Erich Prem: Maybe I should start, one sentence about myself, what this is about. I am working as a consultant to a range of meetings with the European Commission. My background is, I’m a computer scientist by training. I used to work in artificial intelligence, 20 years ago, which means I’m slightly bored today by AI. I hope it is all right.

Audrey Tang: [laughs] No, that was still AI. It’s just not deep learning. It’s now called Classic AI.

Erich Prem: Exactly. I was mostly in embodied AI, working with Rodney Brooks on robots.

Audrey Tang: Cool.

Erich Prem: My second hat is I’m also a philosopher. I’m a trained epistemologist. The reason why we wanted to talk to you is that there has been an initiative at the Technical University here in Vienna, which is entitled digital humanism. I don’t know, if you had time to quickly look at this, at the web page, at the manifesto?

Audrey Tang: I did.

Erich Prem: I think it covers a range of topics, which are, I guess, also important to what you were doing and trying to do in Taiwan. We would like to start a more, let’s say, substantial initiative here in Vienna, that could be…we call it a curated event, but it hasn’t been designed yet.

Erich Prem: This is the phase where we design it, and we talk to a lot of people about what would make sense, what would have an impact, what should be done, and what should be avoided. All right. Since you said you had read this topic, my first question actually would be even before that, what do you think are the greatest challenges in shaping digitization or computerization at the moment?

Audrey Tang: I think the largest challenge is people would think digitization as just an end goal in itself. Actually, it’s just one of the four pillars in a Taiwanese DIGI⁺ strategy, which is Digitization, Innovation, Governance, and Inclusion. All together we call it digitalization, which is not the same as digitization, which is just the technical infrastructure part.

Erich Prem: Right. Which consequence of digitalization, do you think is most important to you or to Taiwan?

Audrey Tang: To me, definitely, it’s inclusion, which is why we put it to the last spot, and not the least, position in the IGI. We could have switched it to the second place with innovation, and nobody would notice. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: I think, and there’s a logical form here, too. Digitization is purely instrumental. It is just a technique. It’s to foster innovation, but innovation is, again, just to foster governance in this sense, not government, but people’s understanding of collecting listening at scale and decision-making.

Audrey Tang: In a sense, innovation is as much industrial as it is social. Now that we have innovation toward governance, what do we govern for? We govern for the people. Then eventually, with digitalization, we govern with the people. Then finally after the people.

Audrey Tang: That’s the story of inclusion. People previously disenfranchised from democracy could join, and even previously people not considered people, such as very young people, people of the next generation, rivers, and mountains, and so on, are also included in the democratic governance.

Audrey Tang: Inclusion is the end goal, while the digitization is the beginning of the instrument. This is a very simple idea of, from the instrument to the end goal, in my mind.

Erich Prem: Does that include people who have no access to digitalization, or digitization, sorry?

Audrey Tang: Yeah, in Taiwan, broadband is a human right. Of course, if you don’t have 10 Megabits per second for €15 per month anywhere in Taiwan, even on top of Yushan, almost 4,000, it’s my fault personally, and I will see to it that it’s fixed.

Audrey Tang: Because it’s a human rights-based approach, this is not about the cost effective analysis inclusion, because it’s the end goal. We need to design the innovations, such as the auction of the spectrum in 5G, to make sure that the telecom put in extra money into the places which are lower resource.

Audrey Tang: Which it did not make capitalist sense, but nevertheless, through this auctioning strategy, we incentivized them to start their 5G deployment on the most rural and remote places. Again, inclusion as an end goal.

Erich Prem: What about people who are simply not digitally literate? I think of very old people, for example.

Audrey Tang: The main word here is not literacy, which is to me more like being consumer of media, data, and narratives, but rather competence, which is the ability to produce narratives, data, and media. Even very old people are actually part of our lifelong learning strategy.

Audrey Tang: Where in the Digital Opportunity Centers, they can express their life story with, of course, easier-to-access technology. For example, an immerse, shared reality is easier than having to learn keyboards, of course.

Audrey Tang: That’s just one example. The voice assistant that assists them in their native language is easier than everybody having to learn American English. That’s another example. Of course, we fund a lot of those researches to include the people, even if they are very elderly.

