Audrey Tang: All right, let’s get started.

Nagy Gábor: Welcome. Thank you very much for your time. I hope you receive my email because…

Audrey Tang: Yes, I did.

Nagy Gábor: I’d like to cover and but start with the COVID because I left…Even in the American papers, I either quoted as saying that “The COVID virus even how democracy foster in Taiwan and all dealing with the COVID virus was a victory for democracy, open government, etc.” I would like you to elaborate on that for a while.

Audrey Tang: Definitely. We built our response of the SARS playbook around 2003, 2004 when SARS first hit Taiwan and it was very chaotic. We had to lock down in hospital to hoping hospital unannounced.

Audrey Tang: The Constitutional Court said that it’s barely constitutionally charged to the legislature to figure out some way to work with SARS 2.0 when SARS come again, without sacrificing the democratic order of the liberal democracy, and that’s exactly what we did.

Audrey Tang: We never declare a state of emergency. Each and every measure that we take need parliamentary interpolation and approval. As a result, we do not set up new data collection points, for example by essentially reusing whatever data collections we already had, before the pandemic.

Audrey Tang: We made sure that there’s no top-down, lockdown or takedown, or shut down measures that’s taken as part of the counter pandemic, in an extra legislative way, but rather work with the citizens just for the citizens and amplify the best idea democratically.

Audrey Tang: I mentioned many things, by using humor over rumor, making sure their civic technology to display mask availability to make sure that people can call the hotline, and so on, there’s many measures.

Nagy Gábor: What do you mean by humor over rumor because it sounds excellent? Up to the top like in practice because right now I think you had the experience, whether it was bad or good with the SARS [inaudible 2:12] free, but it could build on it. You’re just learning the lesson of the first…

Audrey Tang: That’s right.

Nagy Gábor: …pandemic, discard.

Audrey Tang: Yes.

Nagy Gábor: I work as a group [inaudible 2:25] .

Audrey Tang: Yes, sorry, we had some time lag. The SARS experience taught us in a time of a pandemic or epidemic as were, the infodemic part is actually sometime more damaging. At the SARS in 2003, people panicked buy, for example, N95 masks leading to a shortage and things like that.

Audrey Tang: We also saw a lot of people this time around panicking really by not understanding how to exactly work with social distancing and masks and so on. We have this very cute spokesdog. The name is Zongchai, Shiba Inu that translates the scientific measures.

Audrey Tang: For example, when you are indoor, you need to keep three dogs away from one another or wear a mask and outdoor wear a mask if there is no two-dogs distance away. Why would you wear a mask? Because it prevents you from touching your own face with your unwashed hand.

Audrey Tang: This is a dog doing something that the mask prevents you doing. These are very humorous messages that people share and once you see the cute dog, you probably cannot unsee it. It appeals to rational self-interest.

Audrey Tang: Instead of saying, respect the elderly or respect the health workers or whatever, we basically say, “Hey, wear a mask to protect your own face against your unwashed hands.” It did lead to more hand sanitation, more tap water used for example and so on.

Nagy Gábor: I think we need to use it because right now we have a very strict doctor telling us [laughs] which sometimes is a bit scary. We should also use…We are in a learning curve in Europe right now. We are strict and we have very strict orders what to do. We have no [inaudible 4:26] not from the opposition. It is a funny thing to see that you could do that on the one hand.

Nagy Gábor: On the other hand, so you credit the SARS that you were so much prepared for the next one for this year’s event. Do you think that Europe we can learn the same lesson because we didn’t have SARS at the time so we are in the first grade, you are in the second grade, that we should learn the lessons of how to deal with all these kinds of things?

Audrey Tang: Exactly. While the memory is still fresh, you will need to do what we did in 2004 which is to take a hard look at what worked and what didn’t and institutionalize not just in the legislature although it’s important too, but also in people’s collective imagination, what to do when SARS 3.0 hits us and it will. It’s a matter of whether it’s next year or next decade.

Nagy Gábor: Did you have any problems with…I’m not talking about now because Taiwan remained open as far as I could tell from the news report. Did you have any problems people protesting against lockdowns [inaudible 5:43] because right now…

Audrey Tang: We didn’t have a lockdown so we can’t have a protest against lockdown.

