TMU Democracy Forum: Defending Democracy in the Age of AI

welcome everybody uh thanks for being here my name is San Andre I'm the managing director of the de uh public policy leadership think tank at Toronto Metropol University we're thrilled that you could join us for our next democracy Forum defending democracy in the age of AI um before we get started I just want to do a brief BL acknowledgement uh where we are at Toronto metropolitan University on the territory of the annab and Miss sagas it's covered by the district one spoon tree 13 and treaty we are committed to Hon our obligations St treaty Nations and justice for indigenous people generally we do this as a symbolic restorative Act One among many to follow in part of a Wier and hopefully transformative reconciliation project here at TM uh I'm also now delighted to introduce our moderator for this panel Martin red con uh Martin writes political column forar focusing on Ontario politics and also International Affairs he was a foreign correspond years and was the chief of the middle Asia Bureau and foreign editor and then the world affairs colist he's reported from more than 40 countries and has been nominated five pun for the national newspaper award uh he is also a senior fellow here at the dayu where he has founded the Democracy Forum which we are said to take part in today take it away Martin thank you for all right thank you thank you than welcome to our 33d democracy for where we try to do democracy differently more democratically and today the title of you as you've heard of today's forum is defending democracy in the age of AI but the fourth or fifth panel that I've done on this topic and you would think that it would be getting easier for me and that the machine learning would make me better at this by now but I'm still feeling my way but I do know that the more I learn about this topic the less that I know so uh today we're not just defending democracy I think we're trying to talk about modern democracy I'm going to guess that is what our guests are going to talk about and luckily we've got two great human thinkers talking about artificial intelligence and Technology they not just thought leaders but viewers and yes uh so let me tell you about our panelists you have their full biographies uh in the program you can look it up online but I'm just going to have some fun with the TR story true story so Audrey K has been taiwan's minister of digital Affairs since 2022 and a member of the cabinet since 2016 when she made history as the first transgender Minister and perhaps the only self already already [Music] sh she famously uh persuaded the government to let her write her own description and then she wrote an 8 year digital Nation PL and Comm is us five year PL when I was going up and we added an extra three um so there you are she's a big believer in radical transparency in a democracy she post the transcript for minutes of all her government meetings and decisions online to be careful what you say today Time magazine named her one of the 100 most influential people in AI last year and she also made the list of 100 Global thinkers published by foreign policy magazine by my P she's on close to 100 of these top 100 lists so this according to my research we will fact check momentarily when she grabs the microphone um she writes or she rewrites computer languages and she speaks foreign languages German English and some French she left school at age 14 she finished she finished her homework and started working at age 16 in it including for Apple where she helped Siri instead of the other way around uh she started early finished early retiring at age 33 then decided to work for everyone in public service she's also the child of former journalist I'm expecting her to answer all my questions truthfully or should be in trouble with mon welcome to T metrolog University by the way was all of that true uh or because I I looked it up online so it must be true some of it's true some of it's like me still speaking German not so much to speak all right um Hillary Harley has been since this last year the uh starting this last year the Chief Executive Officer of us digital response which keeps America safe from under trouble among other things before that he was Chief digital off digital and data officer and a deputy Minister for the government ofio when I first encountered her and I feel like she uh like Audrey also wrote her own job description being the first in that job and we'll hear about that in the minute before that she was a presidential Innovation fellow and she's also worked for governments on both sides of the Border helping and figure out how to design and deliver programs and services online and uh true fact she's from Kansas and tri good question is anyone here know who else is from Kansas in Ontario and public life Ontario answer Mike Shriner leader of the green party they I see green was about to raise his hand so Off the Mark welcome back to you all right the most thing the best thing about both of our guests today is that they're not just authorities they're very accessible and accountable uh so while you in the audience are piing up questions uh I'm going to pick and off to set the table for today but my first question is actually a trick question for everybody in the audience for listening today and the question is does anyone know how many active users are on Facebook today you can't answer times up three billion okay three billion you probably know was 500 million and about a billion a couple years ago there are 1.3 billion people on Instagram also part of met and we'll talk about later is had 1 billion True Believers including my two adult daughters I'm not going to make fun of chick talk today uh the power of the internet and of AI and Google and Facebook is that they scale up to unphasable levels and people are signing up all the time online while they are disconnecting and disengaging Dem so that's why we're here so luckily you can both help save the world and Audrey I question more serious question for and then just open this up by telling us about how you got Prov and that's unusual for most people who are hired by government don't say here's what I'm going to do you're given a mandate letter and uh how did your job description change uh over the years since be going tell us what you do um my J discription stays the same over the last eight years is it very short points I recited the prayer go like this um 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 with me let's always remember the plurality is here literally my job descrition uh I got to write this um in 2016 um because uh during the 2014 of our Movement we peacefully occupied our opponent in three weeks um demonstrating against the 12 State service and trade agreements uh which would make F and the de are foring infrastructure um and so uh the demonstration was not violent it's not even a perit it's a demo because we use Civic Technologies to get people's uh half a million people on the stream on in us on these topics and