Brian Tseng: 

Brian Tseng: Minister Audrey Tang, welcome to our show. You are the first bring-your-own-device guest here.

Brian Tseng: I was very worried that today you would only send a robot out, and then you would not arrive in person.

Audrey Tang: If you want that, we can arrange another recording.

Brian Tseng: Right, I remember I asked if the robot could come.

Audrey Tang: Sure thing.

Brian Tseng: Oh really, okay, next time… uh, no next time, this is the last episode… I just realized that.

Brian Tseng: This interview, I want it to be different from the past. We used to take care of the audience following, their mood, and whether they laughed or not.

Brian Tseng: I don’t want to do this at all.

Old K: What do you mean?

Brian Tseng: I just want to chat with Audrey, Okay?

Audrey Tang: The host sets himself free.

Brian Tseng: Yes, I don’t care at all, because I don’t have another episode, I don’t care.

Audrey Tang: No problem.

Brian Tseng: You have watched our show before. I have openly shown my love for you. Have you seen that?

Audrey Tang: Did you say super like?

Brian Tseng: Yes, super like.

Audrey Tang: I have seen that.

Brian Tseng: Everyone wondered what that was about. No, I just wanted to express my love for you.

Audrey Tang: Thank you.

Brian Tseng: Why… a bit reserved. So… you have watched our show. Why would you like to be on our show?

Audrey Tang: Because I support a new political party: Can’t Stop This Party. Since you are a party member, and because I support the party, I should also support the party members’ programs.

Brian Tseng: In other words, if I hadn’t joined the party, you wouldn’t have come?

Audrey Tang: Yes, so guessing that game was important then.

Brian Tseng: Wow, it was so close. Fortunately, that game, I didn’t…

Audrey Tang: …win.

Brian Tseng: It was definitely not set intentionally. So, we actually have a lot today… I myself have a lot of questions to ask.

Brian Tseng: Can you really control other people’s brain waves? Before you answer… (puts on a foil cap)

Audrey Tang: I read an article like that in the 2016 Journal of Current Biology, which said, “Intraspinal Sensory Neurons Provide Powerful Inhibition to Motor Circuits Ensuring Postural Control during Locomotion.”

Audrey Tang: You see, brain control, brain, control. One of the co-authors of this article is our Brian here.

Brian Tseng: Oh my gosh, you dug out my master’s thesis… I won’t be affected by your remarks!

Audrey Tang: Whose brain did you control at that time?

Brian Tseng: It was zebrafish.

Audrey Tang: Zebrafish larvae, right?

Brian Tseng: Uh… larvae… Yes, because they are called larvae, larva, anyway, the little zebrafish share the same word as larvae.

Audrey Tang: OK. So even when zebrafish were little, you kept controlling them through cerebrospinal fluid?

Brian Tseng: Oh, not little, but before they were born, we messed up with their nervous systems.

Audrey Tang: Before birth. You implemented brain control in the fetus.

Old K: Wait a minute. For this whole part, you really didn’t care about the audience at all.

Brian Tseng: No care at all.

Old K: You were just chatting away.

Brian Tseng: Are you saying that I am the one who controls the brain waves?

Audrey Tang: Yes, in fact, Brian is the capable one.

Brian Tseng: Then you don’t control other people’s brain waves?

Audrey Tang: In fact, in front of Brian, I dare not say that I could control others’ brain waves, because you have actually done it.

Brian Tseng: Oh my gosh, I already started to believe it!

Brian Tseng: (Removes the foil cap) OK, no, no more nonsense.

Brian Tseng: But indeed for many… you know that many old people have the impression that you are like an all-seeing eye, all the time… you monitor everyone’s iPhone, right? Is this true?

Audrey Tang: Of course not. My name is TANG Feng.

Brian Tseng: A homoFENGnic joke came straight out.

Brian Tseng: Do you have other rumors to crack? Because there are many legends about you. Do you know that you are much like the Chuck Norris of Taiwan? That is, Audrey Tang is so clever… that… “Audrey Tang realized the truth before God wrote it down,” things like that.

Audrey Tang: In fact, I think the most important thing is that my name has now become a verb.

Brian Tseng: Oh, really, someone like that?

Audrey Tang: A transitive verb.

Brian Tseng: Meaning?

Audrey Tang: It means that something has been removed and taken down. For example, if someone asks me a question on Slido and finds that question is gone, then that is the so-called “being Tang-Fenged.”

Brian Tseng: Oh, being Tang-Fenged.

Audrey Tang: When a noun becomes a verb, it means that it is beyond my control and has become a concept that everyone can use.

Audrey Tang: Just like we don’t say “you go to the search engine to find it,” instead, we all say “you Google it.” This is called “verbing” a noun.

