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The Interview
Audrey Tang: bringing digital diplomacy to the world
00:24:54
Zoe Kleinman talks to Audrey Tang, Taiwan’s cyber ambassador at large
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- [00:00]
Zoe Kleinman
This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the uk.
- [00:06]
Martha Stewart
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- [00:22]
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- [00:58]
Zoe Kleinman
Hello, I'm Zoe Kleinman, the BBC's technology editor and this is the interview from the BBC World Service. The best conversations coming out of the BBC people shaping our world from all over the world Today we are spending trillions on war and peanuts on peace.
- [01:14]
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- [01:21]
Audrey Tang
I don't have army, I don't have missile rockets. I have my body, I have my voice. I love singing and so my goal was always to do better and better at it.
- [01:31]
Zoe Kleinman
I was still in an induced coma in hospital when the world was defining me. For this interview, I met Audrey Tang, Taiwan's cyber Ambassador at large from Taipei. She was instrumental in transforming the fortunes of Taiwan's government through the use of technology after a student protest against a trade deal with China led her into government. A champion of transparency and citizen engagement. You're going to hear how her team used social media and polling apps and worked on closing the digital divide through universal broadband access. As a result of these measures, Taiwan was better equipped than most to deal with the COVID pandemic, reducing concerns over data privacy and trusting government information. She went on to become Taiwan's first digital minister and was key to preparing citizens for election interference in 2020. 2024. Audrey overcame a life threatening heart condition as a child, so reading philosophy and the Internet became the bedrock of her life. Perhaps as a result of this, Audrey is insistent on putting humanity firmly at the centre of our digital world.
- [02:39]
Audrey Tang
I think 1 in 10 people report that when they have an extended conversation with AI chatbots, it is the chatbot controlling the direction of conversation. They're out of control, which is very interesting considering that it has to wait for you to type the next sent. But already people are feeling pulled by synthetic intimacy. So in the next five years, we're going to see more and more of that. If the AI systems we use empowers communities, then we should see less isolation, more people to people interaction. But if they are synthetic intimacy replacing human connection, then we're going to see more and more isolation.
- [03:21]
Zoe Kleinman
Welcome to the interview from the BBC World Service with Audrey Tang.
- [03:25]
Audrey Tang
I was born with a heart defect. When I was almost five years old, doctors told me and my family that I only had a 50% chance to survive until heart surgery. So for the first 12 years of my life, I could not get too upset or too happy. Otherwise, I faint and I find myself waking up in the hospital. I learned Taoist breathing, to meditate, and to make sure that I don't go too joyful or too angry. And I learned that before I go to sleep, I publish everything I learned every day. I call this publish before I perish. Because it felt like a coin toss. If it doesn't land well, then maybe I don't wake up. So first in cassettes and then floppy disk, and finally on the Internet. I don't accumulate. I just share what I learned that day.
- [04:23]
Zoe Kleinman
That's an extraordinary response for a child. And it must have been frightening for you to grow up in that shadow.
- [04:32]
Audrey Tang
Yeah. And I think I only was able to cope with this situation because I really learned, especially on the Internet, actually, imperfection is an invitation. If I post something too perfect, people just press like, and then they scroll away. But because I don't have time to be perfect, people see those vulnerabilities, those cracks, as invitations to chime in, to contribute. And so I made many good friends simply by publishing the drafts that I did not have time to perfect during the day.
- [05:09]
Zoe Kleinman
Let's just keep up with your life story here because you were involved in a protest movement in 2014, and that led to you working with the government in Taiwan. That's quite an extraordinary journey in itself.
- [05:24]
Audrey Tang
Yeah. So it started, I guess, as a protest in March 2014 where people did not like the fast tracking of a trade deal with Beijing that would have invited Huawei ZTE and so on into our new 4G infrastructure and our publishing industry and so on. But very quickly, we turned the protest into a demonstration. So not just against the trade deal, but for a new way of democracy that invites the half million people on the street and many more online to, in small groups, like groups of 10, to have a real conversation about our preferences. What's acceptable when dealing with Beijing and trade deals in general. So after three weeks of non violent to occupy, we actually converged on a set of uncommon ground, surprising common ground that people can all live with. And the speaker of the parliament at the time said, well, the people's version is better than the MPs version, so let's go with it. So it's one of those very rare Occupy that it's not just about taking something down, but building something new.
- [06:35]
Zoe Kleinman
Did you expect it to work?
- [06:37]
Audrey Tang
Yes, certainly. Already at the time we understood if we use the social media or the antisocial coolness, it only amplify the polarization, the extreme. But the way we constructed the conversation network through broad listening, not just broadcasting, is to amplify the middle ground and mute the extremes.