over three weeks of nonviolence communication and Co weed on set of very coherent demands which was been taken up by head of the legisl so starting 2015 uh Taiwan and other platforms National direct returnal and democracy that you said Hua Huawei and I should have warn you Huawei trigger [Music] um tell us in in that this that sort of poetry motion I thought somebody was going to applaud when they when they heard uh your words but tell us about ground level so you had an election presidential parliamentary elections in January uh how did your ministry deal with for example the sprad of cyber cber so uh we measure one key thing which is effective polarization meaning how people hate each other for uh so after the election it's a record like the the three major parties which has over 51 um now everybody do they have one and they don't and then my main uh work leading up is just to make sure that we pre-bump each and every POS [Music] information and we know there will be um [Music] videos um short videos about election counseling right being R like even before those are pushed out we know these P right so part of the work is just to invite YouTubers and really anyone up uh to the public cting stations around taian because we do payer only and the paper only BS are counted by [Music] shortly came go back and all three universe that prove that nothing like that actually ever happened that was um and so that was one of the pr and so there's many many where I de myself and Sh how easy that it is and so on uh and so pruning works because is a thing right it's all in order to be effective in order for debing to be effective it has to be a pre that's correct so the idea is that a debunk is defected that if it reaches people before the uh which usually means that you have to but if you know that there you can and just use it at really an opulation not a treatment after the fact could be most effective Hillary you were a Pioneer in Ontario as govern's first Chief digital and data officer people talk so much about the mystery of artificial intelligence we used a bit of a hook title today everyone was talking about AI proba we had a graph showing showing it the time ser but when you get down were appointed I 2017 weer talking about AI yet Al has existed for a long time um so what what's your job description what was your job description did you get to write it and and uh your job uh well as you mentioned um Minister given mandate but I did get to work with the cabinet and with mymin of time to carve out what we called our 10 key priorities and um those were you know you could look at those today and essentially recognize the kind of work that a great digital servic team needs to do uh it's about creating the right teams and creating the right environment and making sure that you're grounded in you know users and user research and the US not the you know um not not the you know an abstract solution etc etc um so you can take a look at those today and say we probably still need to be working honestly um but so WR my job description but I did uh we were able to really kind Focus the uh the energies and what so if you had to explain to somebody on the street for this room what you said that we is in retrospect what are the two most important things we were able to F Well I think the two most important things we it on was the ability to bring uh product teams together and have a product user Focus for what we doing a lot of times um and it's not just government that does this but uh government is kind of notorious for writ large not in Ontario um you know you you have a you have a problem in mind and you immediately get a solution in mind you go and you say uh let's stick those boxes let's just buy that or build that and it'll be fine and and government has had that ability to have sort of a monopoly for decades uh but we really are no longer in an era where if you build it they will come because they don't if they can't get this they are going to walk out to the counter and they're going to try a different way and so what a great digital product focusing does is is follow the data and follow their users um to deliver something that works and to start small and understand what features you can add on over time to create an incredible user service that kind you know that in the minds of the average person you know I can whip out my phone right now or some toilet paper and it'll be at my house tomorrow and people just expect things that work and the way that you do that is to understand what people need understand how they are interacting with things and not just assume that what uh what you're going to build the solution you have in mind oh government I have to use it so build with the people just part of thank you for for demystifying uh the the the false god of of technology and AI at the end of the day it is about deliverability usability and user but question for both of you can you help us reframe the technology versus democracy Paradigm so is technology the adversary is it is it and does democracy have do democracies have to look over their shoulders or to what extent is that just play defense and you've got to monize and look ahead not look over your shoulder one is the democracy is a technology it is a soci technology for collective decision making uh it was just that the fifth rate is very uh very small right uh if you have four candidates that's two bits if you have ref that that's not one bits the lcy is very long like two year or four year so that each package takes forever right to to travel uh and so that was uh the original idea during the SAR movement was that the people already have plenty of pools uh for hybd rate conversations uh and all we need to do is to make sure that it depolarizes people it do Bridges across people that used to ha each other instead of like the anal part of social media that do the reverse right so it's like just taking a reward model an social social media flip it and then use that social media to co-create useful policy suggestions and things like that and so that was the original Insight that led to the co-creation of the coherent mods of the SAR movement and then we follow that to procreate polies for Uber or things like that so to your question I think the more people contribute to democracy as a social technology to better EV you make it sound easy Hillary what's the reality I don't know about the reality but I feel like um my career in the work that I've had privilege of being involved in you know it's not necessarily about the technology around democracy but is about again if you make government simple and easy to use you deliver information that people need you deliver services that people need there is a direct line from that to a resilient democracy because you uh you're you're you're delivering what people need and then they have an impression in their mind that they are going to be successful they're going to interact with the government in a in a in a new and better and simple way they're going to tell their friends about it um