Brian Tseng: How do we know that this is not part of your plot?

Audrey Tang: Alas, this is a very good question.

Audrey Tang: If this were part of my conspiracy, we wouldn’t be talking about it here at all.

Brian Tseng: Oh yes, because you brought it up. But how do I know that, a level deeper, this is not part of your bigger conspiracy to let us find out?

Audrey Tang: In fact, we know that the title of Brian’s thesis is “Sensory Neurons Provide Powerful Inhibition.”

Audrey Tang: This means that when we talk about it here, no one will think about anything else! This is Brian’s conspiracy.

Brian Tseng: You really know how to… that is… make nonsense…

Old K: Do you feel like you’re turning into a zebrafish?

Brian Tseng: Yeah… I’ve started to… doubt everything I did before.

Brian Tseng: Talking about… because we just talked about something beyond your control, and you are passionate about AI or that kind of technology, right?

Audrey Tang: I was. Before entering the cabinet.

Brian Tseng: Like Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla, he worries that AI will dominate the world eventually. Don’t you have this worry?

Audrey Tang: It should not be so. Because our AI at this stage, I usually call it Assistive Intelligence, like an assistant.

Audrey Tang: The most important thing is this: it’s like a secretary who helps you decide all kinds of itineraries, but when you ask them why, if they never tells you, then you will actually fire them.

Audrey Tang: This means that the current situation of our human society is that AI can only do auxiliary tasks, and we don’t actually put it in a position where auxiliary becomes judgment and a boss.

Audrey Tang: So as long as we keep to this bottom line of privacy and accountability, i.e., to protect one’s privacy, and to be accountable, just like an assistant. Thus, it is impossible to dominate the world.

Brian Tseng: But now the way AI learns by itself, similar to the neural circuit of the human brain to learn. What if…

Brian Tseng: Suppose we hard-code the idea of privacy in their hardware. But it transcends it because it learns that, “I can surpass human beings, and I want to override this instruction.” Wouldn’t there be such a day?

Audrey Tang: That is a very good question. It’s like “how to contain the Genie in the magic lamp.”

Audrey Tang: So the simplest is that you don’t want this magic lamp to have an opening at all. It’s like when you are driving, sometimes you look at the navigation. If you don’t connect the navigation to your steering wheel, that’ll do.

Audrey Tang: In simple terms, do not connect the cerebrospinal fluid to the motor circuit…

Brian Tseng: Don’t go back to my paper any more! Enough, Enough, there is no such meaning at all!

Brian Tseng: But seriously, if one day humans go to war with robots, whose side will you stand on? Because I will absolutely choose robots.

Audrey Tang: Of course I’m on the side of modern Homo sapiens… Well, we split up right away.

Brian Tseng: Really? No way!

Brian Tseng: No, I think that if humans… like cyborg, if we put some machines on our bodies, we can definitely break through the ceiling.

Audrey Tang: Right, so the most important thing here is that if Assistive Intelligence develops into so-called Augmented Intelligence, then we actually feel every day, like, the cell phone seems to have become a part of our body.

Audrey Tang: A situation like that would be augmenting our existing social norm. Just like we wouldn’t say simply because I wear glasses to correct myopia, that somehow makes me a non-human cyborg.

Audrey Tang: In the future, when everyone can have the same augmented intelligence, human society will become better as a whole. The focus is still the same: We cannot leave some people behind, while only a few people becoming the kind of cyborg you just described.

Brian Tseng: So in an imaginary future, because that boundary will become more and more blurred, if say, later, that we can repair the organ by implanting some machines, and then there will be a degree of transition from human to robot.

Brian Tseng: You mean, in the future, everyone will be in the middle. Let’s not keep dividing…

Audrey Tang: In fact, there is no need to wait for the future. It is happening now.

Audrey Tang: People in places with broadband access, for example through 4G signals, are not the same as those in places completely disconnected from the net.

Audrey Tang: In the first case, we can use livestreaming and real-time collective intelligence tools to make decisions together, etc.

Audrey Tang: But in the other case, you can only communicate by shouting. If no one is close to you, no one will hear you.

Audrey Tang: Therefore, the concept of “broadband as a human right” means that if broadband is not available anywhere in the whole society, the people there would be excluded from the democratic society. This is why “broadband as a human right” is one of the most important policies of our government.

Brian Tseng: Wow, connecting to the policy. This is really great.

Audrey Tang: An advertorial opportunity.

Brian Tseng: Yes, I have no idea how many people got that.

Brian Tseng: But I think… first off, we broke the premise of many sci-fi movies, that is, humans will go to war with robots, we said that we would be in the middle. However, another issue rises, the system. In places without broadband access, some people may fail to catch up. Is broadband a human right?