- [06:59]
Zoe Kleinman
Did you start out thinking this was going to be an act of rebellion or did you always intend to shape your country legitimately?
- [07:08]
Audrey Tang
Well, I think this is a little bit of both. It is a rebellion in a sense. It's direct action. Right. We seized the means of communication. We literally crowdsourced the Internet connection. I personally brought 350 meters of Internet cables to the occupied parliament.
- [07:29]
Zoe Kleinman
Did you?
- [07:29]
Audrey Tang
Yes.
- [07:31]
Zoe Kleinman
You connected everything, right?
- [07:32]
Audrey Tang
Exactly. So that people on the streets can see the occupied parliament. And this is called humor over rumor, because the rumor only spread in the vacuum of communication. But if you make the livestream interesting, humorous, so people feel engaged, then there really is no room for the polarization attack, for the disinformation and so on. And because of that, we always expected to work as a demonstration. So the rebellion was the direct action, but the demonstration was in a new form of democracy.
- [08:06]
Zoe Kleinman
And so from that moment, you started working with the government and you helped to introduce a lot of changes that dramatically improved the approval ratings of the government. Tell me about some of those initiatives. Things like Vtaiwan.
- [08:22]
Audrey Tang
Yes. In 2014, when the sunflower movement happened, the president Ma Ying Jiu was enjoying 9% of approval rating. So in a country of 24 million people, anything the President says 20 million people didn't really change. Trust him. However, we understood to give no trust is to get no trust. So the government need to radically trust the people. So the vtaian process invites the divided ideas from for example, Uber drivers and taxi driver when ride sharing first came to Taiwan and use the same method to amplify the smaller group's ideas that can cross pollinate across ideological differences. For example, saying that undercutting meters is bad, but search pricing, raising the price is fine. So that is a bridging idea. And by making the bridging ideas viral, not the extreme ideas, we agreed on a set of law that is not just fair to taxi and uber, but also takes care of the rural places and so on. And so after 100 or so of such collaborative meetings, by 2020, the approval rating of Dr. Tsai Ing Wen at the time was over 70%.
- [09:38]
Zoe Kleinman
So a massive difference. And you went on to become Taiwan's first digital minister, didn't you?
- [09:43]
Audrey Tang
Yes. So I was Digital Minister starting 2016, but at a time with our portfolio. But we founded the digital ministry in 2022.
- [09:54]
Zoe Kleinman
And then the pandemic hit, of course. Do you think that Taiwan was well placed to handle things like the misinformation and the fake news that exploded at the time because there was so much fear and uncertainty?
- [10:07]
Audrey Tang
Certainly we understood that the only way to counter these polarization attacks is through journalism. And I don't just mean institutional journalism, I also mean Civic Journalism. In 2019, we changed the curriculum of our basic education so all our primary schoolers, high schoolers, learn not just media literacy receiving information, but rather media competency producing information. So they learned the whole journalistic process, fact checking, balancing perspectives, as well as measuring the air quality, water quality, noise levels, and publishing it so that everybody share the same common knowledge, knowing everybody else know this as well. And so entering the pandemic times, we repurposed these civic infrastructure instantly so people can visualize, for example, where the next available mask are. And people together depolarized the conversation around mask, anti mask, vaccine, anti vaccine, contact tracing, privacy and so on. So uniquely, we only lost seven people on the first year of pandemic. And we never locked down any city during the three years. And the TSMC and all the factories keeps running.
- [11:28]
Zoe Kleinman
And Fast forward to 2024. Last year there is an election in Taiwan and there were fears about sabotage by Chinese sponsored fake news. Particularly, how did you preempt this building on what I guess you'd learned during that time?
- [11:46]
Audrey Tang
Well, we pre bunked these attacks. So it is not debunking after the fact, but rather already two years ago I deep faked myself showing people how easy it is at a time already.
- [12:01]
Zoe Kleinman
Were you nervous about doing that?
- [12:02]
Audrey Tang
Not at all. I had an actor play me basically spoke as me and then we showed exactly how this is done. And I said, you know, this currently takes two hours on a laptop to produce, but soon it would only take 20 milliseconds. And when that day arrives, you cannot really trust anything on content alone. You have to check Digital signatures, you have to check the behavior, not just the content. So people already had inoculation against defects. So arguably the attempts, and there were plenty of attempts accusing of election rigging and so on, but they all backfired. Our president now, William Lai, got elected more than his polls at over 40%. And we also learned that these attacks from foreign sources and defect scam and so on. The red lines around which can be drawn by asking the people what to do. Together we send a text message to 100,000 random numbers around Taiwan, invited Michael Carlson of Taiwan, 447 people and they together talk about mandatory digital signature liability for investment scams, throttling connection to TikTok. If they do not agree our liability rules, which were put in effect last year. This conversation to draw the red lines around deepfakes online was facilitated by what I call assistive intelligence. So it's also AI, but it's civic AI, it's communal AI. The AI is not a huge see everything, do everything Skynet ish ruler that replace human relation and judgment, but rather it's more like a facilitator. So throughout this year there's just no defect scams anymore on social media in Taiwan.
