[Music]
really excited uh to be here uh I missed
the bota one I was in the Osaka one so
happy to uh be back at
Defcon um yeah thank you
and today's talk uh is plurality uh
infinite diversity in infinite
combinations uh you can read all about
it at plural. net which is a public
domain book now uh as you have seen in
the trailer the good end of ancestor
back in 2014 just a decade ago Taiwan
was facing a real public trust problem
uh the trust in the Democratic
Administration was as high as 9% which
was not very high uh and the society was
very polarized and very angry energies
everywhere and so the point uh that we
made back then was that we should not
succumb to the anger and outrage that
swept across much of the world at a time
and instead we should turn conflict into
co-creation and there's a saying that
says to give no trust is to get no trust
and in the span of just six years we had
rebuil the trust by radically trusting
the people and so by 2020 the public
trust has risen to over
70% and so this is the journey that
began a decade ago the sunflower
movement March
2014 uh was when people were really
deeply unhappy about how the
administration and the Parliament was
handling a particular trade negotiation
but what said is movement apart is that
we said that we're not protesters
protesters is against something we're
demonstrators demonstrators build
Alternatives so we occupied peacefully
the parliament for three weeks with half
a million people on the street and many
more online and the occupied streets
around the parliament became a live open
citizen assembly anybody can come there
and learn about how exactly does the
trade agreement affect them and they can
engage in a facilitated conversation
both in person and online and every day
we reach a little bit consensus about
those specific issues and read them
allowed and after three weeks something
very rare happened in the history of
occupies the speaker of the parliament
accepted or our demands and so that was
extraordinary and by the end of 2014 the
central government invited us the Civic
activists to join the cabinet as reverse
mentors advising the cabinets in art of
how to rebuild public
trust and so the idea the key idea here
is bridging systems the first thing we
did in 2015 was building such bridging
systems online platforms that mirror the
facilitated dialogues that we had during
the occupation for example this is a
real screenshot back in 2015 about Uber
which involved nonprofessional drivers
uh and which uh really offended the taxi
drivers uh caused a lot of conflict both
in the street and online but instead of
letting the discussion devolve into
outrage on social media we build our own
pro-social media where citizens can
express their views constructively and
this is the polce platform it's an open
source platform where people can propose
ideas like insurance is very important
for right sharing and so on and as you
can see there's this agree button and
disagree button but there's no reply
button with with no reply button there's
no room for trolls to grow and uh you
can see as you click agree or disagree
that your avatar that blue circle moves
toward to a cluster a c's cluster uh
where people share with your views and
you can see what bonds you together and
what are dividing the groups and the
idea here is that we focus on the
bridging idea the more an idea Bridge
across groups the more bonus it gets and
so only the idea that speak to all the
different groups can get agenda setting
power to be part of the policy agenda
and so during the Uber deliberation
people first agree on the basic facts
like what's actually happening and then
we ask how do you feel about those facts
and some were angry some were you know
happy but everybody is an expert in
their own feelings and this allowed us
to Cluster based on the shared
sentiments and so by the third week we
had a set of very bridging ideas like
search pricing is acceptable while the
demand is high but undercutting meters
is not and so the final regulations
setting this as agenda ensure fairness
for both Uber and the local cooperatives
in rural areas and so on and so the
lesson we learned back in 2015 was that
polarization is not a function of the
people involved it is a function of the
space and so we can Design pro-social
Systems that reduce polarization as a
function of the space making the group
informed consensus into a common
knowledge like a group selfie that
everybody sees and say oh actually we do
agree with most of our neighbors most of
the time on most of the points and it's
just one or two things that divides us
and that group selfie is very
powerful now the idea has since then
influenced the mainstream platforms uh
such as Twitter now x.com uh and also
YouTube so maybe some of you have tried
the jury duty that is the community
notes uh it follows the same principle
so if only one side on the left on the
right agree with a note it does not get
featured it only gets featured if it
Bridges perspective from both sides
encouraging more and more balanced
contributions and so by promoting those
notes that bridge differences the system
incentivized this idea of constructive
engagement and so more generally while
the social media connects us globally it
often treats the individuals as isolated
units and prioritizing that engagement
that do hit over genuine connection and
so instead of these efforts to exploit
our social fabric rather than
regenerating it uh we can do better and
the poce community notes are just
prototypes to what we call pro-social
