Ishikura: 皆さんおはようございます、こんにちは。今ご紹介いただきました、石倉洋子です。どうぞよろしくお願いいたします。今日は、Sansan Evolution Week 2021の4日目で、How to accelerate DXというタイトルで、台湾のデジタル担当大臣のオードリー・タンさんをお招きしています。私もこれを楽しみにしています。オードリーさんについてはもう皆さんよくご存知だと思うので、このスライドをご覧いただきますが、今まで本当にいろいろなことをされていて、今はデジタル担当大臣としていろいろなことを進めていらっしゃるということです。私は今は一橋のナントカとかと書いてありますが実はフリーターでどこの組織にも属していなくてですね、いろいろなことをやっているのが実情です。特に若い人に対してのいろいろなことをやりたいなと思い、やっています。今日はそのあたりもいろいろとオードリーさんに伺ってみようと思っています。それでは、この辺から英語でやります。
Ishikura: Audrey, thank you very much for coming and taking time from your busy schedule. We really appreciate having you. And we have a lot of questions that we'd like to ask. If you could share your experiences, I think it will be great.
Ishikura: As a starter, I think the Japanese government has been getting involved and encouraging DX, digital transformation. At the same time, I hear that a lot of companies and private sector is making DX as a big, big slogan, so to speak. And for the government, we have set up a new agency exclusively for digitalization and we do have a minister in charge of it. And private sector is doing a lot of things depending upon what kind of industry and what kind of companies they are. But at the same time, I'm a little bit concerned that, while we have been advocating this concept quite extensively, but when it comes to whether that is going to be implemented, and leads to a tangible output, I have a little bit of a concern because we are very good at advocating and proposing ant yet we are a little bit behind in terms of the implementation. So let me start off with the question of what are the critical elements to make digital transformation produce the results and make it happen.
Tang: Certainly. I thank you for your call for the question. My job as the digital minister is not an IT minister and I also make this clarification to many Japanese media because they used to call me the IT大臣 (IT minister), right? And the difference is that IT connects machines and digital connects people. So the necessary critical element of digital transformation is not to confuse it with IT. If the work that you do brings people together, give voice to people who didn't have voice, make participation bi-directional, omni-directional, multi-directional, rather than just people listening to one or two radio or TV stations and so on, increases the symmetry and bit rate of participation and engagement, then you are on the right path of digitalization. Otherwise, if you connect everything but still only one or two persons speak and everybody just listens, that may be digitization but it's not digitalization. It is not truly digital.
Ishikura: I think one of the things you mentioned, and I watched your video as well as read your book, and some of the things that seem to be missing, particularly in Japan, is that you talk about four pillars, and particularly these days, sustainability, innovation, and inclusion. And inclusion part is, as you mentioned, sharing, just making sure that everybody is involved rather than one or two people, is critical. And yet, I don't really see that clearly in Japan. How do you make sure that inclusion is everybody's business?
Tang: This is a great question. In Taiwan, what we are doing is making sure that even people who are not of the voting age, younger than 18 years old, have full participation rights through digital platforms to initiate, for example, petitions that calls for banning plastic straws on bubble tea drinks. That started by a 16 years old. When I asked her why she was starting this movement, she said, "This is our civics class assignment". So, inclusion begins with the basic education. And I think it also extends to life-long education because we see the most active groups on our participation platform are 16 and 17 years old and 60 and 70 years old. So the silver-haired and young people are the two natural groups that care more about sustainability, about future generations. So if you make sure that these two groups of people are in natural partnership with one another, then you are of a very good start in inclusion.
Ishikura: You mentioned that inclusion starts at very early age, at school, around 16 years old -- I'm talking about the straw. Is there any way that we can accelerate that? It means that we really have to work on education in early stage and that's gonna take a little while for us to see the concept of inclusion to be instilled in the younger generation kids, for example. So, is there any way that we can just kind of fast-track?
Tang: Yeah, definitely. I'm sure that in Japan there are also plenty of very young people, maybe they are just 14, maybe they are just 15, are already starting very good social movements, social entrepreneurship, and so on. So in Taiwan, our "fast-track" is just to invite these young people into the cabinet level youth advisory council. And this council, very interestingly, all appoints people younger than 35, some of them in their 20s, but they are already quite well-known online. And by calling them reverse mentors, advisor to the cabinet, they get this natural position that goes against the exiting discrimination based on age. Because, instead of calling them "young friends", we call them "advisor", right? Actually, the 16-year-old girl that started the petitions is now 19 years old and she is already an advisor in the committee of national open government partnership, national action plan committee. So, I would call her the counselor, Counselor Wong. Even though she is not technically speaking fully an adult, yet.
Ishikura: A couple of questions. In order to make sure that young people are given a position or assigned to a position of making decisions, we need the existing leadership group to change their mindset or whatever, willing to make sure that you involve these people with new ideas. I'm sure that's not that easy because they have the best of interests. Their reference point maybe much more with their own experiences rather than today's digital native. How can we convince, or do we need to convince these leaders of today?