Nagy Gábor: Not even 2003, you didn’t have lockdown or something?

Audrey Tang: In 2003, we locked down a hospital. Of course people protested it. It was very chaotic and traumatic. All in all, it led to 73 direct and indirect deaths from SARS.

Audrey Tang: Now, 73 [laughs] was a really big deal but of course nowadays is a small number I guess by comparison. That’s a wakeup call to the Taiwanese people because at the time we did not have much support from the World Health Organization. We didn’t this time either. We really needed to figure out something on our own.

Nagy Gábor: How useful is it for Taiwan that you cannot share your experience with WHO or WHA because Beijing doesn’t let you to work together with the WHO? I can imagine that it can be frustrating. You have a good example how to treat pandemics like that, how to treat the coronavirus which is a global problem. I think SARS was a local problem, more or less but…

Audrey Tang: Regional.

Nagy Gábor: Regional?

Audrey Tang: Yes.

Nagy Gábor: Regional I meant [inaudible 6:59] more or less problem, but now we have a global problem. You do have the experience. You just cannot really share it with WHO.

Audrey Tang: I personally, I’m mostly sad because in Taiwan we figured out what was really happening quiet early on and set up the central epidemic command center even before we had the first local case. Because of that, we already played the SARS playback from the beginning of it January and sent experts to Wuhan to investigate.

Audrey Tang: Even amidst all those actions 14th of January last year, WHO was still saying that there is, “no clear evidence of human to human transmission of the novel coronavirus.” Had we had ministerial access to other countries, health ministers, we would probably save a lot of time and a lot of lives. It would save at least 10 days of time.

Nagy Gábor: You are responsible for also the digital ministry. What was the role of the digital tech thing, technology in fighting the coronavirus? I read the [inaudible 8:19] you played and there should be…

Nagy Gábor: You mentioned the dog with both [inaudible 8:28] and smartphones, so having technology to fight, to influence people, to go for the context when you had an exposure to the COVID virus. How is it possible to do that compare to what happened also with the SARS?

Audrey Tang: In Taiwan, there is a lot of emphasis on the national health insurance where, one of the very few if not the only jurisdiction where it’s actually cheaper for anyone, not just citizens, but also residents covered by the universal healthcare to go to a pharmacy to spend, I don’t know, a few cents really, US dollars to get a mask and to put it on and go to a nearby clinic for a full diagnosis if you develop COVID-like symptoms.

Audrey Tang: It’s still cheaper than going through a drive through test of RT-PCR in other jurisdictions. That is to say anyone who work with the medical profession, the medical officers can be assured that there would be no social or financial burden by going through the whole diagnostic process.

Audrey Tang: Even if it’s not COVID, it makes you feel much more safer and also you learn how to use mask and has sanitation properly. The IC card associate to the national health insurance see record used especially in its app version because people can download their diagnosis on their phone and they can also preorder mask on their phone and so on.

Audrey Tang: With all this special technology as too much stress, it plays a supportive role most of the work. The most important technology are still chemical, the soap and hand sanitizer and physical. That’s the physical vaccine or the mask. The digital is maybe the third most important technology.

Nagy Gábor: You also keep mentioning both you and in Taiwan that to counter the COVID virus one of the most important things is to trust the government, to trust that what the government says it’s true and to follow what the government says you should be following.

Nagy Gábor: How did you build the trust through the years? How did you use the source you mentioned to build that trust through years and to use that trust now?

Audrey Tang: I call it trust worthiness. To earn their trust by showing that we are worthy of trust. We do so by essentially trusting the citizens because if the government trust their citizens with open data, then people can see before their own eyes how the system is working without relying on blind trust or third parties.

Audrey Tang: Compare for example when I go to a pharmacy when I swipe the national health card, people queuing after me can check on their phone exactly how many masks did I purchase because the availability goes down in real time on their phones via chat bots and maps.

Audrey Tang: If we publish, instead of just three minutes every time anything gets updated, if we publish every day, then people cannot do the participatory accountability.

Audrey Tang: Whenever people see anything like a rural-urban distribution, inequality or the people who have to take public transportation, who get to the pharmacy for a long time of public transportation and the pharmacy has closed, they can report it in real time through parliamentary interpolation or by calling the 1922 and suggesting better ways of distribution like was preordering.

