Andre Uhl: I’m actually outdoors, and it might be a little dark to video chat.

Audrey Tang: It’s fine.

Andre Uhl: Is it fine?

Audrey Tang: Yeah, it’s fine. Actually, I can see you just fine.

Andre Uhl: I’m sorry about that. It was just a nice evening out, and I thought of going outside a little while we’re talking.

Audrey Tang: No problem. You know that we’ll be on the record, but I will refrain from publishing the video if you’re not comfortable with it. We can publish the transcript, instead. We can decide that after the conversation.

Andre Uhl: That sounds good. Thanks for connecting. Thanks for taking your time to talk. I was excited to hear that you’re joining the Council on Extended Intelligence.

Andre Uhl: I’ve been curious to learn more about your work. I’ve been reading a bit about the things that you were sending me along in your email and I thought right now is a good timing to connect because we just had our members meeting in Cambridge.

Audrey Tang: That’s right.

Andre Uhl: At the meeting, there were a couple of members from East Asia who are interested in building a regional representation of CXI.

Andre Uhl: One of the original intentions behind CXI was to develop a new narrative for the ethics and governance of AI through principles of participatory design. Our first project was a report that would define this mission, and we’ve published it earlier this year.

Andre Uhl: Our challenge moving forward is to translate this report into practice. We decided that as a first step it would be useful to showcase projects of our members. Your work offers an interesting perspective on participatory design and I’d love to figure out how we might be able to collaborate moving forward.

Andre Uhl: I’d like to hear about your reflections about the Council, if you have been involved in anything related to it so far and what you thought about it, so we can have an open conversation.

Audrey Tang: Actually, I think the Council’s three main directions -- because I’ve been attending the calls and also following the Google Doc collaborations -- I think it’s really moving toward a direction where it’s very close to my mandate.

Audrey Tang: Because my main mandate in Taiwan here, because I’m in charge of open government and of social innovation, the enlightened indicators for sustainable human progress in holistically different levels and in a way that is measuring the impact, not the outcome, of policies -- that actually is my main work at the moment.

Audrey Tang: It really resonates with me that if we make each county or town make their own sustainable goal, targets, for their locality and for the municipal government to include them into their voluntary local reviews and other measurement devices, and then for the national level to take approach instead of aggregating them, more of systemically supporting them based on their visions.

Audrey Tang: This would actually much better connect people in the social sector such as the co-ops and nonprofits as well as people in the private sector, because then they speak the same language based on the sustainable progress.

Audrey Tang: I think the pivot from criticizing GDP, which is not exactly very helpful -- GDP is actually 1 of the 169 SDG targets to lift people out of poverty, so it’s useful to that degree, but only to that degree, if you know what I mean. I think put GDP where it belongs as just 1 of the 169 goals. I think that is a really good thought process.

Audrey Tang: I’m very happy to see in the participatory design that the third agenda has been changed into this holistic, multi-level thinking, rather than this anti-GDP narrative, which would be a little bit militant and actually not very practical.

Andre Uhl: That’s a good point. I think what we are really aiming for is to develop a narrative that can be useful for as many stakeholders as possible, rather than joining in the usual ’us vs. them’ scenario.

Andre Uhl: That’s also the challenge, like, how do you actually challenge a paradigm without creating an adversarial relationship with people for whom that paradigm holds a lot of meaning.

Andre Uhl: I think that, again, the idea of this is -- what you are also highlighting with your work on radical transparency -- how can we use technology as an enabler of meaningful communication.

Andre Uhl: I’m curious, how did you actually get connected to the Council?

Audrey Tang: I was in Vatican, where there was a meeting on the future of AI and participatory democracy and so on, organized by Jeffrey Sachs.

Audrey Tang: I gave my talk and get connected to the cohort of people who care about these issues. In particular, John Havens was also in that meeting. Then John took a interest in exactly what you said in having radical transparency as kind of an enabler of creating digital twins of ourselves, and that can be interacted socially.