systems and the main idea of prosocial
systems or plural systems as vitalik
wrote in his blog is to treat the
connections between individuals as first
class objects and that means designing
platforms that recognize and enhance the
Relationships by naming the
relationships and featuring them as part
of the group selfie and so transparency
is really key because many platforms
already understand the networks that we
belong to and the interest that we share
but the information is concealed from
Individual users and exploited from
personalized targeted advertising and so
by openly labeling those content with
Community it connect us to whether
cultural professional or social we can
empower the people to engage much more
meaningfully and so this idea has many
applications and in the book we discuss
a lot of them but basically all of them
falls into this uh tradeoff this
production um possibility Frontier as
you can see on one side deep
collaboration happens in small in
homogeneous groups while large scale
interactions tend to be more superficial
like just capitalism uh but what if we
can push the frontier forward and so
that is the main research agenda for
plural systems what if we can Design
Systems that allows for the same deep
meaningful collaboration but across
larger groups or we keep the same skill
of people engaged but much more
meaningful much more higher bandwidth
democracy and so by designing spaces
that accommodates this kind of infinite
combinations uh in infinite diversity we
can then move toward a much more
interconnected society and tackling more
and more emerging challenges so I'll
just use one example which is the middle
uh the augmented
deliberation uh more recently uh we
tackled in Taiwan uh this March a
society-wide issue which is a emerging
issue called defects and other synthetic
content on social media and so this Mark
we send out 200,000 random text messages
SMS to Citizens across Taiwan from 111
which is a well-known number that says
this comes from the government so you
know it's not scam and it asked a very
simple question how do you feel about
information Integrity online and from
those who responded uh who said okay I'm
willing to engage in online augmented
deliberation we randomly selected 450
people through random stratifi assembly
or sortition a microcosm of our society
in terms of age occupation region so on
so forth and so this microcosm were
divided into 45 online rooms with 10
people each and instead of professional
facilitators the room now autof
facilitates the AI power tools guides
the discussions without a human
facilitator and the platform transcribes
the real time uh transcripts
conversations key points points of
disagreement points of agreement and
even encourage the quieter participant
to share their thoughts more and so the
AI assist deliberation enable us to
scale meaningful conversations in real
time and synthesize different ideas from
those 45 different rooms into a coherent
bridging idea that we then read out to
the 450 people during the plenary for
example one consensus that was Wen this
way was that social media platforms need
to be liable if they fail to verify the
mandatory digital signatures of online
advertisements in other words
if um an advertisement shows awn selling
you some scam or something and the
platform did not secure a digital
signature from me and somebody get con
for $1 million then that platform should
be liable for $1 million and so we took
those Collective insights and within
just three months just passed the
legislation with the support of all the
different parties and so the new law
requires social media to ensure the
authenticity and all advertisement so
it's not content level moderation or
censorship but rather actor level
Providence and so this process
demonstrated how technology can enhance
Democratic participation turning this
complex Challenge and basically
deliberate in the same speed as the
technology
evolves and so uh our journey in Taiwan
taught that uh if we instead of
broadcasting just broad listening uh
from the society we can just integrate
those very different conflicts polarized
sides and turn them into co-creation
it's not just limited to the time one uh
for example in Japan this year a young
political newcomer a AI researcher name
is takahiro anos uh embraced his
principles after reading the plurality
book uh and run for the Tokyo governor
and so inspired by the plurality book
anoong um basically used AI to um deep
fake himself uh so uh he live streamed
as a vtuber for 17 days answering almost
10,000 questions from voters you can
call into a hotline have a conversation
with his voice clone uh but the point is
that it's all open source and his
Manifesto his platform is on GitHub and
so this kind of collaborative
co-creation again show the people in
Tokyo like in real time what their
preferred platforms are and so ano's
experience um basically illustrates how
the principle of broad listening can
result in a very high quality platform
independently rated as the best platform
even though he did not win uh Co Cas on
one uh but the idea is that we can
enrich our Collective experiences and
with a stronger more interconnected
social Fabric and so that leads to the
idea of pro social media what you're
seeing here is a prototype uh called
cortico thatai from MIT that exe
exemplify the idea of pro- social media
uh and the software is to enable small
Gatherings like religious community
educational settings to hold meaningful
listening sessions and the software
again transcribes and anonymize the