but that is building trust in government it's like oh they actually got this done it works it's beautiful it's easy to use um I can kind of see now maybe what some of the bureaucrats are doing or or what you know what what the government is doing and then it makes you want to get involved and have even more agency to have you know to to participate in the direction of what the government is going to do that so so paradoxically it's not so much that it's easy but also transparency helps and you know we use the nword a moment ago mandate letters people in this audience were know controversy about whether those mandate letters should be secret or not the cath GL government released them all and the Ford government kept them all secret I love that word secret journalists trigger journalists and readers but I read the Mandate letters nobody else did in 2017 they were really boring there was actually nothing that interesting or or I should say interesting nothing juicy or exciting it was actually just about the nuts and bolts and toilet paper stuff that you're talking about so that's time okay Audrey the question you waiting for and that is this is like a talk show you have a book coming out you have a book coming out uh I'm not going to show the cover I have somewhere but I won't we don't have camera free [Music] over but uh you got a book coming out that answers all of these questions it's called plurality the future of collaborative technology okay the future of collative technology and democracy uh we have a a poster uh that's very retro to have a piece of paper in online and the book encourages you to download it online because there's more connectivity and hyperlink um spoiler alert Audrey CH the audience um doesn't have a happy ending um is there a false dichotomy between whether democrac whether whether democracy contain technology or technology Will trump uh technocracy libertarianism a word yeah yeah so um yeah the V is on plurality than you can download the E Andia in both Ming and our English uh it's C Comm Z meaning that we relinquish all copyright uh meaning that you do take it and say it's your book we W to you is in the public domain don't try that at home cretive um and and in in doing the plural Bo this way uh what we're really trying to say is that we're not just U telling we're showing uh how it is actually possible to use very simple Technologies like it and so on to co-create policy governance and so on around Roy around how books are to be translated about endorsement wise about who gets the final copy added uh and so on right so it is this micr of dominance Technologies as demonstrated by the book um and so the idea is not to prescribe any topown like constitutional or legislative or whatever reforms but rather to show who's off the show technology today people can already practice democracy as a high Bist technology uh and so the main idea comp about uh is applied to for example C misinformation information manipulation in Taiwan how we did contact tracing that actually bur in Taiwan uh during pandemic how we did um the data coalitions around like privacy data that was kept but can be contributed in a zero knowledge way to contribute to research and all things like that that take previous polarizing the comping like privacy and security on one side and advanc on the other and just deliver co-creative Solutions as evidence by the history them I asked the question I was distracted by the technology decid me because we're going to go to questions a little later on but I already knew the answer because I've read most of the book not all I'm not that fast to leader yet um but I have a question for you and that is why should we believe so so both of you this is a question I'm going to rope you in on this channel as well both of you are prophets in your own ways you're True Believers in the power of technology and so all of us I think were born when people would say that the internet information Super Highway [Music] maybe so so it was going to do the Town Square it was going to connect us it was going to supersede representative democracy which is an oldfashioned phrase that I still believe in because I'm so oldfashioned so given what's happening today um and and and and how false prophets brought us so on why should we believe because the message is not about moving fast or breaking things or replacing right all all the book is trying to do is just connecting hum minut together which was in a sense the original internet Vision before the Dooms to bit right uh the internet was to be a inter network uh where like labs and universities and things like that run their own show and through just very incable phst like email uh can be coupled this um Monopoly by everybody coming up with better was to read or write em but it was still going to the elite interaction think tanks super smart people at universities tall foreheads now it's everybody connected yes Here Comes everybody yes and so um but with uh the book I think it's not about asking you to believing anything right is about like contributing to Wikipedia or things like that if you just press edit on one of those type of you spot it and things like that that's practice democracy in a way that de about way so I don't think this is about prizing anything this is our attempt at answering why Taiwan managed to counter the information pandemic without any administrated take Downs over the past eight years or how we counter the pandemic without any domestic lockdowns we move between cities throughout three years uh and that is because it is within everyone's mind that they can go create new solutions to confence and so both is trying to explain this without resorting to how exens or whatever uh trops that people make by want but rather just this steing tool box that we actually use Hillary why why do you remain optimistic about the ability of democracy to harness technology and so many other people are worried about surveillance capitalism Sur surveillance governance as well For Better or For Worse like democracy uh this you know technology the ecosystem of apps that we use every single day it is unfortunately maybe for better for worse foundational now a similar way that democracy is and if you want to participate if you want to get anything out of it um you have to understand it so there's there's sort of the citizen res resident side of things which is how to figure out how to participate and show up um there is the government side which you know I have kind of dedicated my career to which is to help government show up in the 21st century um you know again with with governments have come a long way they've been online now for decades but the turn of the screw that has happened over the last 10 years is to be thinking about that switch from we can't just put it online and assume it's going to work but how do we make it work for me for you for everyone else and for the people in the back office who are having to to think about it so you know again that sort of the participation piece and how do you show up