Audrey Tang: We do take that to effect and say, “Sorry, we didn’t think of that. Let’s implement that next Thursday.” Keep doing these weekly iterations, apologizing if necessary. Last February, early February for example we used to sign in well-ventilated metros for healthy people.

Audrey Tang: You do not need to wear medical grade mask because we were afraid that we’ll run out of mask. The people will have none of it. They criticized the CECC and keep on wearing the masks anyway. We say just two days afterwards, “We’re sorry and we’re ramping out the production from two million a day to now 20 million a day of medical grade mask.”

Audrey Tang: By swiftly apologizing and showing competency of fast iteration and implementing people’s ideas, we earned trust by merit, I guess.

Nagy Gábor: I think we have a two-pronged question, but I start with one. To have that trust right now during the time of the epidemic or pandemic, you have to have that trust beforehand. You cannot just build that trust when the COVID strikes.

Nagy Gábor: You must have a trust in the government even before the pandemic. I’m talking from Hungary and that’s our problem here because even before coronavirus came to Hungary, we didn’t trust the government.

Nagy Gábor: How should we trust what they are saying now? You didn’t have that problem because even before the pandemic, even before COVID, there was a trust between the government and the people. How did you build that?

Audrey Tang: Back in 2014, March, the approval rate and the trust rating of the administration back then was around 9.2 percent or around 10 percent approval rate. I wouldn’t say it’s a lot of trust and that’s when we occupied the parliament, not violently, I must stress for three weeks in protest of a trade deal with Beijing.

Audrey Tang: Once we occupied the parliament, then for three weeks the protest became a demonstration or a demo to show how people can actually deliberate about a trade deal without a central legislative action.

Audrey Tang: People just swarmed around the 20 or so NGOs each deliberating for example on human right, labor conditions, the environmental protection and things like that. I remember once side deliberating whether we want to admit to Beijing sponsored components into our then new 4G telecommunication infrastructure.

Audrey Tang: The rough consensus back then was no because we have to undo another system that creates assessment whenever there is an upgrade because Beijing could take de facto control on so-called private sector any time through party branches and swapping leadership.

Audrey Tang: Now the world is having the same debate on 5G, but what I’m trying to say is that the social sector is very important in Taiwan and by working with the people and not just for the people, the government slowly regained the trustworthiness by adopting the open government as the national direction around the end of 2014.

Audrey Tang: Ever since then, we work on e-petitions systems, participatory budgeting sign boxes, presidential hackathon. The unifying idea is that instead of just asking people to upload three bites per four years that’s called voting, we want people to participate in day-to-day agendas and head democracy even when they are less than adult age.

Audrey Tang: Even when they are just 16 or 17 years old. Actually, they are the most active bunch petitioning for, for example banning plastic straws.

Audrey Tang: This is a gradual change of culture in the public service by essentially moving from a purely top-down and consultation at most style, into a co-creation style of policy making and having participation officers responsible for engaging hashtags in each and every ministry.

Audrey Tang: The dog actually is a campaigning animal of the participation of the ministry of health and welfare. They literally live with their dog and that’s one of the ways to engage the public.

Nagy Gábor: If I may sound philosophical, in the West, we have the participant into the democracy when the have elections, but we have nothing like you do in Taiwan to have the instant connection between [inaudible 17:03] and the government, and [inaudible 17:06] which was just an interesting talking about. Do you think this might be the next level of democracy [inaudible 17:14] ?

Audrey Tang: Definitely.

Nagy Gábor: That there is not a simple connection between the voters and the government in every four or three or five years when there are elections, but you do have day-to-day between the population and government.

Audrey Tang: A continuous democracy, if you will. Yes.

Nagy Gábor: Continuous democracy facilitated through the digital means which of course [inaudible 17:37] available 20 years ago.

Audrey Tang: That’s right. Also, 20 years ago we didn’t have broadband as a human right but now we do. In any corner in Taiwan even on the top almost 4,000 meters, you are guaranteed to have 10 megabits per second at just €16 per month unlimited data.