Audrey Tang: The other thing that I emphasize is that we co-create the AI norms before we turn them into regulatory experiments like sandboxes. Then after that, we turn them into parameters in a machine code.

Audrey Tang: This is actually a very different direction, because in many other paradigms, it’s the machine code determines the policy of regulations that determines the social norm. You saw it’s a very interesting philosophy that I’ve been turning this around.

Audrey Tang: He introduced me to Konstantinos Karachalios. Basically, I joined through John.

Audrey Tang: But actually, I do have quite a few friends already in the council. For example, the Open Algorithm Project, the OPAL project — Alex "Sandy" Pentland was a part of our World Congress on IT. He did visit and we did have a really good long chat.

Audrey Tang: He’s supervised projects like self-driving tricycles and so on. Totally fit our vision and we’ve been deploying open algorithm because Taiwan has a privacy law that is European.

Audrey Tang: We’re very quickly seeking GDPR adequacy. In that environment, you really need Alex’s word of thinking in order to make sure that we can deliver the social benefits without compromising individual privacy and so on.

Audrey Tang: There’s quite a few people that I’m already reasonably familiar with. I think it’s a good bunch of people to bring in. Like Sarah Spiekermann was also in the Vatican conference, so that’s how we were connected.

Audrey Tang: I chose group three, mostly because that connects with my day job the most. I’m also previously very interested in Tibetan Buddhism and the cognitive sciences based on a fusion between like Taoism, Zen practice, psychoanalysis, and just more reflective my spiritual personal growth.

Andre Uhl: That’s awesome.

Audrey Tang: The challenge is always not just to frame them as prerequisite conditions in order for system change to happen, but actually giving now the narrative of how system change can feedback back into the kind of awakening or consciousness.

Audrey Tang: I think the Theory of U and other similar theories has been really influential in helping my work. I think it’s great that we can give back to scale out the impact of such thinking even further.

Andre Uhl: Oh, that’s great. Actually, one of our members is working closely with Otto Scharmer and she just introduced me to his work.

Andre Uhl: I agree that it really isn’t enough to look at technology alone. The actual question is how people are using it. I think that’s more a question of culture, something that for example also Sarah Spiekermann is looking at in her work on values-driven design.

Andre Uhl: I myself am currently exploring how cultural intervention can be a means for shiftig paradigms within the AI community. This coming fall, I am going to start a residency here at Harvard at the Center for the Study of World Religions to incubate an interfaith AI ethics council. I think that we need to pay more attention that public opinions on AI are shaped by certain religious and spiritual narratives, at least metaphorically. There are all those talks around whether humans are going to upgrade themselves into gods or robots will outsmart their human creators... What would happen if we’d apply a Buddhist or a Hinduist or an indigenous worldview to these questions? I think they could offer a completely different kind of imagination, which would sound quite radical to some people here... So I’m also interested to bring this project to Asia, to find more collaborators on that side of the planet.

Audrey Tang: I’m very well-connected to Impact Hub Taipei, which has been hosting the CP Yen Foundation. The foundation in Taiwan has been around for forever, pushing facilitation methodologies and transformative theory. They give their Dialogue Impact Award based on actually Theory of U thinking.

Audrey Tang: The traditional Chinese version of Theory of U is translated and published. I’m actually just spreading [laughs] this around. They really make a very dynamic use.

Audrey Tang: For example, there’s a Japanese table game called 2030 SDGs Game that uses card games to make sure that people understand the idea of triple bottom line but, more importantly, to transform people’s idea of individual gains into things that are not against individual gains but are more part of the whole. That’s the downward part of the Theory of U.

Audrey Tang: It just lifts the group out of the collective reflection by providing a coherent vision based on the triple bottom line so that people can go on to upward part of the Theory of U.

