Interviewer: The question is, what Thailand can learn from your technology, and what collaborations do you expect to have in the future?

Audrey Tang: Taiwan and Thailand both have “AI” in our names. A lot of assistive intelligence, as we call it, is the center of our innovations on both sides. By assistive intelligence, I mean AI developed with social input for a social benefit.

Audrey Tang: For example, anything that can reduce the chore of public sector or the social sector, that is a good automation. However, for things that takes over people’s judgment making capacities, that we need to design ethics and norms around it.

Audrey Tang: Because we’re culturally quite similar in many aspects, we think we can start with today’s social innovation forum and work toward the common social entrepreneurship, social financing, social norm setting and so on, to collaboratively determine how much assistive intelligence to use in our everyday day society so that the society feel that they’re empowered instead excluded.

Audrey Tang: I think that is a very fruitful science and technology direction to settle on a common AI partnership between Thailand and Taiwan.

Interviewer: You mentioned educational institutions like Chulalongkorn can enable people in the future to fully participate in social innovation?

Audrey Tang: Yes. In Taiwan, we’re making the universities the epicenter of regional revitalization because each township, each provincial government, municipal government across the world may change their leaders, but a university is always here.

Audrey Tang: Because of that, in Taiwan, the university is not just educating people in the undergraduate or the graduate levels, but making sure that they include everybody from the K through 12, the basic education level, so that they can care more about local development issues, community issues, and social entrepreneurship.

Audrey Tang: We have found that if people, in their basic education, started this community development and social entrepreneurship, they will care more about their community so that when they pursue higher education, they learn about things that are useful to their community.

Audrey Tang: They can start a local business. They can start a local co-op, and so on. If they are excluded from the community concerns of their universities nearby, then when they go the universities, they will learn something that’s only useful to themselves. They will just go elsewhere to Taipei or to some other countries instead of enriching their life of their communities.

Audrey Tang: This idea of university social responsibility or USR connects not only to the basic education system, but also to community colleges, the indigenous nations’ education and health centers and digital opportunity centers and so on. It’s a lifelong learning system, and the university is at the center of it.

Interviewer: OK. Do you think that formal education would get less important in the future?

Audrey Tang: No, I think it would be democratized so that it’s not something that you schedule to do when you’re 18 years old and finish when you’re 22 or 25. It could be as an 18-year-old decide to do social entrepreneurship for a couple years, and they learn that they must learn management or learn finance, and they go back to formal education.

Audrey Tang: After two years, they found another pivot, a capstone project that they want to do, so they just start doing something. They learn that they must learn international trade or something like that, and they go back learning international trade.

Audrey Tang: The point is that the lifelong learner has their own course of trajectory. Instead of being limited by, I think, the obsolete idea of a major, one should just become a generalized learner. A university, when they support this learner with different courses on different levels of their learning, is paired with the career growth of that learner instead of being a necessary pre-condition of their career.

Audrey Tang: I think formal education will become democratized in the sense that there will be a lot of zigzag between the different majors. That is why, in Taiwan, the University Act has been changed so that a student doesn’t have to only receive a diploma from a single major within a university.

Audrey Tang: You can receive a diploma after working on your capstone for six years, seven years from many different departments of the same or even different university. That, together, becomes your diploma. You can use that to run for a PhD, essentially saying your capstone is your Master’s degree.

Audrey Tang: That flexibility, I think, is very important for a university to stay relevant in this new interdisciplinary age.

Interviewer: All right, thank you so much.

Audrey Tang: Thank you.