Audrey Tang: Otherwise, it’s my fault personally. Because of that we can make sure that this is democratic as in it’s not leaving parts of the population behind by bringing everybody onboard.

Nagy Gábor: It’s a little bit of a science fiction, but I’d like to go back to the idea of open government. How open could it be? Because when I was in Sweden in ‘94 when they were preparing to join the EU, I was told that any Swede can go to the prime minister’s officer and read the letters.

Nagy Gábor: It was quite unique learning that in the mid ‘90s. He or she can learn the letters except for the secrets. Where are the limits of the open government in Taiwan? You cannot of course be very open about the strategy against the pressure of Beijing. The part of…

Audrey Tang: We are quite aware [laughs] of that as well on the principles, but not of course the kind of deployments of where are the submarines maybe, not that. No. [laughs] To answer in a more abstract fashion, usually what we are doing is to make sure it’s radical transparency, meaning transparency at the root.

Audrey Tang: Meaning that we take by default a publish upon collection measure when it comes to data. Then we evaluate whether there is of course state secret on one side or privacy information something that the people are just entrusting the government to store and process but without the intention of disclosing it to other fellow citizens.

Audrey Tang: The state confidential secret information and the privacy are the two main concerns. These two of course are off the table when it comes to open data, but on the other hands it takes effort to identify this.

Audrey Tang: If people do not identify, for example during our conversation which we will make a transcript, if there are parts of anecdotes you relay about your friends we have not clear it, for our publication of course you can take it out, but it takes effort to do so. Otherwise, by default it’s released during commerce.

Nagy Gábor: Another question about privacy, secrets and open governance, so we have the GDPR in you?

Audrey Tang: Yes.

Nagy Gábor: There is a big difference between the American system and the Europeans. The American system with all these privacy rules and you have all the small letter knowledge, the end of if you agree or not. In America, it is an opt-out thing…

Audrey Tang: It’s a fine print. Yes. I believe that’s what you’re referring to.

Nagy Gábor: [inaudible 20:49] GDPR it’s an opt-in. I suppose you also have the opt-in.

Audrey Tang: Yeah, we are actually seeking to GDPR adequacy. Our privacy law is a straight adaptation of the pre GDPR European directive and so we have a European style privacy act. The only difference between the Taiwan system and GDPR adequacy is that at the moment we have data protection authority, but it’s not independent of the ministry.

Audrey Tang: It’s not like the personnel and the budget is still at the moment appointed by ministers, but according to GDPR, it needs to be independent of the fellow ministers. That we are going to work on I think in a couple of months.

Audrey Tang: We are going to send out the foundation acts of the competent authority on data protection. Hopefully, that will close the only gap between our own system and the GDPR adequacy.

Nagy Gábor: I did have a personal experience when I was in Taiwan at the first time. I was in a hospital and I was shown the…I don’t know how you call it. The health registry card or health [inaudible 22:05] . It was quite astonishing because…

Nagy Gábor: It’s going to be a little bit longer question because I’d like to explain the situation. Hungary, the Constitutional Court in the early ‘90s, I think it was in ‘92 or ‘93, decided that we could no longer use the personal identification number for data gathering purposes.

Nagy Gábor: We used to have during the socialism a number as you do. One of my kids he doesn’t because it was forbidden at the time and still it is. It’s an 11-digit number which is unique to you. The constitutional court decided that the government cannot use this number to put together different databases.

Nagy Gábor: When I went to this hospital in Taipei and they showed me that card and they told me that everything is on that card including your previous diagnosis, including the…

Audrey Tang: Pharmacy records.

Nagy Gábor: …the medical record. It would be impossible in Hungary because it would be combining databases and especially sensitive information about your health. I just want to understand how far you can go with collecting data of [inaudible 23:33] because…

Audrey Tang: The national health card is…

Nagy Gábor: We have a different database for say the location you live and a different database for your health, the different database for your work. You cannot put them together.

Audrey Tang: I understand that.

Nagy Gábor: It’s against the law to put everything on a health card. [inaudible 23:56] the secrets and where are the limits?

Audrey Tang: It’s regulated by a law and the health card, the health IC card says specifically only medical institutions can write to the card. It is true that if you go to a clinic and later on to a hospital, they would be able to read each other’s record that they have put on the card but as expressly authorized by the legislature.