Audrey Tang: This is not a product. This is a facilitative methodology. They translate it to traditional Chinese to get trained in Japan, and then is now offering such workshops. I actually played a workshop and livestreamed it to increase its impact. Not just Theory of U, but this whole SDG system exchange narrative were very well-aligned.

Audrey Tang: I’m very happy to connect you with people who would be interested in if you’re going to have this spirituality and culture as the driving narrative of AI and not just primitive animism. They write it in a way to catalyze a systemic spiritual change. This is something that I’m very happy to help toward.

Andre Uhl: That sounds fantastic. I would love to make those connections. Otto Scharmer just recently published an essay on medium where he talks about the current climate change protests that are led by school kids around the world. He argues that what’s different to similar movements of the ’60s and ’70s is that the new generation is not anymore looking for a shift in ideology alone, but rather a shift in consciousness. I find this observation extremely helpful, also in terms of describing what CXI is about. I think that our overall goal is to support this kind of shift in consciousness that Scharmer is talking about.

Andre Uhl: Actually that’s how Joi Ito and I and others at the Media Lab originally connected. We had a shared interest in awareness, and that translated later into the idea of Extended Intelligence, a sort of non-reductionist understanding of AI.

Andre Uhl: The CXI report I mentioned earlier focuses on the more pragmatic aspects of the term, such as participatory design, data agency and metrics of wellbeing, but I personally think at its core Extended Intelligence is a deeply spiritual concept. The idea is the more we increase awareness for our role as participants in complex adaptive systems, the more effectively we can also respond to the big systemic issues of our time, such as climate change. It’s about ’the power to transcend paradigms’, as Donella Meadows would say.

Andre Uhl: It has been interesting to bring these questions into the AI discourse, which has recently been a lot of times either on the very technical side or, on the other hand, on very simple and almost reductionist world views concerning human versus machine instead of looking at how actually all of them generate a much more complex system.

Audrey Tang: Even within the council itself, of course, there’s different metaphors. What I like about the XI idea is that even though it’s harder to explain, to be honest, but it’s better than...

Audrey Tang: There’s a very popular narrative called augmented intelligence and augmented collective intelligence. That is the driving metaphor at the moment. It’s augmenting like an eyeglass or a bicycle, like computers being bicycles of the mind and things like that. That’s fine.

Audrey Tang: Now that AI have much more autonomy, we’re hearing, "Oh, they must become assistive intelligence," in the sense that the learning needs to be, because they’re now placing in decision-making roles, they need to be subservient to people and the planet instead of become everything -- dictators and things like that.

Audrey Tang: Extended intelligence goes a step further, saying that it is actually the machines are just catalysts for the change within ourselves, within our society, and within our relationship to the planet. This catalyzing role of technological advancement is quite unique in the council’s narrative. I think this is where it sets it apart from the regular AI ethics conversation.

Audrey Tang: I think that is one of the narrative that can only come out if we make the enlightened progress as our goal, and then extend intelligence as the kind of instrumental phase, the transition to reach that goal. Then digital agency, digital democracy, whatever is just a kind of supporting apparatus to the extended intelligence.

Audrey Tang: Kind of flipping the three points around. I’m not saying that you should flip those three points around, but that’s how it looks like in my mind.

Andre Uhl: Yeah, that’s very interesting. And that too could be a cultural thing. I went to an art school in Japan before coming to Harvard, and I used to be fascinated how people created from a much more intuitive place, whereas I, as a European, was used to beginning with some kind of concept or argument, something that you could rationalize. I think I learned the most during that time from translating between German and Japanese, and to deal with the different levels of precision and ambiguity that the two languages allow for. I also believe that’s how I got interested in the cultural dimensions of AI.

Andre Uhl: I’d like to explore more how Eastern philosophy can be used as a framework to explain the idea of Extended Intelligence, especially the Buddhist understanding of non-duality.

Audrey Tang: Very much so. I think, as I mentioned, and also indigenous. It doesn’t have to be Eastern. It could be Western indigenous. Because I mean, Taoism or Shinto, for that matter, all started as indigenous spiritualities and then just formalized a little bit.