to that um on the government side it has to be how are we always interrogating um if this thing works for the people who need to use it the criticism against regulators and the criticism against critics too is that they are always reacting kind of reflexively to the march of technology and the potential Peril and scare stories that you in big media and so I guess the question is well let me let me take it to a concrete example so to speak that that is a little bit retro but I'm going to raise it in a Toronto audience uh both of you know a little bit about something called smart cities and and sidewalk labs and the experiment that was going to take place here in Toronto Hillary you around in your job when that was happening and me he was he was at it so I was I was on both sides of the fence on that issue I understood the concerns about Data Trust and who controls the data I also saw potentially an opportunity for Toronto to be cutting edge uh on this what did you two what did you think when you saw this tell the truth and what do you think in retrospect what lessons learn just quickly because that's because it's an old story it's a footnote to history but it is at the inter protection of trust technology and democracy it really is um I think smart citizens U make smart cities uh and any effort that makes the citizens smart um runs the possibility for those citizens to just Fork whatever that company has to offer because they're smart right they can run their own versions of it and it's this Fork ability that I think sideb Labs intended to explain some of that like people can co-create their own Norms on codes and things like that but they didn't start it in such a way that to make the Civil Society organization set the agenda it's like you know I prepare a project I'm GitHub it's already 99% done and then I invite you this it and and it's I guess it's open source technically uh but it's it creation maybe not right so I think a lot of it stems from the willingness uh to embarrass yourself when you're just 1% there 2% there uh and then to just open source like we did the book when we all we had was the the table of content and nothing else right and and that's actually the gets trust the gets trust so you not only have to pre-b buunk but pre-consult yeah I mean in my opinion it is it it it remains a missed opportunity not for the reasons that maybe you would expect sure it would be neat to have a a community down downtown that is you know with a trash bins or running automatically on the street ET Etc but uh what I mean and I I really I appreciate all of the consultation that happen I appreciate and I and understand the the way that things fell out the missed opportunity to me is that it it could have been an incredible foring function for the province to actually have to think think about the basics of what we're going to enable that so Data Trust data in general all of those things that my team was starting to get you know excited about okay we've got to be thinking about uh Data Trust framework we've got to be thinking about how do we push people to really understand what open data looks like so that this can you know this this can can promate um so that's the missed opportunity to me is is actually the cool side effect would have been having this really neat neighborhood but the longevity of those foundational fundamental pieces working inside government would have been pretty so that that's a good segue one last question for me and then I'll try to try to open it up um Audrey you you sort of pioneer this idea of alignment assembly yeah I know you love the term it sounds a little orwellian to me because it sounds like you will be aligned but I don't [Music] that's so so I I gave it away that I'm I'm I'm kind of hung up on representative Dem where you elect people that you trust to and you sort of delegate them to make decisions for you because life is complex dive into the complexity you two are far more idealistic than me you think everybody can be an expert and I'm not an elitist but I am as I said a Democrat so I think if I understand correctly and you'll correct me if I'm wrong so these alignment assemblies are a chance to kind of pass it up in a way that sidewalk LS maybe didn't it's a I'm a huge believer In Crowd sourcing people always tatch up my and I hopefully can correct them before the print run starts anyone here know what a print newspaper is rightly so uh so I believe in crowdsourcing but it's it's a tipping service it's not always right sometimes the tip it's wrong and sometimes Wikipedia it's a great tipping service sometimes it's wrong my kids were high school so how does it how when you delegate all this authority to participants in alignment assembl just like what we used to call C constituent assemblies where people with um you're both forign born constituent assemblies meally Constitution people in this audience might remember that and it's like a jury everyone's comes together and has a consensus but people who work in the room think what where how did you get there right side does work um so and like with side collapse I think problem was that it's not very easy to for it right for conss uh but fortunately for AI um so alignment assemblies is trying to solve the alignment problem of AI meaning that at the AI which is this large very compressed version of the data whatever that is sced off the internet with comites often contains biases and things that you probably don't want it to U inflict on the soci Mars that's the basic idea uh assemblies is simply just a random like 1,000 uh people uh in a jurisdiction or in tent space we send SMS to 200,000 people like random numbers on the official uh one1 offs and anybody can take a survey uh and say what they want the AI be essentially uh and then out of it a micel of 450 people are chosen represents the jury right uh and then they do this online um video call with the AI facil service that ends up with a constitutional document on how they want AI to behave and then we train the Taiwan um TR engine the the model uh constitutionally that co-created document so the resulting language model behaves in a way or respects the community wants and the great thing about this is that it's fortable so people in highe people in these are different cities they can just run a face tof face assembly right after this and say but In tha we want this instead and use that to then Rune that open source a model so that in now more fits their local nms uh there's a uh company called anthropic uh that use the same plan uh to train the CL 3 Opus their latest model uh with a representative um statistically um like 1,000 US citizens uh and so the original Constitution the androp wrot did not for example have a CL for people with alties handicap people and things like that and they did this comparison that this crowdsource constitution results in a mod that's equally capable but far less discriminatory uh because it's much more nuanced uh and in L was people to experience so that's a their long story but the point to your