Audrey Tang: Also, with the caveat that the institution’s card and the doctor or pharmacist or whoever’s card also need to be put on the record so you can always trace each transaction back to the institution, also the person who have written the record into the card. It’s dedicated for that purpose.

Audrey Tang: The card may be read by public service operators that register their service with the national health insurance, but it must never be read for the commercial purposes or non-public service use purposes. Again, this is regulated by law and regulations. That’s what I mentioned actually.

Audrey Tang: The data protection authority for the ministry of health and welfare is the ministry of health and welfare itself. We, at the moment do not have an independent DPA that says, no you cannot link for example the healthcare and medical data and a long-term care data together. We don’t have that independent DPA.

Audrey Tang: While the law is European style, there’s a lot of flexibility within a single ministry of how the data may be linked but across ministries that’s much harder. We really need a lawful authorization usually on emergency use for that to happen.

Audrey Tang: Of course, having an independent DPA will make this much more clear, but the national health card is also the backbone of most of our counter COVID situation which made for example rationing the mask much more easy on the pharmacies. There is pro and con in this.

Nagy Gábor: Going back to the data you gather as a government, the more data you have, the more protection you need for the data to [inaudible 26:17] . You are a hacker or used to be.

Audrey Tang: Yes, still I am. A civic hacker.

Nagy Gábor: How difficult it is to protect all the data you gather together because Taiwan is in a special situation when we talk about China? What measures you should take to have all the data you gather protected.

Audrey Tang: First of all, as I mentioned if we do not already collect the data before the pandemic, then we tend not to collect that during the pandemic. A lot of it is actually not in government’s hand through what we call the real contact system or so-called participatory self-surveillance.

Audrey Tang: For example, people who frequent the nightlife district – host and hostess bars – they are required to leave a prepaid maybe SIM card that could reach them via SMS or as well email address and a pseudonym. Those data, those contact numbers are kept on the scratch card of the business operator, not the government.

Audrey Tang: If nothing happens on that district for four weeks, then it’s just shreds the paper or just erase the record without needing to store it into any government property and so on. This way, we ensure that whenever there is a local outbreak we can always reach the people needed.

Audrey Tang: People who frequent the nightlife district understand that they would not have their privacy compromised to the state. This is actually more nuanced than just everybody writing every day [laughs] to the national health card. It’s not like that.

Audrey Tang: We make sure that there is a decentralized distribution duty of bookkeeping when it comes to pandemic-related issues. Of course, the house registration, the central registration of household, the central registration of insurance and so on, these are of course kept on centralized databases.

Audrey Tang: We also make sure it’s not connected directly for example to the Internet or it need the special VPN or direct clients to connect to. We pay a lot of effort and also money to white hat hackers so we work with penetration testers. Our white hat hackers took again the second place the Defcon CTF, second only to the US team.

Audrey Tang: Maybe we’ll win this year. Anyway, the point is that we make sure that there’s plenty of proactive work by the white hats before we even deploy any new system. The back bonding program and things like that are also used.

Nagy Gábor: During the pandemic, how much did you close your borders? If a foreigner arrived to Taiwan, what measures did you do or otherwise did he or she need to take?

Audrey Tang: You need to be either already a resident holding residence certificate or to apply for a residence permit outside of Taiwan through for example, taiwangoldcard.com. Either way, you need a residence permit to get to Taiwan.

Audrey Tang: If you go to Taiwan, you have a choice of either go to a quarantine hotel, a centralized quarantine place or if you have your own residence then you can quarantine at home. Either way, there’s 14 days’ mandatory quarantine and around which time we pay you €30 per day as a stipend for the work you do.

Audrey Tang: If you break out of quarantine, you pay us back a thousand time that as a fine, so people don’t tend to break that. After the 14 days, you also need to keep seven more days away from very large gatherings, exhibitions, pride parades, I guess and things like that. After that, you are free and you are free to move about.

Nagy Gábor: I think I asked enough questions about the pandemic and Taiwanese government’s working and open government. May I turn to the other two fields?

Audrey Tang: Of course, go ahead.