Audrey Tang: That is the same as Tibetan Buddhism. It’s not that’s the logical India line of thought. In the beginning, it’s just indigenous spirituality in Tibet. But then they get kind of formalized through Buddhist logic.

Audrey Tang: What I’m trying to get at is that we still have indigenous cultures around and in Taiwan. Half of Taiwan, all of the East side, is actually indigenous traditional land.

Andre Uhl: That’s interesting.

Audrey Tang: While the West side, somewhat symbolical, is Westernized. It’s very interesting that within the island ourselves, we do have this non-duality going on in terms of conversation between indigenous traditions as well as the more rigorous manifestation, but still of indigenous root, like a local religion and Taoism and things like that.

Audrey Tang: I’m very happy to also connect to people who think along these lines and the importance of making sure that the non-duality is getting into all the different dimensions of the CXI, for example, in participatory democracy or participatory design.

Audrey Tang: In Taiwan we say [Chinese] , but we mean that by common understanding or a common sense, actually, sense as in sensing, not in common sense.

Audrey Tang: But this by itself is very different from its traditional Western counterpart, which is consensus. Consensus is something that is very strong, that is binding, that you can put your name on it that signifies a kind of rigid link between individual peoples.

Audrey Tang: Even just the term itself carries a different notion. I would argue it’s much easier to have a participatory design session if what you’re aiming to is just common sensing.

Audrey Tang: But at the end, I think in the Western context, like in IEEE or in IETF, we have to invent new words like rough consensus and running code to capture this same sort of meaning. I think that is also why the key IETF RFC document to capture the process is called "The Tao of IETF" in quotes, the Tao Te Ching as in it’s not a coincidence.

Andre Uhl: That’s very interesting. Yeah. I think that’s were also our shared interest in anarchist theory comes in. I usually tend to think that people in the West - and I would be curious to hear about your experience in your country since you are kind of openly talking about this topic, too - I always feel like here it’s perceived as so radical that people just don’t want to even touch it, at least, in the mainstream. But to me personally, anarchist theory offers a lot of very useful ideas how you can embrace an entire system and allow patterns to emerge in a much more intuitive way.

Andre Uhl: It’s, again, very much like going with the flow and adapting to constant change. I’m wondering if this is also like a cultural thing that people in certain cultural contexts get less triggered by it, in reference to what you were just describing, or if this is just generally like a difficult term to work with.

Audrey Tang: I think the early 20th century thoughts, political thought, like Dr. Sun Yat-sen, who created the five branches of government that we’re still running with here in Taiwan. It was a lot of his thoughts, too, for example, the early socialist thinkers.

Audrey Tang: In particular, I think the influence of Henry George is very much present in Dr. Sun Yat-Sen’s thoughts. His main allies at the time has still like overarching political cultural influence in the early ROC revolution are anarchists and mostly the French part of the anarchist thinking.

Audrey Tang: They are, of course, advocating anarchistic revolution in the context of the Eastern thought and just rephrasing it.

Audrey Tang: There’s a very famous article at a time, about a hundred years ago now, that says anarchism sees education as revolution. Basically, a cultural enlightenment is what Eastern anarchists like Chuang Tzu following Lao Tzu, partly that was in tradition, is looking forward.

Audrey Tang: It’s not as much bomb throwing as it is as meme throwing. I think we are at a age where...The traditional anarchism, I think, was seen as antagonistic, mostly because of their work against private property, and more so than anything.

Audrey Tang: People generally agree that if you can replace hierarchy with horizontal leadership, people are fine with it. But if you start saying property is theft, then people have a lot more problem accepting that, John Lennon notwithstanding.

Audrey Tang: But I think because we’re operating in a domain now where the software, or the code, or the algorithm that is the spirit imbued in the flesh that is code is plainly not property, "intellectual property," quote unquote, notwithstanding. It is theoretically a paradox to treat them as property. Because they are really relational flows between agents.