question is that everybody can for it and that's how it's different from traditional constitutional Jes so you were able to correct for the lack of representation of of people but I understand this is not a a representative sample more a random sample you shoot out these sort of this this Cascade that's yeah so so so there is that but is it also hyper local it can also be hyperal so it could be so it could be like this room right we run a poce conversation we run a remesh conversation we take the resing Matrix into a Google doc that's our Constitution and then we co-edit it until so it synthetically checks and then we train um llama or whatever model so that we now have a model that everybody here can live what do you do about the silent majority don't sign up if they don't sign up yet right then we expect that because the tool kit is open if they find that TI doesn't work to their liking they and their people in their company or whatever when they deploy that AI model internally they can just train aura which is a very geeky way of saying extension right to that previous align model so everybody can align it further when and whenever they feel like it with that [Music] onario you weren't expecting that one that's I wasn't expecting that but uh I mean in terms of w it sell in Ontario I do think there is what what's very interesting to me about this is that ability to say okay uh governance probably we probably need to iterate on governance just in general and uh what other's talking about allows you to say okay here is the here's the heart of this model here is the basic Constitution but um what works in GL might not work in Ottawa and that's the point because you can take that and you can let that Community um you can let that Community forfeit to use that language and and build something there in that community that works for them and I actually I do think uh that that piece of that that mentality and that approach would would certainly s it's really it's crowdsourcing not not not sort of refering right you mentioned wealth that's of course where Mike sh that's the constituency of Mike shr I think there's a Kansas soulmate so I'm gonna go to a question from [Music] Alejandra I knew you were rank I believe in the rank ballot so I'm okay with that but what's the univ what's the population okay what strategies should government adopt to regulate the use of AI in elections to safeguard the Integrity a democratic process so uh in Taiwan uh what we have seen is that uh The Fakes and especially voice phoning uh is used a lot nowadays and even like outside of the election context even just for transnational fraud uh it is now very easy uh to just have an advertisement uh pretending to be a celebrity if you click it it starts a real time WhatsApp conversation that can actually go voice uh and that Cy actually talks to you in very low latency in the actually Pro Cast Cy so this is reality now this is not a future almost like AI fishing exactly yeah it's SP fishing in the age of AI so um I think counter that it is no longer possible to tell whether it's synthetic or not from content learn so from the actor Behavior content layer the content layer is gone uh and although you can tell a little bit like you know inauthentic Behavior Uh posting advertisements on you know the same seconds and so on we're increasingly losing that line of defense as well because they can con convincingly create a life story of that fake uh person right so in Taiwan we're going back to the basics to the actor level so already in Taiwan to post a investment related advertisement you have to uh digitally sign or otherwise do a very strong kyc that you're a human uh and if the platforms do not verify and somebody get con for1 million nty doll uh then the platform is liable to that one million uh which means M has been very Cooperative uh you had better than us with liability scheme so liability schemes and very strong P I think that's the answer to the detic anyway Hillary thoughts on that and and and a followup for both of you what do you think about electronic Val go ahead well just quickly on uh defect what I think again this is my stone but I we have to go back back to the basics and enable uh the government or any entity to very quickly communicate and what does that mean you have to have resilient websites and services and the ability to get information out quickly um so you have to have we have Basics um uh I think once we solve the not of Federated identity um that that should be one of the first things that gets done Audrey well if the ballot is to participatory budgeting or um like e petitions or counter signatures to uh referend that which our all system already does assign but if it is exponential in the sense that is a follow to choose the preice or The NPS then it creates this exponential fact incentive which is why we don't use electronic Val D we use paper only but we use the electronic information live streaming or whatever of the counting process simply because we don't want to create incentive we're capturing it once we captur we we deal with and worry about ransomware like everyone around the world Toronto Hamilton the zoo hospitals our library have all been captured targeted um how do you deal with with cyber warfare if that's the right word uh from the main Mainland CH so um basically we assume reach meaning that we um think that each and every system probably is already reach uh but not at once so uh when I sign a official document or when I approve myself is a real human to post advertisements uh first uh P Pho uh which is this biometric thing checks on my device only on my biometric Crow strike another piece of software checks here V Cloud fler another piece of software checks the online activities and so on the theory is that it's very difficult for adversary to simultaneously penetrate three unrelated private sector suppliers but have we gone with this just one single vend which will not use a interoperable open protoc code which is us as app then of course all the cheeses are you know brooken edar such as strengths in plural that's our defense redund yeah also avoiding so um so this is probably a good time to ask about about disinformation things lack of information something I worry about uh you you like coining phrases you're poet so you talk about the infodemic the information and and um you've also talked about so tell us what what's your playbook for you talked a little bit about your playbook for for People's Republic of China what was your playbook for your own people during the pandemic question for both of you okay you're on a ro okay so um as I mentioned uh the idea is to depolarize people and to anticipate potential polarization points for example we knew that in the very again there's going to be a mask and a mask uh thing going which Canada probably doesn't have but in we have and so um you the crowd sourcing there were few TR there was a bit of that okay okay right so um and we framed the issue not uh around like n95 at the or whatever but rather just had