conversations highlighting the points
where people resonate and share those
resonating um ideas uh across the
bridging groups and so this creates a
network of understanding where insights
from one group inform discussions in
another group and ultimately a
collective sense making report is done
again with the help of language models
and then reflecting the collective voice
of the people so that people can then
understand deeply uh what they all care
about and the idea of pro-social media
then regenerate the social fabric rather
than maximize individual engagement and
this can also offer a new Revenue Source
uh because for communities and also for
personal subscriptions we all want to
connect more meaningfully with our
communities and so uh this leads to the
real world um application part uh so in
our Pursuit uh to do more pro-social
digital environment uh this year there's
also a very interesting critical
opportunity so one of the world's most
influential social networks is called
Tik Tok uh and we think rather than
resorting to bonds we're putting
together what's called a people's bid to
acquire the US assets of Tik Tok and
turned it into exactly that sort of
pro-social constructive Community Driven
space uh as you can see uh Tik tok's
recommendation algorithm has been a
double-edged sort last year there's
research uh that shows um a average
undergrad in the US if you want them to
stop using Tik Tok uh you have toay pay
them $60 or so a month uh for the
utility that's lost but if there is a
way for uh them to make everybody around
them including them themselves quit Tik
Tok they're willing to pay like 30 uh US
dollars per month uh and so this is a
kind of collective trap situation where
people find it very difficult to leave
due to the network effects and peer
pressure and so the people's bid
basically seeks to acquire Tik toac us
and shift it into the open decentralized
infrastructure not unlike forecaster or
lens and allowing users to Port their
social graphs and choose their own
experiences so there's no um immediate
loose if you migrate away from one
particular front end you can keep all
the values in the network and so by
replacing the existing recommendation
engines with bridg making algorithms we
hope to promote content that Fosters
understanding collaboration across those
diverse different viewpoints and
research from Stanford already show
showed that such bridg makak algorithms
can maintain the same user engagement
while enhancing the quality of
interactions and overall mental wellbe
so if you know someone from the web3
space who would like to architect Tik
tok's eventual migration to the
decentralized social networking protocol
like a CTO for the people's bit uh
please do get in
touch so uh now before moving to the Q&A
uh with 10 minutes left uh I'd like to
share something personal um back in 2016
when I was first named digital minister
in Taiwan Taiwan did not have a digital
Minister before and so the EDR asked me
would you like to write a job
description to uh describe what the
digital Minister do and uh in Taiwan it
just so happens sh way means both
digital and plural so in addition to
being a digital Minister I'm also a
minister of plurality uh and so what
follows is really a prayer it is my job
description as digital Minister and now
cyber ambassador of Taiwan goes like
this when we see the 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
when we see user experience let's make
it about human
experience and whenever we hear that a
singularity is near that a just always
remember the plurality is here thank you
so
[Applause]
much any questions thoughts ideas
comments well feel free to um get in
touch I'm at Audrey t on most platforms
thank you oh there's a question there
sorry yes please uh thank you really
great talk
um yes I was just really interested with
the experiments that you've run like if
you ever have trouble with people
engaging and if you've explored
different kind of incentive mechanisms
to get people involved in all this great
work and research yeah that's a great
question yeah so the key to get people
engaged uh is fast fair and fun uh fast
meaning that you need to offer a kind of
instant gratification so for example in
Taiwan even for people under 18 anyone
who secur the signature online for 5,000
people can kind of force a ministerial
response within just 60 days at most and
so it encouraged people uh like
according to the iccs the international
citizenship uh and civic education
standard the Taiwanese 15 years olds are
top of the world when it comes to
feeling that they have the agency that
they can change the society and we
publicize uh the results which could be
fun you know one of the results early on
uh was Manning plastic straws from the
bubble T takeouts the Boba takeouts that
was very successful started by the
16-year-old by the time she was 17 she
became a cabinet level uh reverse Mentor
there's also another very popular
petition uh that says um we would like
to go to school one hour later because
study shows that one more hour of sleep
actually as opposed to one more hour of
study actually increased the grades uh
and the Ministry of Education was like
yeah that's a great idea and so that was
passed uh and included into law and so
by publicizing yeah it really is science
one more hour sleep does help study um
so by making sure that we publicize
those early wins those quick wins we
make sure that people who have like
otherwise longer term you know planning
thresholds and so on can get the support