Audrey Tang: That’s what AI, if I sent my image to you through Skype, I don’t lose my image. It’s insane to treat this as property in the traditional sense.

Audrey Tang: Once we enter this more digital realm and see more digital twins out of analog parts, then all the odes of property as theft narratives doesn’t need to be invoked anymore, because they are not private property to begin with. The arguments then becomes anarchism as a mode of production as a mode of social production.

Audrey Tang: Actually, Eben Moglen of the Free Software Foundation wrote a very influential paper around the turn of the century called "Anarchism Triumphant -- Free Software and the Death of Copyright," and the birth of copyleft, I’m sure. That is, I think, how the people in the software realm generally reperceived anarchism as a social production mode and less of a direct fight against private property.

Audrey Tang: At least that is the context of how I connected my more Zen and Taoist traditions and the more political traditions of socialist anarchism to the more crypto-anarchist.

Audrey Tang: That was around the turn of century. But then there came Bitcoin and Ethereum and suddenly we don’t have to explain the core concepts anymore because then people do actually see that you can have the centralization while have a different sort of trust that has its own governance problems, of course, but it’s clearly anarchistic.

Audrey Tang: What’s in operation, I’m not saying development. The development is downright minimal. But in any case, what I’m saying is that then now that we have firsthand experience of people participating in anarchistic systems, that’s when the word can be more openly used, is what I’m saying.

Andre Uhl: Are you using this in your own professional life as well?

Audrey Tang: Yeah, so I call myself openly as a, quote unquote, "conservative anarchism." The term, it’s designed so that it appeals to people who care about the plural traditions.

Audrey Tang: Conservative meaning keeping what works, making sure that why the grandparent’s life experience still makes sense to the young people. Making sure that institutions are respected as is and we complement instead of destroy institutions.

Audrey Tang: But underlying it is a kind of a Buckminster Fuller idea of the consciousness change that you just described of 15 years old, if we enabled them to have their effect on a society, as in Taiwan, through e-petition, 15 years old just project their enormous mobilization capabilities.

Audrey Tang: For example, Taiwan just banned indoor use of plastic straws or one-shot use and things like that. These were just organized by 15 years old on the e-petition platform. Among, them, of course, also 65 years old. Those are the main two age groups.

Audrey Tang: What I’m getting at is that they were excluded from representational democracy anyway. They were not at a voting age or referendum age, but actually, they do lead the consciousness change.

Audrey Tang: If we say conservative anarchism in the sense of conserving their planet and their people’s relationship and what they treasure, that’s totally something that a 15-year-old would understand and a 65-year-old would not oppose to.

Audrey Tang: That is kind of how I rephrase conservative anarchism in a way that is not individualistic, but rather as a strategy to make sure that we, despite our different cultural positions, arrive at common values in a way that is not coercive.

Audrey Tang: Nobody wants their culture to be coerced into a subservient status. Now, every culture feels this way because of globalization. That is my counternarrative.

Andre Uhl: I’m very much aligned with what you’re saying. At the same time, I’m also wondering how we can emphasize the question of consciousness here. In a best-case scenario, systems get reshaped because there is a growth in consciousness that makes people aware of certain issues that need to be addressed and changed.

Andre Uhl: But there’s of course also the worst-case scenario where it’s only about destruction without a constructive alternative narrative to emerge. The question is how do you foster not only participation, but meaningful participation?

Andre Uhl: Maybe this is what is engrained in what I mean by cultural intervention. How do you actually foster meaningfulness along those lines? This is related to each other, but also a separate part of the work.

Audrey Tang: I do follow your thinking. There’s a very short conversation that I had with Jaromil. I don’t know whether I’ve sent it to you before, but it directly tackles this point. It’s super short. I will just post it to you now. There it goes.