Nagy Gábor: Which go to your ministerial portfolio but to your expert on the digital. In the light of what happened in American with Donald Trump and Twitter and Facebook, what role for the social media because social media became such a big power in the interaction between the government and the people and the whole ecosystem of receiving and sending news?

Nagy Gábor: Should they be regulated? Should they be as open as a utility? About all those things in the light of what happened at the Capitol more with Trump’s Twitter account, so how could we use the social media?

Nagy Gábor: How should the social media work when every day you check your Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, whatever account? I’m not saying that everyone lives on the social media, but it became such a big thing in everyone’s life. We don’t really know what to do with it.

Audrey Tang: In Taiwan as a digital minister in charge of social innovation and social entrepreneurship, I still think the term “social media” is a little bit different than the term “social” when we are saying social enterprise and social entrepreneurship.

Audrey Tang: When we have a social enterprise, it means that it serves a social function, solves a social problem with social participation with a governance structure that takes into the stakeholders related to that function. I’m talking about cooperatives, talking about credit unions and things like that. The social sector as we say here in Taiwan.

Audrey Tang: The social media companies you mentioned are hardly in the social sector. I’m sure they are not incorporated as cooperatives nor do they have substantial agenda-setting power by the constituency. It’s a confliction of metaphor.

Audrey Tang: This is like saying that your local library or your local, I guess the Hyde Park, [laughs] the park for deliberation and debate is proudly sponsored by a bar that sells addictive liquor. [laughs] This is a confliction of ideas.

Audrey Tang: Nobody expect the host and hostess bar I just mentioned, the nightlife district to serve the primary convening function of town halls. It would be very absurd to think it that way. That’s exactly what we are [laughs] seeing now in many parts around the world.

Audrey Tang: In Taiwan for example, the Taiwanese equivalent of Reddit, the PTT, the original place where we upload to its [inaudible 33:40] message about the SARS happening again in Wuhan. This is entirely open source. The source code is in GitHub.

Audrey Tang: The governance is by everyone who log in and have sufficient number of time to serve as moderators. Its development is subsidized essentially by the National Taiwan University running on Taiwan academic network.

Audrey Tang: The entire stack down to the metal has no one to serve in the shareholder fashion by the advertisers or by venture capitalists or whatever. This, we understand serve as social function and is run by the social sector and the academia of course.

Audrey Tang: That of course channels our developer’s energy into the topics that has a positive social impact or as I call it, the pro social part of social media without inciting the divisiveness, the polarization, the conspiracy theorists and so on.

Audrey Tang: What I’m trying to say is that I’m not saying that we should ban nightlife district. What I’m trying to say is that we need this to a public infrastructure to serve as pro social purpose instead of just letting the civilians and capitalism taking over the essential social functions and we are doing so in Taiwan.

Nagy Gábor: Maybe the social word is not properly connected to the social media but still it has a big power. If you talk about Reddit and if you talk about the Taiwanese equivalent of Reddit, this is a much smaller proportion of the populace than the proportion which uses the companies just mentioning Facebook and then Google and other cyber [inaudible 35:24] .

Audrey Tang: Granted. There are 20 million or more Facebook users in Taiwan. On the other hand, there are 10 million users in Taiwan for our national petition platform and deliberation platform, join.gov.tw. We have maybe one half of Facebook’s reach.

Audrey Tang: That’s fine because people understand in order to set a governmental agenda, in order for the ministry to give a point-to-point response, you need to go to join.gov.tw because that’s the public infrastructure. I’m not saying that we ban Facebook. I’m saying that we shouldn’t use Facebook as a public infrastructure.

Nagy Gábor: I understand. That’s a very unique Taiwanese situation. It’s, I think, a big success of having a trusted government portal, if you will via .tw which can attract half of the audience of Facebook in a country like Taiwan. I can’t imagine the same proportion of any kind of government portal attracting that many people or half of…

Nagy Gábor: Just imagine half of the Facebook users in America would join and send their ideas to a government portal. I can’t imagine that. That’s a huge win for Taiwan and a huge win for the Taiwanese digital social system. That’s a different kind of situation. My question would have been more about the general view on those social media companies.

Audrey Tang: Of course, I guess it is possible for Taiwan to export our model to other parts of the world. There are similar successes around the world. The [inaudible 37:13] system, the council system and later on the [inaudible 37:16] in Spain and Barcelona in particular.