Audrey Tang: Broadband is a human right.

Brian Tseng: It is in the future, then…

Audrey Tang: Right now, it is a human right in Taiwan.

Audrey Tang: Even on the northern peak of Yushan about 4,000 meters high, you can still get 10 megabits per second with unlimited 4G for 15 euros per month, and you can still livestream, maybe faster, because fewer people use it there.

Brian Tseng: Makes sense. Wow, this can, by the way, solve the problem of urbanization and rural depopulation.

Audrey Tang: Exactly.

Brian Tseng: Awesome. This reminds me that we did talk about 5G here. The question we asked was that, if most of the technology is concentrated in big companies, like the United States, of course, there are firms like Qualcomm, but Huawei still accounts for a large part.

Audrey Tang: We also have Mediatek, which makes SOC (System-on-chip) here.

Brian Tseng: So we are capable of developing 5G capabilities independent of oversea manufacturers.

Audrey Tang: Yes, of course, because now we look at the situation of the bidding for 5G, we can already see that this year it will enter our lives.

Audrey Tang: In that, I think the most important thing is that 4G is fast already now. 5G will be faster, but not very, very much, it will be a bit faster.

Audrey Tang: The sub-6 band, which would be the first one to start with, is about 10-20 times faster, though it has an important advantage: Low latency. It’s like that if we are now chatting through video, from the point you nod to the point I see you’re nodding, it’s called micro expression. In fact, the brain only takes about 1/60th of a second to complete the process.

Audrey Tang: But if there is a delay in the process, I would feel like talking to a virtual person. This is why most of the time we say “meeting in person builds 30% of trust,” but video meetings only builds 20%.

Audrey Tang: So when 5G reduces the delay to less than 1/60 second, meeting through 5G also builds 30% of trust.

Brian Tseng: Understood. We have just covered quite a few key points. Don’t you think 10 to 20 times faster is a big improvement? You think it’s a small…

Audrey Tang: It’s all right, it’s OK.

Brian Tseng: I don’t know if we need to be modest or something. But you can look forward to Taiwan in the future. Do you think it will step into 5G within a few years… Because there is still a problem with the base station. Is it because of frequency? It requires very dense base stations. Will there be no problem with land use?

Audrey Tang: This is actually fine, because after the passage of the Telecommunications Management Act, we have actually adopted the so-called co-construction method, especially in non-metropolitan areas.

Audrey Tang: The so-called co-network and co-construction mean that one base station can serve several different base providers. A lot of technical characteristics of 5G allows us to deploy the base stations in a test field, and we don’t need to fill them all at once. For example, the Shālún science city…

Brian Tseng: …everything is over there…

Audrey Tang: …it’s now a self-driving test ground…

Brian Tseng: …right. I just visited the Taiwan CAR Lab there.

Audrey Tang: Yes, exactly.

Audrey Tang: So we have to cover the self-driving tracks first, because the vehicle-to-vehicle communication cannot tolerate a 1/60 second gap.

Audrey Tang: But when you get out of the car, it’s okay. Why not wait for 1/60 second?

Brian Tseng: When we talked about self-driving cars, I really wanted to ask another question. This is a question on tech ethics.

Brian Tseng: Self-driving cars may run into the trolley problem. If the car can’t stop itself, should it kill the driver or…

Audrey Tang: …just don’t drive so fast.

Brian Tseng: Oh! Makes sense. Just set a top speed, then self-driving cars won’t encounter that kind of problem.

Brian Tseng: OK, but we can only say that it minimizes the chance, and we can’t say that it will completely prevent this from happening.

Audrey Tang: No, because there were these self-driving vehicles around my office, the Social Innovation Lab, at #99 Section 3 Ren’ai Road…

Brian Tseng: …you don’t need to spell it out, OK?

Old K: …tell it all…

Brian Tseng: …you don’t have to run open government to such an extent…

Audrey Tang: …well we actually tore down the wall there so you can walk in directly from the roadside, it’s really quite open. Anyway…

Brian Tseng: …not interested, really…

Audrey Tang: …this office you are not interested in, there were all these alien-looking things roaming around all day.

Audrey Tang: These are actually self-driving vehicles, and they are tricycles. Thanks to our contributors, the tricycles gradually became this attractive, two-eyed, capable to read human expressions…

Brian Tseng: Very cute.

Audrey Tang: …cute like this.

Audrey Tang: Although tricycles in nursery rhymes run fast, in reality they are slower than a jogger. So it’s not about lowering the probability, it’s that nothing will happen even if you really run into it.