like a 16 year old and 17 year old they
can get a support from 60 years old and
70 years old because both have more time
on their hands and care more about the
long-term sustainability anyway and so
each even partial or failed petition
then builds the community that pushes
the next petition forward I hope to
answer a question you great any other
questions um there's quite a few
there thank you thank you for the talk
I'm huge fan of your work H thank you
for that oh yeah sorry for the for the
mutex sem we can ask coordination
questions yes yeah please
okay uh so again I'm a huge fan of your
work thank you for that um but um while
we try to use what you suggest in in web
three my question is what would be your
call to action like a waiter wer call to
action for all of us also outside web
three because it seems like it needs
like a huge leap from where we are to
those new systems that can you know stop
the World from fing apart thank you
great um the most um interesting
experiments early on I saw in quadratic
voting quadratic funding this kind of
high band with plural systems they all
started in web3 space and mostly from
the ethereum ecosystem basically what we
use in Taiwan either for the
presidential hackathon or quadratic
funding would basically look at uh the
ethereum ecosystem see what worked uh
and then took what worked uh and in the
real world applications so although I
guess it's not strictly speaking real
world application of eum is real world
application with ethereum uh and uh
nowadays I think with the new found
superpowers of ethereum to settle the
transactions and so on so quickly um I
am thinking that most people who want to
build such pro-social system who want
the social graph to persist uh in a way
way that transcends individual
experiences and so on they now see like
what we just saw from the Sony uh and
the Sony L2 idea we can take existing um
traditional institutions centralized
institutions like Tik Tok uh and then
offer some sort of a ramp so that it
become uh decentralized and then
bridging into the existing very exciting
decentralized social systems so I think
that sort of um conversion the web 3 to
um like Web Two ramp uh and offering a
kind of a easy ramp for the web to
people to come aboard I think that is
one very exciting opportunity that I can
see but keep doing the experiments of
the bridging bonuses and so on in the
web three world because after all for a
policy maker like pointing to anywhere
in the world where something worked is a
sure way to get it into the standard and
Consciousness uh of people so keep up
the good
work uh question do you uh uh see the
innovations that uh you've been working
on in Taiwan on on Democratic systems
are they merely a better way of
manufacturing consent or is it possible
that at some point we evolve beyond the
need for hierarchical structures um so a
direct democracy could actually lead to
better uh decisions within the right
coordinating structures that's a great
question um indeed uh I think currently
the examples I gave is more like in
design thinking terms it's like in the
first diamond it is about um discovering
the common values and defining how those
values should be applied to solve
emerging issue uh but in existing
representative democracy the second
Diamond which is the development of the
budgets and policies and the delivery of
such things in the execution layer in
the administration uh these stay the
same so basically this is like a add on
uh to the existing representative
democracy but we do also see for example
during the pandemic or the infodemic the
disinformation crisis during the
pandemic we do see that there are
certain functions that people in Taiwan
do not want the government to run for
example factchecking um they would think
that if you centralize the authority of
factchecking into something that's run
by the government then the government
has an incentive of basically uh saying
uh things that are front of opposition
party as as falce or something so in
Taiwan we do not actually concentrate
that power into the administration but
rather rely on the uh collaborative
factchecking in the Civil Society on the
open source ecosystem so that for
example Facebook or Instagram uh The
Meta ecosystem they partner with the
time fact checking Center or the mopen
or the collaborative fact checking
system and these are in the social
sector these are in the Civil Society
and we make sure in the government that
we just offer like very quick responses
to the fact Checkers instead of assuming
that function ourselves so I think the
more um practical way to think about it
is to feel uh in a society whether there
are some functions that people just do
not want the government to centralize
and from those fields we can then use
the same coordination measures and then
extend to the development and the
delivery um layers and once people have
good Peak experience uh like the uh
Society wide deliberation uh and then we
can piggy back on those experience and
then expand more for direct democracy or
participatory democracy but it needs to
be done peace meal instead of just
assuming all the governmental functions
before the Grassroots the Civic muscles
are
ready thank you great question
yes
hey um so so my question kind of
connects to direct democracy MH uh like
the last question
and uh if if I had to make an analogy on
the
um on your kind of um SP and idea is
that we're trying to migrate realities
so we trying to migrate from a physical
reality to something that is more
virtual governed by bits and bites maybe
