Fantastic. Thank you. Audrey, that was great.

I feel the same way right now. I’ve got so much to think about here. Thank you so much for sharing that with everyone who’s listening here. I wish you all of the best in all of the challenges and continued success with the programs that you have been carrying ...

Thank you. Audrey, I remember from the conferences where you would be presenting about software to developers that you would be going at a rate that would cause steam to come off their heads.

Wow. One last question. What do you think we will face in the next 10 years in terms of progress in artificial intelligence?

Is this the time to develop international treaties on the ethical use of AI, and how about autonomous weapons?

Are you seeing any developments or developing anything in that respect yourself?

I want to move onto an international area here. The Obama Administration produced a report from the National Science and Technology Council on the future of AI. One of their recommendations was the US government should develop a government-wide strategy on international engagement related to AI and develop a list ...

Wow. I’m going to have to process a lot of that offline. I’m looking at the clock here and aware of our time.

Audrey, you were quoted in the Taipei Times as saying that AI should be developed transparently. In a world where it looks as though most of that cutting-edge AI is coming out of Google, Apple, IBM, how do you see that happening, and what would that look like in a ...

Wow. Just a note to the audience here, I’m going to have to go back over this and listen to it several times to get all of this, so you might want to do that as well.

Do you see this happening there? Can you forecast that happening? What do you do about that?

There’s concern in the West about the impact of artificial intelligence on jobs. Technology development can provide benefits, and at the same time, disruption that has unanticipated or negative effects on some people.

What should governments be doing today in respect of the impact of technology on those people? Does that role, for instance, tilt mainly towards providing education, regulation, or incentives on the tech sector, or something else?

As an open source developer, your customers were mostly a narrow base of developers, but government is responsible for the welfare of all of its citizens, including, as you point out, those who neither care nor know about technology.

I’m reminded of the saying that, “A lie can be halfway around the world before the truth has got its boots on.” I think that you’re demonstrating how the truth can get its boots on faster.

That’s very interesting. I’m thinking of some cultural differences and wondering how successful that approach might be in the United States, where it seems that pointing out the provenance of information hasn’t always helped in changing its effect.

Do you see this where you are, and how do you see this evolving as perhaps a kind of information warfare as AI evolves?

In one aspect, AI is accelerating that problem because of the number of bots that are populating Twitter with messages that are aimed at causing disruption and dissent among the population, probably in many cases, at the behest of some foreign power.

I think there are many people on this side of the world that need to understand that as well as you do, because manifestly, it is a much bigger problem over here.

How could AI or other technology combat the problem of disinformation?

The coronavirus has led to us isolating behind Internet conversations, which is exactly the kind of environment in which that virus of the mind breeds. At a time when we were trying to decrease the amount of screen time people had and increase their social interactions, we’ve been forced to ...

Wow. That’s a lot to take on. You mentioned disinformation in various ways. Fake news, and what used to be called propaganda or psy ops is a serious problem in at least some democracies at the moment.

Maybe we have the opportunity to improve those patterns while they’re still fluid and volatile, before they gel again. Do you see places where we can emerge from this better than we went into it?

This pandemic disrupts the status quo in just about every walk of life for just about everyone on the planet. We’ve had many patterns within our societies and institutions that were not optimal but have become ossified, as it were. Almost impossible to change, and yet COVID-19 has disrupted them ...

As we like to say, the testing proves it, and your numbers have proved that.

Does that validate the concept of digital democracy?

You’d been building this digital democracy before the pandemic, and then that happened. You achieved a response that is the envy of most of the world in its success, especially because you achieved it without the sort of totalitarian police state tactics that many people thought were going to be ...

Giving all this power to the citizens, there’s a saying in the West, “You’ll never keep them on the farm once they’ve seen Paree.” Are you in some sense inoculating the people against the possibility of some future government wanting to take some of that power back? Would they just ...

Can you describe digital democracy and the role that technology plays in it?

It sounds very much as though you’ve brought the ideals of open source to government, and you’re debugging democracy. Either way, it sounds that you’re empowering people to an extraordinary extent.

That’s fantastic. Congratulations. What sort of skills has this job demanded of you that you didn’t need before?

You wrote an app for tracking masks?

I believe you’re even still writing code. I think I saw something about an app.

Audrey, many people want to attempt a midlife career change, but going from hacker to national government minister is, shall we say, rare. Why was it important to you to take this job?

We first met over 15 years ago when she was an incredible coder in the open source movement. She was writing not just phenomenal code, but entirely new ecosystems of phenomenal code. Her IQ has been measured at way past the official definition of genius.

I’m here with Audrey Tang. She is the Digital Minister for Taiwan, a minister without portfolio, in charge of helping government agencies communicate policy goals and managing information published by the government, both via digital means. She is the youngest minister without portfolio in Taiwanese history.