a very cute issue by you knew uh with a poster uh with a PA on in his hand uh face and that says wear a mask to protect your own face against your dirty hour watch chance and that's mean that humor over rumor thing uh really worked because it caused a new Crossing conflict um it links P washing and M use and uh it makes m not something that you protect others rather just protect your own face at your 30 NS so it's so intuitive that it just defeats the polarization and later on uh we anticipate there will be a VX antix polarization which you don't have obviously and so um in Taiwan again we turned that into a family competition right we publish every day uh how many people in which age bracket prefers estren or prefers modna rbn or the home through medent I got all four just to make a point so it turned it turned I do believe so there are people who like really paid meden and think it's water or it wors uh but uh there's no inac section because we TR that into a friendly competition again Crea across cut well our Playbook on the digital side was I think basically two fold one was to ensure that um both the public and decision makers had all the data that they needed every single day um and that was a communication effort it was also just a data Gathering effort we built the data we built the uh you know the dashboard that the premier and the secretary used every single day to sort of understand where we were at in the Pro um so one was just about data visibility and transparency um the second was uh and I don't know if anybody uh in the government at this point would say it this way but what I think um if I were to distill it down into into a phrase what we were able to do was to make um folks realized that policy and delivery were had to be joined at the hip and that because this was one of the very first times you know in modern history that policy was iterating as fast as you would expect a product to iterate and so having those two sides and those teams joined at the hip so that as we were learning new information every day about where the public policy needed to go and where Public Health was going we could adapt our products and our services and the information providing to the public so that was I think really transformational uh I hope that there are opportunities to prove that that policy delivery Gap can be closed um when we're not in a capital crisis and you you you you came up with the dashboard which allowed you to P it faster both publicly and in of policy right I think that's right all right question here from uh Hamish asking uh saying the internet is important for participation in society social media is harmful to society especially to health kids what role should government play in media you first give Audrey a chance to think this up yeah well I think in general there is a need for um I'll use the word regulation but I don't know that I necessarily mean capital r right and what I mean by that is um I think that that government needs to be thinking about whether it's a or other sort of tech policy issues they have to be uh on the Forefront of understanding what the issues are understanding what the technology does understanding what the potential of the technology is so that they can create guard rails and those guard rails are then the first step toward okay let's test this we can test it internally but we can also test it with companies we can test it publicly those guard rails that you know the um they start to set the the landscape of of then what may need to become regulation and we've done that in Ontario with AI we have you know a trustworthy AI framework um the government's been working on for the last couple of years to do exactly that to sort of say this these are the the principles and the values that we believe in with regard to this technology so no AI in secret you know we uh AI shouldn't be making final determinations that has to be a human those kinds of things that don't necessarily need to be capital r regulations yet but they need to be setting a framework for folks to understand how we're going to be better [Music] understanding uh we're basically doing a crowdsource um Horizon scanning for all the harms that the social media uh is is causing right so by running alignment assemblies it's not just to tune the AIS it's also asking people in terms of information intey what are the harms you're already seeing is it nonconsent intimate images uh is it uh investment scams or other sort of scams is it de faking of campaigners or whatever elections and so on and so for each and everyone that was identified this way we amend the relevance act so it's not a fundamental Service Act but just in the relevant act we say for this kind of things if the internet platforms do not adopt the Norms co-created by the people then they become liable for their damage so this is the way we doing for the past like seven years uh and I would argue that a good uh way for this approach to continue uh is for people to co-create Alternatives that are pro pro social social media in Taiwan there are people who uh uses threat the net which is this new may but it's now part of the ferse meaning that you can create new viewers uh new apps or whatever on the th so you're not tied to whatever addiction making UI that is currently doing uh and so as as long as we decouple uh the user experiences and the core services that those platforms are using then we move to an email or podcast or open Opera system where the market forces can actually you know make a nwork effect on the Civ Society side nor just on their large fascinating all right we're going to go to a network effect question here but it's a hybrid because it's asked by somebody who I recognize in the room today so so John Ryerson I would hand you the microphone but it's a little it's just too much movement so I'm going to read I'm going to put words in your mouth read your question out John uh big issues like climate change or housing are longterm uh that's to say not just governing only to the next election governments need shorter term well I mean for each harm there are The Chronic Parts like social media addiction and acute lines which are the kinds that we just mentioned and of course wins on those hug ones uh to get trust across different ideologies and so on that then carry to long-term Horizons planning um things in Taiwan we have the presidential hackathon for the short CH LS where people can take a small District or city project data literacy air pollution monitoring or whatever that solves a acute problem that's the top five winning teams they don't get money they get a trophy in the form of a projector when you turn on it projects the personent giving you the trophies very M uh representing uh the promise uh that whatever you did locally will become public digal infrastructure uh nationally in the next fiscal year or two uh and so that solves theability problem the Boost traffing problem for digital public infrastructure and so that's can then be used to solve the CR problems well the nice thing