later other things mhm um but physical
reality has a fabric which is very basic
does one person
one vote and that kind of governs
morality in some way right um so how are
you trying to migrate that because
physical reality has Bad actors and Bad
actors can exploit the lack of fabric
that you have that you don't have in
virtual um realities
namely it's called civil um stability or
anything like that so what I'm curious
to understand what you're thinking about
that so just uh to clarify the question
the question is that in physical reality
like each person is physically in one
space uh it is impossible for me to Fork
into like 10,000 clones or robotic
clones uh and it has been like that for
thousands of years so I'm that's that's
my question basically yeah how do you
migrate that principle which is physical
to something that is virtual
yeah um so for example uh in the Pol
system or the systems that we run we of
course need to ensure that each person
only have one presence uh in that system
uh we usually use SMS which works
domestically because it's if you try to
get like 5,000 SMS numbers the in money
launching people discover you very
quickly uh but beyond the borders uh it
is uh then the need for some sort of
interoperable like personhood
credentials the ways to kind of disclose
that you're not a bot without overly
disclosing anything about yourself that
becomes very important um and so uh just
um I think a couple days ago Finland uh
is now running a hackathon uh that tries
to solve this sort of problem because
they want to use polce as their
society-wide public digital
infrastructure and so they don't want
like fins overseas uh to have a lot of
trouble authenticating but they they
also don't want uh people being able to
impersonate 10,000 people and so they
used exactly the same toolkits that
you're all developing here the uh zero
knowledge proofs The Selective
disclosure verifiable credentials and
things like that and so it's not to make
the virtual world a surveilled world at
or world where it's like real name
transactions but rather just to preserve
one single feature from the physical
world which is one person can only be
physically in one room uh at a time uh
so that is the feature that we're trying
to
um imitate uh the in the virtual world
without uh making it into a surveillance
of capitalism space so I I'm not exactly
sure that to completely address your
question but that is like the number one
uh issue we face when we deploy that in
the real
world any other
questions uh yes one more question okay
hello um and thank you for for your talk
it's inspirational quite um if I can put
this question together I'd ask uh what's
the biggest threat from State actors um
against radical change and Civic
movement like what do you think we can
do about um governments trying to
subvert their own Societies in the way
that you've spoken yeah I think the the
number one threat that I see uh is this
sense of the society being so polarized
that any sort of organization or
mobilization or trust uh is impossible
so it is in a authoritarian government's
best interest to make sure that each
individual feel like a individual uh and
not at all horizontally connected not at
all participating in anything that's
meaningful and change making uh and so
to counter that a lot of the work that
we've been doing is to ensure that even
at a very small community Grassroots
level there are ways to quickly see that
we do actually agree on common actions
and can make those common actions
together indeed back in 2014 uh in the
occupi parliament in Taiwan all the
different Corners in Taiwan were
occupied by different NOS the Civil
Society organizations that has been
around even when Taiwan was a under the
martial law was a dictatorship and they
did not have the um canvas to tackle
like overtly political topics back then
maybe they tackled like consumer right
protection or Environmental Protection
or Collective buying like cooperatives
and so on but after a few decades the
relationship most Muses and Civic
muscles grew to a point where people do
feel that they're in it together and
then uh they affected a peaceful
transition to democracy in Taiwan and
also ensure that it's not violent
because at any given time people belong
to intersection groups of Civil Society
actors that they can feel that even
though maybe the president wasn't yet
directly elected that didn't happen
until six uh 96 but throughout the 70s
and 80s more and more room gets opened
by the Civil Society actors so to
counter the pessimistic polarization or
manufactur polarization the easiest way
is just to get organized and just trust
each other even on a small scale thank
you all right thank you so much for the
great questions live long and prospering
thank
you thank you Audrey thank you AUD
amazing
talk okay
with this we actually are concluding the
programming for this main stage uh at
this point the stage will be closing
down it will actually be dividing into
three stages which will reopen in the
afternoon for more programming uh
starting in 24 minutes are more talks in
other stages uh around here on the same
level so you have talks around uh yeah
introduction to multilateral Trade
Credit set off an PC onchain Capital
allocation Workshop what's going on in
into the pectra upgrade by Christine and
bridging trafi and defi through ethereum
and evm a pathway to Innovation so check
out those talks in those other stages
we'll need everyone to clear out of this
stage so we can reset uh and thank you
all for joining us here this morning
[Music]