Audrey Tang: The basic idea of this conversation is saying we’re not specifically fixating on the code that is the particular implementation of decentralized apparatus such as Ethereum.

Audrey Tang: What we are doing here instead is making sure that they signify the different way of integrating social consensus. We emphasize the politics dimension of the operationalization of Ethereum. It is what Kant would call a regulative thought.

Audrey Tang: If you hold the image of what you just described in your mind instead of the particular software of the deployment, and the protocol, and things like that, this then creates a different set of political questions saying that the design space begins with the fundamental assumption that nobody have coercive power in what we do.

Audrey Tang: If you start with this design question, then people tend to think of ways that are not for short-term gains, of individuals gains, or for all other things like that, that people will start to think about more political possibilities.

Audrey Tang: That’s by and large where Vitalik Buterin himself is going through RadicalxChange, collaboration with Glen Weyl, Radical Markets, and things like that. By the way, I’m joining the board as a non-profit of the RadicalxChange Foundation along with Glen Weyl and Vitalik Buterin to explore the political dimension of decentralism.

Audrey Tang: Just to summarize very quickly, the capability to fork is not just a technical thing. If we treat it as a technical thing, then there’s a great disconnect because people who are equipped to fork is, frankly speaking, a few very percentage of people.

Audrey Tang: If we take the idea of a creative fork emerge at any given time as a political aspiration or regulative thought, then you will start discovering similar patterns everywhere. Even very far from the software domain, AI domain, or blockchain domain. You can have regulatory sandboxes that is also forking emerging.

Audrey Tang: You can have also different forking emerging possibilities. That is truly what we mean by the movement g0v. By changing the O to 0 in G-O-V, it is not meant to dissemble government itself into decentralized institution.

Audrey Tang: Rather, to inspire people to have a reflective idea of seeing, "Oh, the state is failing me, so I should actually organize and feel where the state have lacking and show the state in an open way how to do it, so the states can be more relaxed and make sure that the social sector piecemeal takeover the functions that’s offered by the state."

Audrey Tang: This statement imbued in software language is what I’m looking for. I’m not directly saying technical advancement, the product as a service of people in the planet, the technical advancement as inspiring are regulative metaphors for people in the planet. That is the different level of conversation I’m focusing more on the later level.

Andre Uhl: What do you and what does your team do to actually encourage people to participate?

Audrey Tang: The main incentive really is the connection to the political binding power. I’ll just use one example. Every year, we run the Presidential Hackathon, where people just crowdsource their ideas of how to improve public service.

Audrey Tang: We make sure that we use quadratic voting, which is a new voting mechanism out of the RadicalxChange collaboration with Glen Weyl and Vitalik Buterin, so that people see 100 or so cases. They are authenticated through the Join platform, and each receive 99 points. They can spend the points on the projects in a way that is like one point gets you one vote. You can vote for 99 projects.

Audrey Tang: If you vote for a project of 2 votes, that’s going to cost you 4 points, 3 votes is going to cost 9 points, 4 in 16, and so on. It’s created so that the marginal utility coincides with the marginal spending of the points. People have to maximize the incentive to share their true preferences as opposed to just hitting 99 points on one particular project.

Audrey Tang: We’re looking for synergies. That’s what we were looking for. We select 20 teams out of the quadratic voting and coach them to be trilingual, meaning that whatever they start with, they would end up with a tech expert, a domain expert, and a public servant , in a way that it co-creates a prototype with their restriction on data, or budget, or whatever, in three months.

Audrey Tang: After the prototype comes the demo day, where the president herself hands out trophies to the five winning teams every year. There is no money. It’s not about economic reward.

Audrey Tang: The trophy is a projector that if you turn on projects the image of the president herself handing the trophy to you. It’s very useful in internal negotiations because it can serve as a symbolism of the presidential will, but crowdsourced by the people and co-created across sectors.