Erich Prem: Brilliant. Let me switch to this notion of digital humanism. Do you have any associations with it, about this term?

Audrey Tang: Yeah, sure. First of all, I think it could be human-centered, meaning like the homo sapiens is like a cursor in which that digitalization start typing and takes place, but it should not be human-centric, meaning that we exclude non-humans from this vision.

Audrey Tang: A human-centered, but not human-centric, vision is my first association. The other thing is that is, instead of a singularity, which is the idea that we become trans human, in some sense, or post-human, in some sense, we need to be transcultural.

Audrey Tang: Transcultural meaning that respecting the cultures as they are, and also being able to look at our existing cultures from the lens of other cultures that participate in this co-creation, but all these cultures are still human cultures.

Audrey Tang: Being transcultural doesn’t mean that you become not-human or trans human. This is what I call plurality instead of singularity.

Erich Prem: Very interesting point, because actually, the Internet does not at this point very much support this kind of, let’s say, respect of different cultures. It behaves as if everything was the same.

Audrey Tang: That’s what I mean by the elderly here not having to learn American English, actually. The ASCII is the American Standard Code for Information Interchange. [laughs] The A stands for American.

Erich Prem: Yes, right, very well. Now, you know we are doing this from little Austria here in Europe, and we are based in Vienna. I have to ask you, are there any associations with Vienna, should you know it at all?

Audrey Tang: Yeah. Of course, I’ve visited Vienna, and I have the association, I think, to the Haus Wittgenstein. It’s a cultural center in Vienna. I think it was around the Parkgasse, if I remember correctly. That’s the street, and Landstrasse is the district.

Audrey Tang: I’m reminded of the Wittgensteinian transformations of philosophy, first because the early Wittgenstein basically defined the symbol logic that all programmers operate with. Then the late Wittgenstein redefined epistemology through the phenomenon of use of language, instead of intrinsic, symbol meaning of language.

Audrey Tang: This transition to me also symbolizes this, a very singularity point of view transitioning to the plurality point of view that happened literally within Ludwig Wittgenstein’s lifetime, in his mind, I mean.

Erich Prem: I know the house. I actually used to play basketball just across the street. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: That’s great!

Erich Prem: Let’s talk a little bit about potential topics. The digital, or the computerization, whatever you want to call it, it touches upon so many fields. You mentioned democracy, governance, but then there is security.

Erich Prem: You also mentioned culture. Then there is education. Basically, there is not a single topic nowadays that the digital does not affect.

Audrey Tang: Oh, yes, there are, of course. That’s the quantum, because that supports digits. [laughs]

Erich Prem: Which of these topics, basically, you would have to address, which of those do you think have the highest priorities?

Audrey Tang: I think by far the priority should be that whichever direction we go, we must not foreclose possible futures. To me, the main stakeholders are seven generations down the line.

Audrey Tang: If we choose a particular form of – and I liked the word you used – co-evolution with the digital technologies, the welfare of people seven generations down the line is more important to me than people of this generation. They should have priority.

Erich Prem: I guess you are saying this because you believe that, by doing so, we will also be able to harvest something for, let’s say, the second, the third, and the fourth generation down the line?

Audrey Tang: Exactly. The whole debate around Climate Change, around carbon emissions, and things like that was because the people did not plan for seven generations. They and their grandchildren will reap the benefit of Industrial Revolution, and the children’s grandchildren will suffer the consequences.

Audrey Tang: Seven generations, of course, is, I think, a Canadian-indigenous idea, but which I really like. Seven generations is the easiest way to imagine. I could have said, of course, 100 generations, but then humanism doesn’t make sense anymore, because homo sapiens will probably be something else by then.

Audrey Tang: We can still imagine seven generations down the line, homo sapiens still means something.

Erich Prem: That is a pretty surprising answer for someone who basically is a politician, because you are not elected by the seventh generation down the line.

Audrey Tang: I am not elected by the current generation, either. I am appointed twice. The people elects the president, appoints the premier, appoints me.

Erich Prem: That relieves you of the burden of having to satisfy an immediate voter.

Audrey Tang: Exactly.

Erich Prem: Good point. Let me talk about, since you know we would like to create a festival, an event series, a curation, in some sense, that discusses these topics and that helps to also find our way. Many of this is utterly confusing, many of the develop, even to the experts.