- [13:53]
Zoe Kleinman
Do you think the examples that you're sharing of the way in which you're using tech in Taiwan, in governance, in democracy, you have a population of 23 million. Do you think that could be shared across other countries, perhaps larger countries? How about the US for example?
- [14:08]
Audrey Tang
Yeah, definitely. We have just concluded a very successful experiment working with Google Jigsaw Unit as well as the Neapolitan institute in the U.S. called We the People 250 in which two conversations, one on freedom and one on equality, were held by five people from each congressional district in the U.S. so together these 1,000 or so people, again is a statistical representation of the entire US population. And it turns out using assistive intelligence, people share their personal lived experience of what freedom means, what equality means. And we were able to build a social translation between people who care, for example about climate justice and people for example who care about biblical creation care. And they both, although they often talk past each other on social media, was then able to to see through social translation that they actually share the same concrete actions and can understand each other using this bridging translation layers. So I'm very happy to report Taiwan is no longer the largest polity to try these methods.
- [15:25]
Zoe Kleinman
You're listening to the interview from the BBC World Service people shaping our world from all over the world.
- [15:35]
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- [16:17]
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- [16:33]
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- [17:11]
Zoe Kleinman
For this episode of the interview, I'm speaking to Audrey Tang. Audrey is constantly on the move, carrying out her tech diplomacy. She told me she's been to 27 countries this year alone. I asked her how she relaxes and she told me it's on long haul flights. She also writes poetry, and at the end of our interview, to my surprise, she asked if I wanted to hear a poem that she penned in New Zealand in 2016, just after she heard she was going to be Taiwan's first digital minister. It's kind of a job description.
- [17:43]
Audrey Tang
When we see Internet of things, let's make it an Internet of beings. When we see virtual reality, let's make it a shared reality. When we see machine learning, let's make it collaborative learning. Or is the user experience? Let's make it about human experience. And whenever we hear that the singularity is near, let's always remember the plurality is here.
- [18:11]
Zoe Kleinman
Okay, let's return to my conversation with Audrey Tang. Are we taking the threat of AI seriously enough?
- [18:18]
Audrey Tang
Well, I think for many people the threat of AI is already now. It is not sometime in the future. There are people who, for example, reports one in seven people, I believe, reports that somebody close to them encounter reality distorting episodes through synthetic intimacy. So that is a big problem for many people already today, not just young people but also people who have vulnerabilities, who suffer from trauma and so on. And we also know that they trust the chatbots much more than the companies that make the chatbots, which creates, I think, 30% difference. So I think a way out of this dilemma is instead of saying banning chatbots, we should make sure that the chatbots are aligned to the community's needs, not to the big tech's needs.
- [19:12]
Zoe Kleinman
And is that what you mean when you say that AI alignment is fundamentally flawed?
- [19:17]
Audrey Tang
Yes. What I meant was that is that I think it would be much better if the designers of AI systems stay humble and instead of making tech progress at the expense of the local communities, empower the local community in what I call techno communitarianism so that each community can steer their own AI model toward their own local norms.
- [19:44]
Zoe Kleinman
We see time and time again the way in which technology, social media, all of these tools can bring out the worst in people and can be damaging and toxic to society. And we also see a growing call from some places to ban them or to delay the introduction of them. We've got Australia banning social media for under 16 year olds. Is that the answer, to ban it or delay it?
- [20:10]
Audrey Tang
Well, I think equally important is to provide safer alternatives. When the ozone was being depleted by Freon, we didn't just say, oh, let's ban refrigeration, which would be quite devastating. Instead, through the Montreal Protocol, people said let's double down on safe alternatives and we commit ourselves to switch to such alternatives after X years. And so I think the same needs to happen. Of course, if you ban antisocial media and promote pro social media, that's very good. In Taiwan's classrooms, most classrooms now ban the use of small touchscreens. But each student we have a one laptop per child policy, so that they have large tablets, large laptops, so they see screens as something that they can share with other people to build their relational health, the civic muscle width, instead of isolating oneself into. So I'm not saying that banning is the complete solution. It may be one part of the solution, but it always work best if you can provide a healthier alternative in the same place.
- [21:23]
Zoe Kleinman
Do you fear the redistribution of power that is going on at the moment, particularly in terms of big tech? We have a handful of enormous companies generally run by enormously powerful men. Does that concern you?