Audrey Tang: What it symbolizes is that whatever the team has delivered as a proof of concept in the following year, we are committed to integrate it into public service by introducing whatever regulatory change, personnel change, or budget change required to the ones that demonstrate as the better way of working.

Audrey Tang: The participation framework is both wide in the sense that people can join with just five minutes of voting, and also deep in the sense that it can actually reach the same binding power as legislative budgeting power.

Audrey Tang: Also, a gradual slope in the sense that you can just participate part-time as a participant or a contributor instead of a project lead during the Presidential Hackathon period, which is three months to every year. This year, we also have International Track with seven countries joining as well.

Audrey Tang: This is just one mechanism out of dozens that we’re doing. I think it’s is a good idea because then we have a directly elected president. We imbue in her presidential will. She shares it horizontally to a process of co-creation. That totally ignores representative democracy, but is realized and maintained by MPs.

Audrey Tang: In design thinking terms, the MPs are still around, but they’re responsible only for the second diamond. The first diamond is decentralized in the process so that the society can convene on the pressing "how might we" questions in the middle of the double diamond. That is the shape that I’ve been introducing. It’s national regulation now actually, so it’s institutionalized.

Andre Uhl: Very interesting. What have you observed statistically? Are there any groups that are participating more likely than others in terms of age?

Audrey Tang: Yeah. I mentioned the 15 and 65 years old are the...

Audrey Tang: ...because, first, they have more time. Also, they are concerned more about public welfare. The age groups in the middle, they still have in themselves a imperative to sustain economically.

Audrey Tang: The people in the other two groups, the retired groups and the 15 years old, they have in their mind more the people the planet dimensions and they dominate over economic events.

Andre Uhl: Very interesting work. What do you think in terms of some ideas how to move forward with some sort of collaboration? What kind of potential do you see in the Council? What would be helpful for you to get out of it? In which way could you imagine working together?

Audrey Tang: Just creating local narratives is a great start. You already mentioned the local chapters. The cultural translation more so than textual translation is really the key. If you do a cultural translation, it evolves in the local culture. You can then harness the outcomes and translate it back to inform the English-based narrative that you’re having.

Audrey Tang: Actually, we’re running, just after the Presidential Hackathon, a workshop with Canada to basically do a back-translation of all the deliberative democracy practices, including Presidential Hackathon and how it has been adopted in the local context, and back-translate them into English.

Audrey Tang: The outcome of the workshop is a set of glossary, new words of English that they can then use to inform their conversation in their deliberative process in the National Energy Board or other highly contentious conversation with indigenous population or whatever in a way that’s more respectful as compared to the current set of English vocabulary.

Audrey Tang: This very concrete workshop can also be done in a Theory of the U context, in SDG context, and certainly in an extended intelligence context. It’s cheap and cheerful, meaning that it’s inexpensive to run, but the outcome, which simply speaking a glossary, is tangible and useful to people.

Andre Uhl: I agree. That’s great. The small team that has formed around starting an Asian representation, first of all, they mentioned that they would like to organize some sort of workshop later this year and maybe even translate the report that we have drafted into Mandarin.

Audrey Tang: That’s great.

Andre Uhl: My idea for this workshop is to look at this report and identify how we actually might have to reframe the narrative around Extended Intelligence so that it works in the local context -- culturally, socially, politically, so on and so forth. That might be an interesting workshop to organize.

Andre Uhl: How do we actually communicate Extended Intelligence as a concept across the globe, to, for example, an audience in China and Taiwan?

Audrey Tang: In Hong Kong and so on. I think it’s great. The dualism or reductionism is lost in translation.

Audrey Tang: We can see what we’ve found in translation. This is great.

Andre Uhl: Love that, too. I would love to keep staying in touch and see maybe how you can get involved in this type of workshop if you’re interested.

Audrey Tang: I am. I’ve also worked as freelance translator and interpreter also. This is a personal hobby. Even not as digital minister, this is also something that I like to personally participate in, also connect to other interpreters and translators, too.