Erich Prem: There are so many things you could do. Are there any initiatives, festivals, conferences that you really like where you think these are good?

Audrey Tang: Sure. First of all, I think there’s the UN High-Level Forum on Digitalization. I think it provides a pretty balanced point of view, especially because they had the resource to run a very large consultation on this whole idea of COGOV.

Audrey Tang: They call it C-O-G-O-V for co-governance. I would suggest to start there, the COGOV report. Now, I think they call it digital interdependence, the age of digital interdependence, to be precise. They shaped the nine underpinning.

Audrey Tang: That’s inclusion as the highest value and then respect, human-centeredness, human flourishing, transparency, collaboration, accessibility, sustainability, and harmony. I think these are really good values to start.

Erich Prem: Excellent. When you look at such initiatives, what do you expect? Is there anything that’s missing? What do we need more of, and what also do we need less of?

Audrey Tang: The report itself – actually, I am sharing with you a distillation here – says very simply that the lack of the adaptive, agile, and inclusive, a systems approach, a holistic approach for regulation is the main thing that’s lacking. If you scroll to the bottom, the bottom line is that.

Audrey Tang: At the moment, we have a lot of norms and a lot of cultural interpretation to those norms. The norms are here, and they are here to stay, but for regulations, that’s another matter altogether. In Taiwan, the regulators are blessed, because we do have a set of sandbox experimentation spirit.

Audrey Tang: In Taiwan, even the constitution itself is under constant amendment. We’re a very young democracy, so our democracy is seen as a technology. It’s just a set of technologies that the people can still tweak so that the society works better.

Audrey Tang: There are few places in the world where the constitution, the Referendum Act, and the very methods of election, whether we’re a presidential or a parliamentarian polity, are still being hotly debated and innovative.

Audrey Tang: For many jurisdictions, the system, whatever existed for regulation, is already there. It’s not built as adaptive, and certain not agile. In order for the governance system to support the inclusion value, which is the idea of DIGI⁺, the last link is the missing one.

Audrey Tang: There are many people working on digitalization that is happy to support innovation from the digitization viewpoint, support governance from an innovation viewpoint, but supporting inclusion from a governance as a technology viewpoint, that is quite missing. That’s literally the last line of the Declaration of the Asia Digital Interdependence.

Erich Prem: Thank you. Just a quick follow-up to that. My own view of much of regulation of technology is that it is mostly concerned with things we should not do. It’s about what Facebook should not be able to do, what Google should not be able to do.

Erich Prem: Of course, being regulation, it’s very little about what it should do. Rarely does it have a positive twist. Maybe that is just not the point of a regulation. What’s your take on this? Am I addressing the point?

Audrey Tang: I don’t really think so. The first regulation that I worked on as a reverse-mentor to Minister Jaclyn Tsai back in late 2014, after we occupied the parliament and invited ourselves in, is on telework. Telework is a good example, because labor law, of course, needs adaption.

Audrey Tang: Nobody deny that. There’s a specific section in Taiwan that says women are required not to work after 10:00 PM for the commuting security. They designed it with the best intention in mind, and I’m sure, have protected countless women.

Audrey Tang: If a woman telework and you ban her from logging in after 10:00 PM, it definitely does not make any sense. People all agreed that this need to change, but then the regulatory framework pre-assumes a negotiation with labor union and so on.

Audrey Tang: The problem is, of course, there is no teleworkers union. In 2014, maybe not anywhere in the world. There are tele-members of unions of a particular trade, and they happen to telework. They don’t identify as teleworkers, and therefore do not form unions or associations.

Audrey Tang: We developed a multistakeholder consultation method called vTaiwan that shaped a new regulation that basically is just seven or eight points long that basically bridges the concepts in Internet governance to the terms in our existing labor law, and listed places where it doesn’t bridge, it doesn’t translate well.

Audrey Tang: To me, that’s a really good interpretive work in the sense that it doesn’t restrict anything that’s not already forbidden. It makes the old regulation and make new sense of it on the teleworking era. That’s also a piece of regulation.

Erich Prem: Very interesting. I can tell you that here in Austria, we actually a similar problem now, and there will be a new regulation for telework, because of everybody is now working from home. Which, unfortunately, is only going to be published by April, which is a very long time from now, given the development of the pandemic.