about short-term WIS is that it actually gives the people on the ground that are going to span administrations um it builds it builds confidence and resilience in what they have ven what they can understand so that you know even if mandates ships they can you know they can sort of have the again sort of the basics in place to keep certain things going in one mind so that's the the real win around a sort of a short-term progression is just giving the the teams and the bureaucrats uh the the understanding of what has worked and what hasn't worked so that even if mandate shift a little bit you have that history not just the teams and the bureaucrats but the politician also benefit from short-term successes and arguably although this Still Remains controversial our Premier dou for benefited from a perceived competence more or less on Co that he didn't have before or perhaps after so in that sense this this Segways me to another question Hillary you were appointed when Premier Kathleen Lynn was Premier and you served Premier Doug Ford uh there'll be a followup for you as well Audrey that is just what is it like dealing with politicians I don't mean question in the conventional sense it's just that there seems like you know in Canada we say there's two solitudes French and English now many solitudes but you could argue that there are two solitudes in technology and democracy there is there is this perception that politicians and some voters are Lites and and that the tech folks are The Cutting Edge cool kids like you two who who are seeing around corners while we're looking over our shoulders so there's there does seem to be this this perception of too solid udes Audrey what was it like dealing with two different governments and the two solitudes of of the the tech team and the political risk averse leadership that was elected I want to go to Hillary first I was G to try to torture her first um so yes I joined in the joined the public service in 2017 got to work with amazing people Andre um and then there was an Administration change I will say I don't know if people expected me to El last through that I I don't know what the word on the street was um but um but honestly that that sort of administration change it it didn't we didn't feel it at all in in a really wonderful way uh and I say that because uh you know the new government came in and really wanted to think about what it meant to deliver good services to people um and so uh our team I think had had a had a bit of a a boost uh through throughout the the early days and certainly when the pandemic H because we were one of the only teams that was uh structured and situated in a way that could pivot on a Di and say what do we have to do and how do we get it out the door in three days um and so we started delivering website Services the the symptom checker apps uh just pivoted on diamond we're able to do that so uh I mean in terms of what's it like to go through that um it we didn't feel it too too much because uh and I will confess I didn't feel it too much in terms of being you know the umbrella for the team I hope the team didn't feel it but I also didn't as well it was just like let's keep going because it is important um to think about uh Evolution and iteration and efficiency and you know the work that teams like the teams that I've had the privilege to lead the work that those teams do is all about making things simpler and whether you use language uh that appeals to right left or Center it is the same work of making government better and getting your mandate delivered because that's gonna incentivize people to show up and and vote again so again it's it's all Circle a virtuous circle I saw that coming and and the government was this conservative government was rewarded for its faith in you and that you were able to help them look good and do good because at the end of the day uh good good government is good politics and good service delivery is bad service delivery is just bad for everybody regard remember the passport delays that we were facing a couple years ago people can get their passports um Audrey you are Anarchist conservative Anarchist correct and and so what's it like dealing with political parties in power conservative is just to respect Traditions uh to make sure that existing institutions VI that were helping the helpers are not replacing the helpers uh the face sentence and so on Taiwan I think is the second most divers religiously uh Place uh on Earth uh and with more than 70% Ved turnout and so on that means that whatever policies we make need to be respectful uh to all these traditions and conserve them uh and also uh to respect their ability to do direct action Anarchist F uh and so I think uh my point being um if we make sure that digital is there to serve plurality uh and in membering conveniently p and plural is the same word So when you say sh it means both plural ministers and digal Ministries um and so uh by saying that dig plurality is the same thing uh anything we do is just a beginning an invitation so that people speaking indigenous languages kind sign languages whatever ethnicity whatever can for it and to make better services that serves their constituencies and so to take that is to me people where LI or whatever uh they actually prefer technology to be delivered in a particular way it's not that they refuse technology is that we respect technologies that work with them not just for them and so by making the for I think you can have both sides you can have very Avant um you know language models whatever in a same vein to makeing sure that it serves all the 20 national languages you may know that our current government in Ontario call itself Progressive conservative and I think conservative the same kind suspicious umill I forgot to to mention that part of the part of the when the new government came to power and he worked uh the treasury board and Peter be Minister now Finance Minister and there was a hunt to find every fact machine still in government did you get them all or did some get away uh it's interesting there are still a few employ that were very necessary for certain Services I think especially in the health Healthcare redundancy realm uh but redund we for the most part asked the [Music] facts um Tik Tok if I understand it you are in the process of or have already been years yeah Tik Tok was that controversial did you get alignment in your alignment assemblies and what do young people say about that well um in Taiwan um we four years ago classified pi as a harmful product um meaning that it is under indirect control of our forign there of this formal defination uh and a harmful product cannot be Ed in public sector uh and after speaker um uhy us uh 2022 uh we saw that it's not enough to just restrict in public sector networks because uh there was this sideboard uh in the commercial sector but housed within the thawan ra station uh station and that was replaced by misses partly because it came from a PRC vendor right but it's not plugged in into the government service