Audrey Tang: There’s many other successes around the world that showed if the government is responsive enough and with sufficient agenda-setting power, people do understand the difference between the entertainment part and the public as a decisions part.

Nagy Gábor: Fake news, the real news and the conspiracy theories run the real theories. It should be important to teach people to differentiate between those two kinds of things. Right now as we could see in America, you have equal chambers, you don’t really have another kind of opinions.

Nagy Gábor: You do see a role for the government in making a difference between fake news, real news, conspiracy theories and the reality. It leads through the open government, the digital infrastructure and the digital participatory democracy. If I…

Audrey Tang: You are a journalist, you get to use the term “fake news,” but I’m not a journalist. I never use that word. I say disinformation, the infodemic. [laughs]

Nagy Gábor: Pardon me. You do see a role for the government to teach people to trust?

Audrey Tang: Definitely. To build what we call a media competence and digital competence. This is not the same a literacy because literacy was last century. It apply when most people are just viewers but nowadays everyone is a storyteller.

Nagy Gábor: I think we are running out of time so I would run to the fourth area which is the artificial intelligence. As I mentioned, you don’t have to be a fan of dystopia and science fiction movies or books to fear the artificial intelligence.

Nagy Gábor: Should we fear it? Should we embrace it? How should we embrace it? What to expect from artificial intelligence because if we go through the development of the digital technology, I’m not an expert like you are.

Nagy Gábor: I’m just a journalist, but I see this should be the next phase of the development of how we deal with the digital part of our life and the digital technology. Should we fear it? Should we embrace it? If we embrace it, how should we do that?

Audrey Tang: To me, AI could either stand for authoritarian intelligence or assistive intelligence. We should, of course, reject the authoritarian intelligence and embrace as much as we could the assistive intelligence. They are both artificial but in different ways.

Audrey Tang: Assistive technology things such as eyeglass, we are both wearing one. They are characterized by two things. One is alignment. I want to see better and you want to see better. The eyeglass help us see better.

Audrey Tang: We don’t see, for example, a popup advertisement that we have to countdown from 10 [laughs] because that would be aligned to the advertisers not to us. We need to empower the dignity of the human being wearing the assistive technology. The same goes for hearing aids.

Audrey Tang: Also, the other thing is accountability. Just last week, my eyeglass literally shapeshifted. I couldn’t quite put it on right. I just bring it to a nearby repair shop who just repair it. I imagined if I watched some videos, I can also repair it myself.

Audrey Tang: I don’t have to pay astronomical like a million US dollars in license fee in order to repair my eyeglasses. It’s not a black box. It’s very adjustable to us. If a technology is both aligned and accountable to the purpose of the human beings, then more powers.

Audrey Tang: We all have worked with many assistive technologies before machine learning and when applying assistive form could easily make us able to listen and scale to people Pol.is.

Audrey Tang: P-O-L.is is a technology, AI-based conversation that we use extensively to visualize people’s different resonance and feelings on the common topics to find shared values despite different positions.

Audrey Tang: It’s entirely open source, open data, its algorithm very easy to explain. You can easily modify and fork it, and audit study it. It’s truly aligned to the interest of the people working in it. All this makes it an enabling technology that everybody can learn and democratize.

Audrey Tang: Democracy I would argue is by itself a technology that is assistive. On the other hand, if it’s unaccountable, if it’s not aligned to the person using it, if the person using it is just treated a user, I know some other industry that treats its customers as users.

Audrey Tang: Then addictive manufacturing industries and then that shapes the power balance either towards surveillance capitalism or to state surveillance. In the end is that not AI enslaving people that only happens in movies, but people enslave other people through AI. That’s possible. Then that’s why I refer to as authoritarian intelligence.

Nagy Gábor: I think these are all my questions.

Audrey Tang: Awesome.

Nagy Gábor: Thank you [inaudible 42:59] and thank you very much for the answers.

Audrey Tang: Thank you. Very excellent questions and I’ll make the transcript and send it to you.

Nagy Gábor: Thank you very much.

Audrey Tang: Cool. Live long and prosper. Bye.

Nagy Gábor: Bye-bye.