- [21:41]
Audrey Tang
If you have off ramps and on ramps across all the parts of the stack, then no matter, you call it the Euro stack, Taiwan stack, India stack and so on. At the end of the day, one do not need to worry that much because people always have the freedom of movement among choices. But if because of lobbying, because of other issues, people do not offer the meaningful freedom of exits, then yes, one can get trapped. A couple years ago, there was a study that asked undergrad students in the US using TikTok how much they will have to be paid to give up the use of TikTok. And it's about $60 a month. However, if there's a magic button you can press and move everybody they know off TikTok together, they're willing to pay you 30 bucks a month. So obviously that's a product market trap. Everybody's suffering, but nobody want to move out because fear of missing out. But if the governments have the freedom of movement baked in, then there is no need for each individual to suffer 60 bucks or 30 bucks a month. But rather people can freely, one by one, move to safer alternatives while keeping their communities.
- [23:02]
Zoe Kleinman
How likely is that to happen though?
- [23:04]
Audrey Tang
Well, already the state of Utah is passing that for instant messaging and group messaging. Europe already have the Digital Markets act and they're now looking to extend that to social media. And already people around the world are looking for the AI companies to offer the same something we call the context portability. So if I switch from one AI service to the other, anything this AI learns about me should be transferred to the next service, which may be open source, which may be run by the community. So again, this kind of portability, we need to plan it even before the AI systems become indispensable in our daily life, just like social media. Had we had this portability for social media 10 years ago, a lot of the worst antisocial practices would not simply be possible. And so, yeah, I think the context portability is something that we actively talk about in Taiwan in our upcoming Basic act and the Data Innovation Act. I'm sure the European counterparts are thinking about this as well, but that has.
- [24:10]
Zoe Kleinman
Been a deliberate thing that the tech companies didn't want. They don't want to make it easy for you to leave, do they?
- [24:16]
Audrey Tang
I really want to push back a little bit because if you are the second or the third largest vendor, then portability is good for you. It is only bad for the top vendor, which often takes like 60%, 80% market share. So when we introduce such kind of bridging mandatory protocols, usually the loss leaders really endorse that. But if you count all of them together, they have equivalent or even better lobbying power compared to the top player.
- [24:49]
Zoe Kleinman
Do you think that we're going to see A lot of change in the way we use technology and the way technology runs our lives. Within the next five years, we are.
- [24:59]
Audrey Tang
Already going through a period where many people feel that they do not meaningfully steer the technologies. I think one in 10 people report that when they have an extended conversation with AI chatbots, it is the chatbot controlling the direction of conversation. They are out of control, which is very interesting considering that it has to wait for you to type the next sentence. But already people are feeling pulled by synthetic intimacy. So yes, in the next five years we're going to see more and more of that, as I mentioned, like hamster in a hamster wheel. And I think one of the very accurate way to show this is to analyze the human to human relationships and whether they suffer. If the AI systems we use empowers communities, then we should see less isolation, more people to people interaction. But if they are synthetic intimacy replacing human connection, then we're going to see more and more isolation.
- [26:01]
Zoe Kleinman
Taiwan is bombarded by cyber attacks from China every single day. How are you managing that onslaught?
- [26:09]
Audrey Tang
Well, we enjoy free penetration testing. As I said, 2 million attempts every day. Usually you have to pay for this. We get it for free. And we do that by making sure that there is resilience, not just defense. And so by working with a resilience mindset, each attack becomes some intelligence that we can share with democracies around the world so they can guard against the next attack. Because no democracy is an island, not even Taiwan. So Taiwan may be ground zero for such attempts, but all democracies face the same issue.
- [26:47]
Zoe Kleinman
Who do you think is going to win the AI race? China or the US or humanity?
- [26:52]
Audrey Tang
For sure. If humanity do not win the AI race, there may not be a human race anymore. So we're all in this together.
- [27:04]
Zoe Kleinman
Thank you for listening to the interview from the BBC World Service. You'll find more in depth conversations on the interview wherever you get your BBC podcasts, including episodes with Google Bus, Sundar Pichai, Nobel Prize winning journalist Maria Rassa, and economist Francis Fukuyama. Until the next time. Bye for now.
- [27:28]
Martha Stewart
Foreign.
- [27:35]
Stone (BBC Radio 4 Host)
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- [27:49]
Audrey Tang
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- [27:55]
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- [27:56]
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- [28:04]
Martha Stewart
I'm Martha Stewart and I believe the best gifts are not only beautiful, but useful every single day. And Lennox has brought timeless beauty and lasting quality to our tables for generations. And their Lennox Spice Village is the perfect holiday gift for someone you love or for yourself. Spice Village transforms everyday spices into inspired memories filled with warmth and joy all year long. Give a gift that lasts beyond the holidays. Discover the collection@lenox.com SpiceVillage.