Erich Prem: I think the points you mentioned are definitely worthwhile to look into. Let us talk again about question of an event targeting digital humanism. Do you see any potential showstoppers, risks, or things we should try to avoid when going for such an initiative?

Audrey Tang: Yeah. I will say don’t overcommit to any particular action. Make sure that all the people’s feelings from all the sides are taken care and taken into account before just starting printing roadmaps. I say this because it’s very easy to prescribe, but it’s actually hard to describe what’s the existing feelings and norms around digital technology.

Audrey Tang: Spend more time in the reflective period before doing any interpretive.

Erich Prem: What would you expect in terms of results from such a program? I’m thinking anything from new regulation to manifestos to papers to artworks. What do you think should be output?

Audrey Tang: Any form of media is fine, but I think result of such a reflective period is usually that people understand, despite different positions, we as homo sapiens have much more common value between ourselves than we originally thought.

Audrey Tang: That’s useful result. How do you portray or present that result of common value? It’s up to you. Then also out of those common values could be innovations that includes more people in future multistakeholder conversations, because the conversation’s never really ending.

Audrey Tang: If you end with more people taken into account than what you started with, then that’s a net win when inclusion is your main value. Innovations to be inclusive, that’s a positive value, and at least a common value among the people who participated. That’s just a more inherent value.

Erich Prem: I am fascinated by how you focus on values and people and humanism, and we hardly ever even mention technology in this discussion. Why is this? Is this because you have a positive attitude that says, “We can shape the technology any way we like”?

Audrey Tang: Social technology are also technologies. I talked about multistakeholder consultations, about listening at scale. You could even say that, I mentioned unions, and unions are a sort of technology. It is defined and invented and tweaked.

Audrey Tang: Co-ops, too, are new forms of organizations that are an application of social science. There’s social science, and there’s social technology. I think the natural sciences and the industrial technologies are at 4.0, but like the Japan, Society 5.0, the society is one version ahead of the industry.

Audrey Tang: Technology, it’s technology that evolved to meet the societal common value, not the other way around.

Erich Prem: I agree with this being an aspiration, but having said that, of course, many people, including some of the people in our group, think that our technologies with which we work every day have developed in directions where this has become very difficult.

Erich Prem: For example, because some of the large networks that have powers that are beyond or larger than those of single states, even.

Audrey Tang: They become governors, essentially, and almost sovereign reign now.

Erich Prem: This poses a huge challenge for smaller countries, yes, even for Taiwan. It’s just they are not so easy to design, to shape, to evolve in the right direction.

Audrey Tang: Certainly, but if we have a strong social norm, as we did, for example, during our past presidential election this January, the social norm was for all the campaign donations and expenditure to be published as raw, open data for investigative journalists to analyze.

Audrey Tang: It’s a new norm that people fought for. When it was first adhered in 2018, we discovered that Facebook, the campaign finance does not include any donation or expenditure toward Facebook and any other social media advertisement.

Audrey Tang: Clearly, those semi-sovereign, or at least governing, entities are bypassing our social norm. If you are a Taiwanese citizen, you’re free to donate to any candidate. If you’re a foreign citizen with no Taiwanese residence or passport, you cannot donate to our domestic elections.

Audrey Tang: That’s a very long history of norm, but Facebook essentially allows people of various different jurisdictions to hide themselves and spend money on precision-targeted advertisement during election under the name of a supporting media sponsor or things like that, or advertisement.

Audrey Tang: What they are really doing is essentially campaign donation and expenditure and campaigning. We talked to Facebook, saying, “Look, you can either face social sanction, because there’s a strong social norm that people fought for the radical transparency in campaign finance, or you can choose, do what we do.

Audrey Tang: “Publish in real time your advertisement library, including who dedicated and what’s the precision-targeted criteria, and you must refuse foreign donations. All the donations during our election period that’s broadcasted to the Taiwanese public must be from Taiwan.”

Audrey Tang: They agreed and adopted our social norm. At that time, probably the only jurisdiction that they agreed to such a negotiation. I can say many more examples, including the counter-disinformation strategy, and so on.

Audrey Tang: I think this single example illustrate that, if you a strong social norm, the society is indeed leading even Facebook or the largest multinational industries.