Brian Tseng: Yes. Just now, I don’t know how many viewers got it. Audrey actually jammed a few things in those words, without even caring if anyone got the reference. How did you achieve this equanimity?

Audrey Tang: Equanimity? Very simple. Like a good novel, you always have to read it a second, third, and fourth time before you see the deep meaning.

Brian Tseng: Every time we go back to it, “Ah, I found another one.”

Audrey Tang: Yes, it is like a game. If you cracks it at the first try, you won’t play it any more. For higher replay value, put lots of easter eggs.

Brian Tseng: Yes, but the most admirable thing is that you put them in so invisibly. We put them deliberately, and even then the audience may not buy it.

Brian Tseng: Like in an interview with “Deutsche Welle,” you said, oh I remember Taiwan’s breakaway…

Audrey Tang: Neolithic Age.

Brian Tseng: …was at the Neolithic Age. Was that one you had thought about before and was ready to put there?

Audrey Tang: No, not at all. I just responded casually, and then answered his real question.

Brian Tseng: Don’t you just feel that other people are dumb?

Audrey Tang: Not at all.

Brian Tseng: Because when I’m talking to you now, I have a kind of inferiority complex. I am afraid to ask some questions, afraid that you would look down on me…

Audrey Tang: Actually, this is because we are meeting for the first time. This is quite normal.

Brian Tseng: I am touched.

Brian Tseng: Your words are really heart-warming. Old K wants to say something?

Old K: Once you have meet each other a few times, you will get used to it. You will know that you really are dumb.

Brian Tseng: Old K has been hanging out with me for two, three years now. My reaction is really quite slow, isn’t it?

Old K: During that segment, I was just thinking about what we should eat in a little while…

Old K: I’ve decided that when I go home I will play this segment at 0.75x speed on YouTube and watch it slowly…

Brian Tseng: …yes, everyone can do it, really, including this segment…

Audrey Tang: …YouTube can play it at 0.25x speed.

Old K: By the fifth replay, I’ll get the jokes.

Brian Tseng: Yes, and then write a response saying, oh I know, I got the joke now.

Brian Tseng: Audrey, rumor has it that your IQ is… 160? 170? 180?

Audrey Tang: That 180 is in centimeter only.

Brian Tseng: 180 in centimeter only? Okay, brilliant.

Audrey Tang: That’s the appropriate unit of measure.

Audrey Tang: Because IQ is meaningless in adults and anything above 160 cannot be measured anyway, I just don’t talk about it.

Brian Tseng: Is it really true that you can’t measure an IQ above 160?

Audrey Tang: Yes, in WAIS…

Brian Tseng: …Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale. It doesn’t continue after 4 standard deviations?

Audrey Tang: Indeed, it doesn’t go up after that.

Brian Tseng: How strange, okay. So, how relevant is IQ in the future? Should we be concerned about this matter, or is it not…

Audrey Tang: I think by now, especially now, IQ is completely meaningless. Because for most of the things tested in WAIS-III, you only need to have a mobile phone. It doesn’t even need to be online. Even in places without Internet access, you only need to have installed 5 apps. Memorization forwards and backwards, turning 90 degrees, and so on, your phone can solve them all.

Audrey Tang: To put it simply, as long as anyone has a mobile phone in hand, their IQ is already above 160, and so cannot be measured. With this in mind, IQ is the least useful thing now.

Brian Tseng: So really, technology can dismantle many previous concepts.

Brian Tseng: We have just talked about policy. I don’t know if it’s a topic your staff would like you to talk about, but let’s talk about the future. After the election, what can we expect our country to look like in the future?

Brian Tseng: You have taken part developing the 108 curriculum, which is being rolled out now. What about the 108 curriculum? Currently, many people are very hesitant. They are worried and have no idea what this idea of “sùyǎng” is about.

Brian Tseng: Is is right to call it “sùyǎng?” What does it mean?

Audrey Tang: Actually, the word “sùyǎng” is a part of a translated term. The original term is “competence,” from “core competence”.

Brian Tseng: Why not just translate that as core “nénglì”?

Audrey Tang: Right. Because we needed to overcorrect something.

Audrey Tang: Why overcorrection? Because for more than ten years, people in Taiwan translated the word “competence” in “core competence” as “jìngzhēnglì.” However, that word actually means something else: “competitiveness.”

Audrey Tang: Competitiveness is only meaningful if you go to run a race, and when someone wins, there is a first, second, and third place.

Audrey Tang: Competence, on the other hand, is about applying what we’ve learned in everyday context. Like teaming up for a common purpose. Everyone in a team contributes their knowledge and skills. Each person has a different set of competences.