network so it's I guess not government service but it looked like government service and uh uh when a journalist want to check whether it was entire translation with ATT or whatever they find the Ministries we side very slow to respond that's beos attack so we we faced this compound attacks uh during that time and so we had to extend the um amount to restraint harmful products so now in public uh places like public schools and things like that which covers all the basic education and so on there's no P to connectivity was there push back from young people um in a sense no because um we started early enough so the penetration rate of T at that time was quite low and even though like I think by now I think one one fourth a quarter of our people have had Tik to info on their phone only about 3% 4% use it as their primary so so the push back is slightly lower than compared to us and Hillary's not asking but if I were to ask on her behalf would you advise her if she was still our chief digital service officer to extend because now Ontario and Canada prevent public officials from having Tik Tok on their phones and some politicians were annoyed by this what about the rest of us your advis so not just Public Schools extend okay um yeah well we're we're having a conversation now in Taiwan you as part of our all assemblies on information see whether we should extend even Beyond Public Schools like public transportation places and and things like that so I don't think there's currently atite for a kind of outright B because one possible solution is for Te to prove that they can set up a local shop like Zoom is committed to by the end of this year so that we can audit all it's inbound and outbound statea flows and then they it's forc to them to prove that they're not under indirect control of our adversary which is the same thing as the US Act is asking to do so I think this peace me makes more sense because it scales uh and generalizes to other PRC defective controlled applications or was defect of control but hopefully and and before we we we torture Hillary uh you talked about you framed it in terms of a national adversary what about the algorithm and the adverse effects of the algorithm on kids well I think that's another uh issue alog together right uh for algorithmic account ility St uh I think the consensus from our previous Al assembly is simply so that it needs to be open up like a c tangle well bad example it's closing down but anyway uh something like the publicly scrutin API on its Downstream effects and I I think if we to Al assemblies like literally every week then actually the downstream effects and the adjustments can be shown and it's not just correlation there could be compation are you Tik Tok no um my kids got into t i a 9-year-old and a 14-year-old and my kids got into Tik Tok for a hot minute but then um YouTube brought in YouTube shorts and it kind of replaced it uh so as a parent with my my parent hat on only uh very supportive of how we think about restricting access to some of that type of content especially in schols um you know I've been trying for unsuccessfully yet but um to block YouTube in my own home I uh I downloaded some tools and had it figured out and my it's but um but I do you know just as a in the question you just asked uh in terms of the algorithm the tools that uh those companies are using to understand us better than we know ourselves is very scary as a parent very quick last question 20 seconds each what do you do about Twitter X other kinds of hate and the do centr um X has this thing called Community Ms which is community moderation the beauty is that it's open source and it works as a layer across all possible social media platforms technically so potentially we can extend that model to also cover thre net or whatever uh thing and then just build a collaborative check Network all sort of online harms and in Taiwan we already do some of that uh it's called co-ax or collaborative fact checking and I said she Su to uh get any ha sorry you get any hate did I get any ha oh sure but I think honestly one of the main reasons is because of my handle on Twitter which is uh Hillary I have pretty much abandoned us using it um and one of the reasons is because everybody just yells at me assuming I'm experim experim okay uh we're out of time for questions we're at of time period I just wanted to conclude by saying how easy it is to be pessimistic about technology and democracy's future but pessimism is not a strategy so we need an alternative for that we look to you too I'm going to turn it over to Karen bardi the executive director of the days for a formal thanks arily it's K lurking I don't see where there you are um but first as promised a reminder that Audrey has a new book coming out called plurality the future of collaborative technology and democracy and appropriately for Audrey it is available for download it's open source just go to plurality doet is that right okay I'm going to sneak in a quick and formal thanks to both of our guests uh shes thank you and you thank you so thank you so much uh Martin I um I think the way uh forward in so much of these issues is having leaders who have both expertise and empathy um and I'm just so thrilled that to for days so much as help put on this event help thank the team that helped put on this event of Viet Vu Angus lockheart Tanya coil Katherine and Bergie Andre kot Sam Andre My Le leaving anyone out here no um and thanks to all of you we have um uh for participating in this democracy Forum we've got um some exciting events coming up on the theme of democracy just one week in 7 Days 168 plus 4 five hours uh W prom is going to be uh launching uh democracy change it's also the official Afterparty of the public policy forms testimonial dinner W prom.com please get your tickets uh for Canada's uh best dance party celebrating politics uh public policy and people who make change happen um that's on Thursday and then on Friday and Saturday we're co-hosting with okad University and the open democracy project democracy change Canada's democracy Summit uh tickets start at $25 participatory workshops uh speakers panels uh artistic installations it's really the whole N9 yards uh and democracy you know we try to keep it affordable uh thanks for our sponsors we able to have ticket starting at $25 it's also streaming online um thanks so much again again maybe because the mic did not pick it up fully I just want to thank again Martin for your uh Devotion to the building better democracy um through the day and tmu and again to U Audrey and Hillary for leaving such empathy and expertise and as a final note for those in the audience here today I believe Audrey has been to sign a few a few cover pages of the book uh so we'll do that at the desk over there um and thanks so much to all of you and happy F watching safely in the thanks

Channel: The Dais at TMU

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Id: hjnd-kLV6kY

Length: 66min 59sec (4019 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 23 2024