Erich Prem: This is an important point, especially emphasizing the strength of a social norm. You know that in Europe we are quite proud of having introduced the GDPR. You have probably heard of the GDPR.

Audrey Tang: Yes.

Erich Prem: It is a strong norm, but we are still struggling to actually enforce it, because even companies such as Facebook always seem to find ways around it. Let me stay with this power question a bit. When we are organizing such a thing, there is this issue with whom to call collaborate, making it a very, let’s say, original, a European, or a global initiative.

Erich Prem: What is the right balance and mix? On the one hand, you emphasized cultural aspects, which are more, let’s say, national or regional. Then there is the UN question, which is obviously global. For you, what’s a good mix? What’s a way of balancing both?

Audrey Tang: You call yourself humanism, and so that already presupposed that people who are human are eligible to join, as long as they care about other human, I guess. [laughs] Maybe no to the social path, but otherwise, [laughs] people are welcome to join.

Audrey Tang: I don’t think it is… Even for people who are suffering from sociopath disorder, there are digital ways that we can assist them with assistive intelligence. The point here is that even people who don’t share the European norm, they are still people.

Audrey Tang: I think the great thing of GDPR is that it brings the jurisdiction to wherever European citizens may be, or where the European citizen’s personal details could be collected, processed, or applied. That is pretty much everywhere, including in international space stations, I’m sure. It’s extraterrestrial in jurisdiction.

Audrey Tang: There’s no inherent paradox. Even if you say, “We only apply our conversations to where the GDPR applies,” that’s still the entire human society and civilization.

Erich Prem: That is a very, very interesting point, absolutely. For you, who are the leaders in this discussion? I mean that could be institutions, cities, or even personalities, where you would say, “OK, these are really interesting examples or people.” Anybody or any institution that comes to your mind, except for what you already mentioned, the UN?

Audrey Tang: If you look at who participated in the age of digital interdependence consultation, then you get the full list. That’s probably the same list that I will give you, because the high-level panel, the Secretary General’s high-level panel on digital collaboration, really included input from pretty much all the stakeholders in the Internet governance and digital governance communities.

Audrey Tang: They are recent enough – it was just last year, last June, if I am not mistaken – and so yeah, this report include already the list of stakeholders that I would suggest you to pursue.

Erich Prem: Brilliant. I’m nearly through with the questions. Let me ask you one more question, which I think is quite important for us here in making these decisions. It’s this question about a rational approach versus an emotional approach to the cureated event.

Erich Prem: Much of regulation has this, typically, it’s all very rational. It’s about rules, how they are to be followed, and the consequences. Then again, we are human beings. We also approach things with emotion. It’s about the feeling that something has.

Erich Prem: I’m sure this must be a challenge when you are dealing with technology and people. How do you approach it?

Audrey Tang: I call myself a poetician. The way I deal with it is to write poems. My job description literally is a poem. It is a prayer.

Audrey Tang: It says, “When we see Internet of things, let’s make it Internet of beings. When we see virtual reality, let’s make it a shared reality. When we machine learning, let’s make it collaborative learning. When we see user experience, let’s make it about human experience. And whenever we hear the singularity is near, let us remember the plurality is here.”

Audrey Tang: This is both a manifesto in a sense of things actually rationally people can do, but it’s also I guess poignant in the sense that people feel moved by it. I think the roadmap needs to include both wings. Birds or airplanes don’t fly without both wings. It could be a quadcopter with four wings, but anyway, with at least two wings.

Erich Prem: Right. Audrey, there’s no clever question I can come up with at this point. As I said, I’m hugely interested with what you’re doing. I think it could be a brilliant example for many other jurisdictions, and people who are trying to shape the world, to make it a better place. I wish you all the best of luck with it. I think you deserve it.

Audrey Tang: You too. I wish you live long and prosper. [laughs]

Erich Prem: Thank you so much, Audrey. Sorry. How do we proceed about this writing it up? Is this something I have to…?

Audrey Tang: I will send you a transcript, maybe in 24 hours, and then you can co-edit, and do whatever you want, and we donate this to the Commons together.

Erich Prem: Thank you so much. I really appreciate it. Cheers. Bye.

Audrey Tang: Cheers. Bye.