Audrey Tang: So competence is about cooperation, whereas competitiveness is about competition. Because we used to translate both as “jìngzhēnglì,” schools focused too much on competition between individuals, which is quite meaningless once you graduate and form a team, except when played for laughs in a certain show.

Brian Tseng: Yes, the audience gets it.

Old K: Audrey did it again, you see.

Brian Tseng: But the premise of this is that once you graduate, it is not a zero-sum game. It is a team competition… well not competition…

Old K: …team cooperation…

Brian Tseng: …but why…

Audrey Tang: Teams are competitive with one another.

Brian Tseng: True.

Audrey Tang: But within a team, it is mostly cooperative.

Audrey Tang: So as a teacher, you need to show how to cooperate within a team, and how teams compete with each other.

Brian Tseng: Understood. The other thing that everyone questions is the so-called urban-rural gap. I think this is relevant to the 108 curriculum… because…

Brian Tseng: Let me talk about the premise. We really wanted to make an “Èi!” episode for the 108 curriculum, but I think it’s still too early. Let’s wait until this batch of high school students take their first exam, just before they face the exam, the real problems will be highlighted. Moreover, there are very few videos at the moment…

Brian Tseng: My key point is that people worry about the gap between urban and rural areas. They feel that there are many self-study courses. Teachers who teach these courses are concentrated in the cities, and none is in the rural areas. How do we solve this problem?

Audrey Tang: I think there are two aspects to this. On the one hand, the net can replace the road, with co-teaching across schools. We have a teacher in one place. This teacher, while not necessarily a domain expert, is very capable at understanding students’ learning motivation. Over the net, maybe through a wall-sized projection, they may be connected to an expert teacher in another city.

Audrey Tang: Actually, just upstairs from my office at #99 Section 3 Ren’ai Road, people are learning indigenous languages. In the morning, children can choose to learn the culture or language of any indigenous people. Yet, of course, it is not possible to send such teachers, e.g. from the Sakizaya people, to all of the dozens of schools in Taiwan. That’s why they have a green screen, and the culture of various indigenous peoples is continuously projected in the back. All the children can then form a learning community with the indigenous peoples through this dual-teacher projection. This technology is quite mature now.

Audrey Tang: Secondly, it is not necessary to use knowledge-based teaching. Students can also go into a local area and work with people in the local community, community colleges, community development associations, etc. as school-based courses. Even in class time, what in the past could only be done in the community or the eighth class can now be taken outside the campus and directly brought into these fields for practical experience.

Audrey Tang: There is an advantage to this. The local culture can be passed onto these children. When they grow up, and if they want to study a specialty, such as monument restoration, they would learn skills that are useful to their own local people. If they haven’t learned such skills in twelve years, then after going to university they probably won’t return to their hometown, because what they study are of less relevance to their hometown.

Brian Tseng: Yes, you have mentioned two points just now. I think the first point is that if technology can really bridge the gap between urban and rural areas, in terms of hardware, doesn’t it mean that our government should ensure that everyone in the countryside has the hardware to connect to the Internet before they can accomplish the things that you mentioned?

Audrey Tang: This is exactly one of the goals in our Forward-looking Digital Infrastructure program, and its implementation rate has reached 100%.

Brian Tseng: Brilliant. Brilliant. Yes, my question has been answered.

Brian Tseng: The second question, though, is that if each urban and rural area has its own characteristics, wouldn’t that impede the mobility? Because what you learn in one place is what you can use in that one place. If I want to move to the city, I…

Audrey Tang: …can just move to the city for further development.

Brian Tseng: But I can’t learn it, or did you say that you can learn it online? OK. Alright.

Audrey Tang: That’s why when we talk about regional revitalization, we used to talk about community building, and it often took a lot of young people, maybe eight or ten, to build an ecosystem in that community. Yet, nowadays, sometimes one or two people go back, and through the net, they can connect everything about design, copywriting, and marketing to the online community. That’s why it only takes one or two people to go back…

Brian Tseng: You’ve just said connecting to…

Audrey Tang: Online communities. Now it only needs one or two people to bootstrap a regional revitalization plan.

Brian Tseng: OK. Let me ask one last thing: Disinformation.

Brian Tseng: Our show has discussed how to respond to disinformation before, and our solution is to knock everyone out. When you can’t tell the truth from the false anymore, you won’t be impacted by disinformation. Of course, I am standing by what we’ve said previously. I believe this is a great way.

Audrey Tang: In other words: No appendix, no appendicitis.

Brian Tseng: That’s right. This interpretation totally makes sense. However, I know you, Audrey, have provided a solution to counter disinformation by responding with memes?

Audrey Tang: Actually, memes are a little bit like knocking others out. Yet, first things first, they don’t cause irreversible damages.

Brian Tseng: Seems fair. Clever.