Andre Uhl: That’s great. I’d suggest that I’m just setting up an email with all of the people who are currently involved to just get you in the loop. We keep you on the loop with any preparations, conference calls, or whatever. You are more than welcome to join whenever you have time. We’d see whatever happens from there.

Audrey Tang: Sure. I’ll add on my part the people who are working on, as I said, cultural translations. They do have a translator and facilitator background so that if we are looking specifically for the Mandarin version of the narrative and advancing the Mandarin version of the narrative, then I will just connect whomever interested in that end.

Andre Uhl: That will be wonderful. Simultaneously, what we have discussed in this recent CXI meeting is that we will form two committees. One is invested in strategic thinking, and the other one in questions of membership. These committees, I think they will emerge over the summer.

Andre Uhl: We have a couple of meetings. Whoever wants to join, just to think about how do we want to engage broader audiences with the council. We currently have about 100 members. It’s a very diverse and eclectic group just in terms of interests, at least. Culturally, it’s not as diverse yet as we want it to be, but at least in terms of definitions and interests.

Andre Uhl: We have to make sure that if we engage more people moving forward, what kind of guidelines we establish that are OK for everyone. This is a heads-up also, I have given the other members from China who are eager to broaden the community. At the same time, we are also here working to make sure that we have the guidelines set up for new people to join.

Audrey Tang: Sure thing. I personally hosted VR workshops in Hangzhou in the Art Academy to make sure that we conveyed these transformative ideas in virtual spaces in deliberation, even as digital minister in Taiwan. The great thing about virtual reality is that it transcends to geopolitical concerns. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: What it really means is that it makes sure that we’ll stay on the level of the sustainable development goals. If we use SDG, they were specifically designed to be not political. They’re designed so that all the major controversies that the UN Security Council has to worry about is not part of the 2030 agenda. That creates a safe space of collaboration despite the geopolitical tensions.

Audrey Tang: That is very important in this day and age, where if you talk about drones in military, that is also air ethics. I really can’t imagine a [laughs] conversation that doesn’t touch geopolitics. If we focus more on sustainable progress and SDGs in particular, then that creates a common vocabulary that I’m happy to share despite the geopolitical differences.

Andre Uhl: It makes a lot of sense. It sounds good. Great. Thank you for your time. You mentioned earlier that you are going to make this conversation public. Is that correct?

Audrey Tang: If you’re OK with it? We’ll just release it under Creative Commons attribution, which makes it part of the Commons. I’ll just put on YouTube if you’re OK with that.

Andre Uhl: I’m just a little bit concerned because I wasn’t really prepared visually [laughs] to be here. I’m not sure...

Audrey Tang: No, it’s fine. I could just publish the video part of myself, so you don’t have to show your face, but you do show your audio. It won’t be that easy to generate convincing deepfakes of you if that’s what you’re concerning.

Audrey Tang: It’s a legitimate concern, by the way.

Andre Uhl: Yeah.

Audrey Tang: I’ll just take out the video part of you and then release the audio part if you’re comfortable.

Andre Uhl: That will be great. If it’s OK, may I just check back with also John Havens and from the leadership team since I’ve been...

Andre Uhl: I wasn’t so sure in what capacity we’re connecting.

Audrey Tang: OK, let me do this. I will take out the video part of you and I’ll send you the link. You can pass around to John Havens and friends. If they’re OK with it, we’ll just make the video public. If you’re not OK with it, just let me know, and then we co-edit the transcript and publish the transcript instead.

Andre Uhl: That sounds great. Thank you so much.

Audrey Tang: Let’s do this.

Andre Uhl: It’s been such a pleasure to talk to you. I’d love to continue our conversation. There’s a lot to unpack and collaborate on.

Audrey Tang: Very much so. Have a great localtime.

Andre Uhl: Thank you. You, too.

Audrey Tang: Cheers. Bye.

Andre Uhl: See you soon. Bye.