Let’s take away this, making sure that this is the starting point. Start here.

This one?

Every place has a different norm. If we start from the law, and impose the norm, intense conflicts are much more likely.

The MIT Media Lab people who brought this into our attention discovered that, in Taiwan, people would much prefer they yield to the elders first, then handicapped people, then pregnant women, and finally children, but in Boston, where they’ve made a first prototype, people care about the children, not at ...

Norms, design the norms, implement the norms, making sure it’s reflected in the code. This is especially important for self-driving vehicle. Every place, the tolerance and the social expectation is different.

Of course.

Of course. Do I just randomly…

Drawing.

I’ll send you the slides.

We’re good.

Nowadays, with participatory democracy, even with cow horns, I think that gradually makes people conscious that the democracy doesn’t have to only work with the current generation, but also for the future generations.

Maybe democracy, as we practice it, the traditional representative democracy, just like the business as usual for plastic straws, maybe it has a social and environmental negative externality that are not felt until two generations or three generations later.

It’s not a bad fiction, certainly not worse than the corporate limited liability as a legal fiction, [laughs] as a legal personhood. I think these referendums serve as bridges that brings us from a more limited adult only – and I care about it a lot because I participated as ...

Because of this constitutional mismatch, I think referendums is a really powerful advocacy tool to get people to understand why, for example in New Zealand, in Māori, they have a river made person. They can sit on a boat of a company. Somebody from the Crown and somebody from the ...

I think it genuinely increases people’s horizon of what citizenship means, of what people means. Because Taiwan, unlike say Germany, don’t have the animal’s right of life into our constitution. We have to rely on constitutional amendments in the future to take care of the rights of animals as a ...

I think this is important because for all its issues and the funds that it got made, it actually gets people, including people in Taiwan, to really read about what roles horns play in animal’s metabolism. What in the ecosystem, do they hurt other animals, do they not hurt other ...

I do learn from, Latour, Bruno Latour, who argued that there should be people designated as speakers for the natural elements that cannot yet participate in a human understandable manner.

Cows is very interesting because they don’t have voting right to begin with. Whether they’re a minority in democracy or they’re unrepresented people in a democracy, that is a very interesting debate that I’m sure people in deep ecology can argue much more passionately than me.

If we go back to national referendum, indigenous populations may be three percent, and that wouldn’t make sense. Systemically taking away rights from people who are just in the minority, that wouldn’t work, obviously.

For example, the indigenous nations’ rights must never be subject to public referendum, because indigenous nation may be subject to a lot of the rights decided by their nation nowadays, because after the transitional justice and the president’s apology, we’re now working with the indigenous nations much more peer-to-peer like ...

In our Referendum Act, I’m sure there’s similar considerations in other countries.

That are not dehorning.

It also makes citizens’ initiatives much deeper because, otherwise, people would just associate it with the closest presidential or mayoral election and fall back into this winner-loser thinking. I think our process around referendums can really make a lot of improvements. Switzerland is obviously the world leader in that.

Now that we have made mayoral election a year and then referendum, and then presidential election and then referendum, and so on. Alternating years, there will be representative and deliberative democracies. That gives each deliberative topic in the referendum a lot more runway a year, or more of runway, to ...

That is also because some mayor candidate are also petitioner of referendum. It makes the whole representative versus participatory line very confused. Now, we must learn more from Switzerland.

Certainly. Our referendum system, which is really new, is designed to be inspired by the Swiss model, but we made a big mistake of tying it to the national election day. Turn out no matter how much deliberation before a referendum topic, if we tie it to the same day ...

Whenever any vendor tells you that singularity is near, please keep in mind that the plurality is here. Instead of smart cities, smart citizens. A smart city plan only works if it makes smart citizens. If it makes dumb citizens, that’s the wrong kind of smart city.

I would say that instead of thinking about Internet of Things, we should make an Internet of Beings. Instead of building virtual reality, we should build a shared reality. Instead of focusing on machine learning, we should focus on collaborative learning. We shouldn’t ask about user experience, but rather human ...

Once you have the culture as Switzerland obviously does, then you can use digital to enhance the humanity, the connection between people, but never digital for digital’s sake. My main message, which is really short, is also my job description.