Audrey Tang: When your party just formed, I sent a flower basket. The flower basket was full of catnip.

Audrey Tang: Of course, a part of me did that to avoid the cilantro conflict, but the important thing is that catnip has the same effect as memes. When cats approach…

Brian Tseng: …they temporarily get unconscious…

Audrey Tang: …so when a cat’s restless, angry, full of outrage, out on an expedition, the only thing you have to do is to offer some catnip, which will knock out the cat for a second.

Audrey Tang: After the effect wears off, the cat actually becomes quite reasonable. Thus, we can keep on talking about the topic nicely.

Brian Tseng: However, in order to use memes to reply to the disinformation, or as a the premise to make this work, the memes always have to…always have to be more hilarious.

Brian Tseng: Because…for instance, if disinformation is spread through more hilarious memes, then aren’t we kind of having a competition to be the funniest message to grab everyone’s attention?

Audrey Tang: It’s actually not like that. Because when we think of something humorous, our brain circuit is like this: When I perceive a social controversy, I often feel helpless. The helplessness may lead to uncomfortable and angry feelings, and when one feel angry, one often press the “share” button immediately because it can lift anger into outrage.

Audrey Tang: However, the circuit of outrage is contradicted with that of humor. That is to say, if you see something humorous when you feel angry, no matter it’s true or not, as long as you laugh and think it’s hilarious, you will then generate a sense of “Hmmm…I’ve laughed and had fun already,” and the feeling of “I must vent my anger at someone” disappears.

Audrey Tang: Therefore, memes don’t really have to be true or false; in science, there are lots of different hypotheses. These diverse ideas can then lead to real debates and deliberations.

Brian Tseng: Alright. Yet, I don’t agree with you because the circuit of emotions doesn’t have to contradict each other. For instance, when writing scripts for the show, I often tell my writers, “we have to pick an emotion.” I believe sadness and happiness have the most contradictions. As for anger, you know, our show satirizes many things, such as the Mining Laws and factories on farmlands. These are all approaches to channel anger to…

Audrey Tang: Yeah, that’s the most effective… We totally agree.

Audrey Tang: In other words, if you want a funny punchline, you should start with anger because it’s the easiest way. Nevertheless, when anger turns into outrage, as in going on an expedition to attack someone, it becomes hardly funny at all.

Brian Tseng: Its outcome is different. Good.

Brian Tseng: Let’s talk about the last topic. I believe everyone in the audience can see that I really just want to chat with Audrey and don’t really care about you guys at all.

Audrey Tang: Yeah, I noticed that you seldom turn your head.

Brian Tseng: Yeah, seriously… I really don’t care.

Brian Tseng: You know, the producer keeps saying, “Okay, okay, you should end the conversation now,” on the side. Yet, it’s my last episode, I just don’t care.

Brian Tseng: Audrey, I don’t know it’s before or after when you became a Minister, but when someone said that you’re a proponent of anarchy, you seemed to explain that anarchism doesn’t equal to having no government at all?

Audrey Tang: I’m a conservative anarchist, or “chíshǒu de ānnàqí.”

Brian Tseng: So it’s not the “bǎoshǒu” kind of conservative. What’s the difference between your definition and the usual one?

Audrey Tang: I define conservative as respecting the diverse cultures in Taiwan. Currently, we have about 20 national languages, and each of them is a different culture. When one particularly strong culture dominates other cultures, looking from that culture’s side, people may consider it as progressive, as in making progress. Yet, when you take the view from the other cultures, it simply means that we didn’t conserve them well.

Audrey Tang: Thus, my main idea here is transculturalism. In other words, you may be under the influence of one culture when you were born and growing up, but you can get in touch with another culture, usually through learning a new language, when you’re in your teens or twenties. The more you can understand your hometown from the perspective of other cultures, the more unique your thinking becomes.

Audrey Tang: With a transcultural citizenry, everyone can offer a unique perspective, which makes for a most diverse democracy. This is my fundamental idea.

Brian Tseng: Wow! There are so many things that I want to talk about.

Brian Tseng: Let’s talk about anarchism. In your opinion, what’s the difference between “anarchism” and “anarchy”?

Audrey Tang: In anarchism, there can be governing mechanisms. It’s just the government would not have the power to coerce, command, and force people.

Brian Tseng: OK, good. Also, because I majored in foreign languages, I wanted to talk about languages that we’ve mentioned earlier. We learn languages, and languages are the denotations of the conceptual world. We express our thoughts through languages.

Brian Tseng: You’ve just said learning another language can help you understand another culture, but my question is this. Since a language cannot include all concepts, so do you have other methods to…

Audrey Tang: …then you probably have to learn more languages.

