Hello. I'm Audrey Tang, Taiwan's Digital Minister. I'm really happy to be here virtually to show
through some thoughts about democracies should respond to PRC's emergence as an AI superpower.
First, let's reflect a little bit about the term AI. To me, AI stands for Assistive Intelligence.
Assistive intelligence, of course, is value aligned in the sense that like any assistive
technology, it honors the person. On the other hand, it also must be accountable, meaning that
if there is bias, if there’s governing problems and so on, there's always a way to a participatory
mechanism to make amendments to how the assistive intelligence works.
However, the same word may mean very different things. In the PRC, AI means something like
authoritarian intelligence. Just like in Taiwan, when we say transparency or radical transparency,
we mean the state need to make how the state works radically transparent to the citizens.
Through, as you can see, the Join platform, which has over half of 24 million population visiting
the site on citizen's initiative, participatory budgets, and so on. However, in the PRC,
transparency means the reverse, meaning that the citizens are to be made transparent to the state.
Far from making the state accountable and transparent to the citizens,
it's use of the so called social credit, or 社会信用, system shows in moving fashion how exactly does
the authoritarian intelligence gathering works. That's not necessarily all in the national level.
Many provinces and regional governments within the PRC all made their own so called social
credit applications in a way to shape a very different norm. One that is based on the idea
of citizens made transparent to the state. What's the social credit system? It's rather
more like a system of ideologies than any particular algorithm.
The defining point is that the public behaviors of citizens are tracked comprehensively, and
those who behave well, according to some criteria defined by any level of the government authority,
gets preferential treatment in education, in employment, household registration, etc.
However, unlike traditional financial credit systems,
there is a strong sense of public shaming, this citizen to citizen pressure part of it,
that shames people who have different to norm behaviors. They were punished
not only by disclosing their names, but also denying them travel on airplanes,
on high speed rails, and so on. In this sense, the social credit system
enforces the state intelligence, making the people more transparent to the state authorities,
but the two pillars of assistive intelligence namely, acting in the individual's best interest
and providing a full account of when and why are those policies being made are nowhere to be found.
There are real dangers in this authoritarian interpretation of AI.
First of all, it risks making the previously subtotal totalitarian regimes more fully total,
as we see, for example, in Xinjiang. Not only in Xinjiang, but also the PRC is
exporting its model of authoritarian surveillance through its Belt and
Road Initiative to other jurisdictions looking for similar authoritarian control.
Also, through face recognition apps and normalizing the use of face recognition,
they gained a lot of profiling materials on not only citizens,
but also their citizens overseas, and also totally unrelated people in other
jurisdictions that use the face recognition apps developed or sponsored by the PRC government.
They all become part of this potentially social credit rating system that is part of
a state profile on not only citizens, but also residents, and also foreign nationals. Finally,
it's basically shaping a, what some scholars call a, rule by law system.
Whereas in the rule of law system, we understand the value alignment, accountability, the appeal
process, the access to justice, and so on, a rule by law system ostensibly has a legal code,
or regulations and algorithmic code as well. However, the way to appeal to the biases and the
decisions made by those semi autonomous pieces of code whether code of law or code of algorithm is
completely opaque. There is literally no way for people to fork that is to say, to take the code to
a different direction or to ask for accountability if they get wronged by the rule by law system.
Shaping that into an international norm will essentially make open innovation,
end to end innovations which is a core of the Internet culture hard to reach, inaccessible,
and even seeming remote to the people who are used to these authoritarian norms.
How do we counter it? It turns out that, in Taiwan, we had a very long discussion ever since
the Cross Strait Service and Trade Agreement, or CSSTA, was in the talks.
There’re many people, many experts, holding multistakeholder forums and deliberations,
culminating in the Sunflower Occupy of 2014. That basically says we must reject
PRC suppliers in our then new 4G infrastructure. The idea is that that, if there is a de facto
state control, if there is a norm for that band, for the Chinese Communist Party to install its
branches into those so called private sector companies, then for each and every upgrade, we
will have to do another systemic risk assessment to see whether those telecom infrastructures are
still working in a way that's value aligned to us. Or whether it has been upgraded "upgraded"
with additional algorithms that will participate in their state surveillance and data collection
plans. Because, as we know through the party branch controllership, the PRC can plug and play,
essentially, leaders in the private sector. Amortized, this systemic risk analysis that
goes on for not just 4G, but also long term evaluation, the evolution of the 4G and now
5G and beyond 5G protocols. Amortized, that will actually cost us a lot more in both the
cybersecurity and the privacy fronts than, for example, if we work with Nokia or Ericsson.
Because of that, all five telecommunication operators in Taiwan are listed in the Clean
Network Program, which is a new program. We're happy that other countries are joining our
vision and rejecting the PRC suppliers from the core telecommunication infrastructure.
Also, partly due to the strong consensus that emerged from half a million people on
the street and many more online during the Sunflower Movement, as you can see
being live streamed in real time through Wi Max, actually, not through 4G.
The people at the time understood that, for each and every sensitive and national security,
including cybersecurity related projects, our tender documents must reject PRC suppliers.
That has been the path of what we call the clean procurement ever since then.
For the past six years, not only we have zero PRC components in our 4G infrastructure,
the same holds for our national projects, such as the National Health Insurance System that plays so
much part into the anti COVID conversation. Also, on the five telcos, which voluntarily
participated in the digital quarantine system and so on, none of these systems
run on the underlying technological stack that contains any PRC suppliers,
so that we can be assured that our AI are really assistive in the sense of assistive intelligence,
instead of just serving also for the authoritarian control purposes of the PRC.
Finally, we have also established cybersecurity standards for the IoT devices. For example,
the IP cams, which are very often turned into botnets or used for nefarious purposes, these must
adhere to the national cybersecurity standards. Because Taiwan makes so many IoT devices,
we're now extending not only the 10 vendors that produce more than 27 IP
cams, and all passed our lab inspection, but we're also actively seeking collaboration to
work with other liberal democracies' labs so that we can make sure that there is an entire
clean stack when we make foreign conversations. And offer a truly clean technological solution
that is free from the authoritarian control of an authoritarian intelligence regime.
This is what I have to share today and thank you for listening. Live long and prosper.