First of all, it’s not a race. There’s no fast or slow. I would much rather people get the broadband, the broadband as human right, to media literacy, critical and creative thinking, the curriculum based on the students’ needs to be curious and solve problems instead of any standardized answers ...

Maybe the people who have the EID after the new EID rolls around will grow from maybe one in four people to maybe one in three or one in two people. We’re certainly not saying that everybody have to mandatorily enable the EID.

There’s a plan starting next October to start rolling out the paper ID. With a EID built in, but you still have to activate it. What we’re saying is that if you feel like, you can have your EID and your paper ID and essentially stick them into one. If ...

It’s handed out by the state. The software is written by CHT, the Chunghwa Telecom, which is a almost state-owned but not quite telecom operator. People generally trust the CDC, but because it’s opt-in, if you don’t want a digital certificate, you can use other means to file your tax. ...

We already have EIDs for quite some time. We have a PKI card, the Citizen Digital Certificate, or the CDC. It’s a strongly encrypted card that has the same weight as signing a paper document. I think maybe one in four people in Taiwan has that card and uses that ...

Then you get a referendum and half the people feel they have lost.

Setting aside time for feelings is also very important before we jump to the ideas, because as I showed time and again, if you leave time for feelings, the idea is to take care of everybody’s feelings. If you don’t leave time for feelings, people just start from here and ...

I would say any top-down approach to impose digital orders is by itself the risk to digital democracy in general, which need to be done in the basis of not just norm-first, but also giving people sufficient time to look at the collaborative thoughts and form their own feelings.

Once people get into these norms, maybe someday we’ll talk about election in the lower levels. There’s always this mentality of sandbox building norms and then building policies. I think this gradual idea is very important. Any rush to a top-down approach is actually the main risk in all the ...

If you only use that for national referendum, which is the same candidate, the same issue across the nation anyway, you can very easily introduce first, electronic counter signatures, then electronic tallying. Then, after that, maybe electronic voting without harming the people’s norm expectations.

We can actually experiment with the national referendum because there’s no exponential return. If you use electronic voting for president, and the president has some power to change the rules around electronic voting, then the reward is exponential.

Every time this happens, we see more polarization being done. It’s very hard to fix that if you started this path, which is why we keep saying in Taiwan, for example, we are not doing electronic voting for any candidates of mayorship or president, period. We are not doing that.

Yeah, there’s always a risk if the law makers ignore this norm design first approach and try to pass the law that dictates the codes, that dictates for the whole society.

Young people of course are the ones that see and form the norms the fastest, because there is no legacy. [laughs] They don’t have the habit of interacting with technology any which way. They can form a norm much quicker than the older people do.

That is what we call the norm-design-first approach, which is a superior approach if you are going to tackle all the emerging technologies, because otherwise, if you start with the law, that dictates the code, that dictates the policy, that dictates the norms, you run into endless conflict when the ...

This open hardware, you can just tinker it. All this made sure that a norm gets formed, and the policy followed. The policy then determined the code that finally gets absorbed into the law.

If we make sure there is a sandbox, meaning a safe experimentation space, for each and every of those emergent ideas – for example, self-driving vehicles – it could be a really slow one that’s a tricycle that literally roamed in my social innovation lab that is open-source and open-hardware, ...

This is how we formed the norm before we settle on the law. Because if the lawmakers don’t have firsthand experience of those emergent issues, then they’re very easy for them to make a law that just forecloses other possibilities.

Because of that, we have to switch to a different set of questions. Instead of asking, “Who are the organizers and how do we arbitrate?” we must ask now, “What are the various positions? What are their common values, and can we deliver innovations that deliver on everybody’s common values?”

This is a superseded idea because, nowadays, with the right hashtag - #MeToo, #ClimateStrike - anyone can be a organizer. There’s no need for traditional vertical organization anymore to represent people’s ideas. Any of these online platforms can represent people’s ideas with no loss in fidelity.

I think the public service can really learn, and that includes me, anyone can learn about the fact that we’re switching from a metaphor of there’s just a limited number of senior organizers in civil society and in the private sector, and the public sector’s role is just to make ...