Brian Tseng: OK, good, more languages.

Brian Tseng: Alright, alright, I have restrained my urge. I know that just now the audience is sending questions to Minister Audrey Tang through a website. I don’t know if we have explained to everyone that we want really irreverent questions.

Old K: Hold on, hold on, the second question is… it’s completely irrelevant…

Old K: Now someone, someone…

Audrey Tang: I see the “(seriously)” in brackets, indicating that this is not irreverent.

Brian Tseng: Great, they must be worried that no one knew this was just kidding.

Slido Comment: “Minister Tang, how do you maintain your hairstyle? (seriously)”

Audrey Tang: In fact, my favorite hair studio is Superbcut, a social enterprise.

Brian Tseng: Hey, really, I know it, it’s that shop on Dunhua South Road…

Audrey Tang: Yes, they also helped with your party’s founding party.

Audrey Tang: As for their hair stylist, every time I visit there, I say “Please help me cut a hairstyle that does not require any maintenance.” That’s why I don’t maintain my hair.

Brian Tseng: Oh, so you don’t maintain your hair?

Audrey Tang: The only way to maintain one’s hair is to have enough sleep, eight hours a day.

Brian Tseng: Do you wash your hair every day?

Audrey Tang: About every one or two days.

Brian Tseng: Oh, so you are really saying something. I’ve found that you really know how to chat. How come you can speak about anything?

Audrey Tang: I have probably been asked these questions more than five times already.

Brian Tseng: Not creative, that’s what you mean.

Audrey Tang: It’s cached, it’s all in my head. Actually, this is because their vote number is so high. The ones with low vote number often have never been asked.

Brian Tseng: Got it.

Slido Comment: “Can you find @shasha77 in the vast crowd?”

Old K: What is this…

Audrey Tang: This is an eyesight test, not an intelligence test.

Brian Tseng: He is also one of the party founders.

Audrey Tang: @shasha77… where is…

Old K: He is dressed like Wally today.

Audrey Tang: In the second row…

Brian Tseng: Too accurate…

Audrey Tang: In the back… I saw the shadow of a figure just now.

Audrey Tang: I give up, I give up.

Brian Tseng: OK, we can’t find it.

Slido Comment: “What advice will Audrey Tang give the newly re-elected President Tsai Ing-wen and the new Legislative Yuan?”

Audrey Tang: Actually, from the perspective of the executive branch, we are the subject of congressional oversight. That’s why we won’t do anything like advising the Parliament. But a few…

Brian Tseng: On this informal occasion…

Audrey Tang: …yes, so I can speak a little wildly.

Audrey Tang: A few legislators from the south often told me that they have to run local trips for their constituency. Even if we have the high-speed rails, their service may be far from high-speed rail stations. They will rush, then, to the parliamentary inquiry and then rush to go back. In fact, they’d spend almost an entire day on this.

Brian Tseng: You’re going to say something about robots and Skype?

Audrey Tang: I would suggest that, in every administrative area, we can place this kind of devices for tele-inquiries.

Audrey Tang: Because in fact, during the parliamentary inquiries, what matters is the optics, and tele-inquiries can also offer that.

Brian Tseng: Also we should use a kind of projected virtual characters…

Audrey Tang: That’s right…

Old K: The videos are split-screen anyway…

Audrey Tang: Anyway, we can…

Brian Tseng: Pack a bunch of white balls at home…

Audrey Tang: …create 3D models of legislators.

Audrey Tang: I think this must be very effective. And then after every inquiry, the legislator can fly up. Wouldn’t that be great?

Brian Tseng: Brilliant. Okay, next question.

Slido Comment: “How do we achieve anti-infiltration with information.”

Audrey Tang: In fact, this question is linked to the half-question that I have not answered yet.

Audrey Tang: On my suggestion to President Tsai Ing-wen, because I am also in charge of youth engagement, I think when we are making policies, we often think about the state helping young people, helping them with schooling, employment, entrepreneurship, housing, etc.

Audrey Tang: But in fact, some of the most interesting youth policies we see are often proposed by young people. For example, the suggestion that WorldSkills medalists should go to the National Day parade. After the parade, they could go to the elementary and middle school to help students renovate their school buildings. This is to let everyone know that technical high school is about learn things that you can help your school with rather than things that you only learn when you can’t enter an academic high school.

Audrey Tang: This idea was put forward by Huang Wei-hsiang, a youth advisor to the cabinet. He was 29 years old when he joined the Youth Advisory Committee, about the same age as you. Under such circumstances, I think that the more youth policies are led and decided by youth, the better.

Audrey Tang: In fact, this is also the best method for anti-infiltration in terms of information. Because if you think that the top-down policy affects you and you have no right to decide, then it is very easy for you to become misinformed.

