t enjoy the same music together now, it’s very easy. The food and drink is much harder.

If the intermediation is biased, for example, if sometimes people don’t have the bandwidth required to participate in live streaming, or they don’t have access to such devices, or if the live streaming platform only favors certain operating systems or devices and excludes other operating system or devices and so ...

It also makes asynchronous communication possible that breaks the time boundary. That’s why digital is important. On the other hand, all of this goes through intermediation.

This breaks the space boundary. Also, if people are in different time zone when they cannot wake up to participate in a live streaming, they can watch their recording and do a asynchronous way of, maybe, comment and a reply to nevertheless voiced their opinions without having to stay awake ...

The question about why is digital so important is that digital allows us to transcend the boundaries of space and time. For example, we are not in the space now. Through digital technology, we can still meet face to face and see each other very clearly, actually, more clearly, than ...

It serves like a collective intelligence system. I don’t have to rely on my own pairs of eyes to look at all the possible problems with any proposal. Rather, people in different positions can help to suss out the problems in any proposal and build common values. People trust each ...

The reason behind this philosophy is what we learned during open-source development. There’s a saying that says, “When there are enough eyes, all bugs are shallow.” That is to say, when you get people from various different positions looking at a idea together, the problems, the inconsistencies, and so on ...

The other days, people can just visit me when I’m here. The only thing I ask is that we publish everything online as either transcript or a video recording. The reason is that the radical transparency makes sure that people, when they lobby me, lobby only on the basis of ...

Thank you for the great question. I think a very important one, which is why open is so important to my philosophy. I’m here not only Wednesdays. Although I have to go to cabinet meeting every Thursday, I’m usually in the cabinet on Monday as well.

Yeah, thank you. It was a blast. Bye. Cheers. Bye.

Sure. I think our legal counsel starts working Tuesday. I will just run this through our legal counsel, who usually responds not in 30 seconds, but 30 minutes. [laughs] We’ll see how it goes.

Yeah. Maybe we can call them Presets.

…that’s not a lot more fictional than how corporates become avatars.

Now the river is there, and the mountain is there. The digital commons are there. If they become, magically, avatars…

That’s much easier to understand intuitively than liquid democracy — which is essentially about shifting allegiances, for lack of better term — albeit without a formal formula for earning trustworthiness.

Maybe not liquid democracy — maybe natural personhood? It sounds more like natural personhood, like giving a river or a mountain a legal seat at a table, through re-presentational algorithms, essentially, to prove that this poor decision harms the river, so the river can sue for damage as a legal ...

Currently, I don’t think we can — there’s no app for that.