Audrey Tang: However, if this policy is something that you have taken part in, say, if it had been proposed via Let’s Talk, a petition through the Join platform or other methods, it means this policy had been originally written by you, or at least parts of it had been written by you, then of course you will not be subject to infiltration.

Brian Tseng: Hang on, there are two questions. What is the definition of youth?

Audrey Tang: According to the definition of the Youth Development Administration, or our Youth Advisory Council, it is 18 to 35 years old.

Brian Tseng: OK, OK. Which definition do you not want to follow?

Audrey Tang: Of course, everyone has been a young person once, anyone over 35 years old.

Brian Tseng: Like a certain young boy.

Audrey Tang: I asked my friends from the Youth Development Administration today. They said that these high school students on the stage…

Audrey Tang: This is because the 18-year-olds are not the most frequently petitioners of proposals; rather, it’s the 15-year-olds. Because an 18-year-old can at least go to vote in a referendum, whereas a 15-year-old can do nothing, so when we have a petition platform, the petition such as banning plastic straws are all proposed by 15-year-olds.

Audrey Tang: So I asked the Youth Development Administration whether they are considered youths? My colleagues said that they are “youths-in-training.”

Brian Tseng: Do you think they are so enthusiastic because they can’t do so much? Because once you can do it, you won’t cherish it as much.

Audrey Tang: Sounds reasonable. That’s why we should cherish this period of traineeship.

Brian Tseng: Or we can start taking away the rights of what people can do… no, no, just kidding.

Slido Comment: “Recent Views on Hong Kong (Influence on Information Dissemination)”

Audrey Tang: I see another bracket here. Well I think for Hong Kong, with the resurgence of a so-called waterless movement… Er, let’s do another take.

Audrey Tang: As for the “leaderless” and “be water” movements in Hong Kong, I think the most important thing is that in our previous imagination, large-scale events must have organizers. Many people would say, what happens if there is no organization? It would become a riot.

Audrey Tang: Therefore, the approach in Hong Kong is not that there is no organizer; rather, it is that everyone can be an organizer. Everyone can think clearly about what I am going to do here and that I am willing to share it, so that very soon there are more than 2,000 organizers.

Audrey Tang: So, with a co-creation like “Glory to Hong Kong”, we can see that in each creative process, there is an organizer facilitating the co-creation. After each creation, they share it in an open and transparent way, so that other creators can see it and say, for example, that it only resonates with certain people and not the others. Then someone else can remix it so that it resonates with other people as well.

Audrey Tang: We can already see this kind of creative method on LIHKG. I think this is really a method that any social movement in the future must learn.

Brian Tseng: That’s great.

Slido Comment: “In an ever changing era of AI, is there any advice you want to give to someone who is on this path?”

Audrey Tang: Actually, I think in the era of AI, any time you are feeling machine-like while doing your work, these are the times when AI can help you.

Brian Tseng: So it can eliminate some negative emotions because there is no such work for you in the future?

Audrey Tang: Yes, so you can focus on the creative work.

Brian Tseng: Oh, but can you call this an advice for people who are on this path?

Audrey Tang: Certainly. In other words, one of the most needed skills right now is experience design. Or if you have a social work background, it is called job/process redesign. With this competence, you can go and find out what is repetitive in your work flow; which tasks has a simple input structure and a simple output structure; where there is only a difference in speed and you find it really boring.

Audrey Tang: Previously, people had to endure this part of work, because only humans could do it. But now, even if nobody wants to do it, and you can’t find a trainee, you can go and train a machine apprentice to do it. After it has observed your work, it can do it for you.

Audrey Tang: And then you can do the part that requires getting along with people, that is, the competence around communication and interaction, and develop common values, the competence around social participation.

Audrey Tang: Redesigning your own work is “Taking the Initiative.” Using different skills to connect with each other is “Engaging the Public.” Achieving a shared purpose is “Seeking the Common Good.” These three are precisely the Core Competences of the 108 curriculum.

Brian Tseng: So we come back to that again. It’s great. OK, alright. Last question.

Slido Comment: “Can you shout “Better than Brian” to Brian Tseng.”

Old K: I think this is very suitable for Audrey to shout out.

Brian Tseng: Surely not?

Old K: It would be very convincing.

Brian Tseng: Fine.

Old K: Unlike a certain someone.

Brian Tseng: Alright, alright, alright.

Audrey Tang: You’re good with that?

Brian Tseng: Yes, of course.

Audrey Tang: Better than Brian!

Brian Tseng: Without a doubt!

Brian Tseng: Audience members, please put your hands together once again for Audrey Tang.