Tang: This is where the partnership with the silver-haired people begins to show its importance. For if the young people have the support of the 80-years old, like my grandma who is 88 years old, then those elderly people can actually speak with authority about the necessity of including young people. One concrete example is that, every year our office hires very young people, some of them are like 18 years old, into our internship program. Initially, all they did is to help government web services work across browsers. Because many older people, they are not that versed with keyboard or Internet Explorer. They are more versed with their phones or more natural ways of using tablets and so on, with touch screens. But the government web service was not initially designed for that. Maybe they were designed for ActiveX or something like that. So, for the first couple of years, all the young interns did is to make our government web site accessible especially to the elderly people who rely more on touch screens and speech interfaces. That won the support of elderly people. And the carrier public service and the leaderships see the young people as someone who assists, not just criticizes. That builds a very good intergenerational solidarity.
Ishikura: I'm just getting off a little bit from this sort of the questions. Do you think that the COVID-19 accelerates that kind of trend? The reason why I ask this question is that because of COVID-19, you are not able to go to the office. The "senior people" have an opportunity because they cannot really meet their friends. I think they have an incentive and they are encouraged. Some elderly people, old people, are getting much more into Internet because they want to keep in touch with the other people. That may be a very good factor, sort of a benefit of this COVID. Even though that restricts our movement.
Tang: I think the transformation by necessity as you mentioned is definitely the case. Actually many elderly people that I met, especially people in senior leadership, they didn't want to teleconference or video conference, not because they cannot do it, but because they used to do that when they were young. The technology was very bad at that time. So they remember how bad that was. Meeting face-to-face builds 1% trust, but meeting on-line deducts 2% trust. Because of that, they don't want to video-conference. So COVID-19 is the great way to clean the cache, like the browser cache, in their mind, or their stereotype about video conferences. They see nowadays, with 5G, with WiFi connection, with anyone's smart phones with cameras, actually it's very easy to setup and it brings people closer rather than pushes people apart as they remember 10 years or 20 years ago. This new familiarity, I think, is a great opportunity.
Ishikura: That's very encouraging. Whatever opportunity, we should be able to take advantage of.
Ishikura: Let me change the subject a little bit. We're talking about DX. What kind of world, what kind of society do you expect with DX, if DX proceeds.
Tang: I think that digital transformation will make peace between generations. We talked about people who are two or three generations apart. But digital world also shows us how the future generation will benefit or suffer from our actions. Too often, these are not visualized well. These are not communicated well. People cause pollutions, climate change, then disinformation causes social upheaval without them fully understanding the consequences. But if we give voice and build an Internet of beings, then we can empower future generations who are not even yet born. But based on environmental sensor data, based on social measurements, and so on, we can have a full understanding of the consequences of our actions, and therefore make much more longer term thinking which was previously impossible. This is like how I experienced in virtual reality. I put on virtual reality for the first time in 2016 and saw the earth from the International Space Station. And suddenly, all the borders disappear. When we are down there, because of the cloud, we cannot see other parts of the world very clearly. But in the space, we are much more holistic and we see the earth as an interconnected whole. This is essential if we are going to solve a structural issue like carbon dioxide that doesn't care about borders. Actually, the virus of the mind, disinformation, or the virus of the body are also cross-border. To solve those cross-border issues, we require intergenerational cross-border thinking. That's what digital transformation can bring us like better telescopes.
Ishikura: Because I'm very crazy about universe and space, my favorite destination after this COVID-19 is to go to the International Space Station and stay there.
Ishikura: How would you describe Taiwan's position in the world with DX in the future, in three years, five years, out.
Tang: I think, in three years, Taiwan will grow towards the sky, towards International Space Station. We grow by 2.5 cm per year. In three years, that is 7.5 cm. The reason we grow is, I guess it is relevant today, because of earthquakes. In Taiwan, we understand how bad it could be for the earthquakes and typhoons, and compound disasters. So our development strategy of digitalization is to couple it with ideas of resilience. Resilience means that we build digitalization not to blindly develop one measure like GDP or whatever, but rather, to make sure each corner of our society is well equipped with democratized tools to respond in time if there is a unforeseen earthquake, typhoon, COVID, or things like that. I think in three or fiver years time, we'll be much more resilient compared to what we have now, because as we have just learnt, in 2004 after SARS hit Taiwan in 2003, we installed this Central Epidemic Command Center that responds to new respiratory diseases. So we would build center of excellence to respond to the emerging issues out of full digitalization, such as, for example, state sponsored malicious hackers that has been actually all over the news over the last couple of months. This is also something the we build resilience toward.
Ishikura: What would be your individual goal, three years, fiver years out, or ten years? Can you share it with us?
Tang: Sure. I plan to visit Japan after the COVID, and meet you face-to-face. And maybe immerse myself in a new language. I really want to learn 日本語 (Japanese language). I currently cannot speak the language and I would really want to learn that. Beyond, learning a new language, I foresee that my job will take me toward more cultures around the world. Because, nowadays, for the past year or so, I wake up in a meeting in one time zone, and throughout the day, I move time zones. By the evening, I meet with the European and African people. This is like touring around the world in a virtual way. This really builds more trans-cultural mindset in me compared to the pre-COVID days. I look forward to visiting these cultures in real space, once the COVID is over.
Ishikura: When it comes to language, I heard you talked to the young people in Tohoku in Japanese. So I know you speak Japanese as well.
Tang: I was reading a script, to be honest. I'm really meaning to do it.
Ishikura: Just changing the subject a little bit. You have done tremendous things and accomplishment so far. If you are able to do it all over again, would you do something different, or would you follow the same thing? You talked about resilience and learning from SARS and all sorts of things. If you know what you know now.
Tang: Definitely, I will make a couple of changes. The first one is that, I think, we will make sure that open API initiative is rolled out even sooner. Because we helped rolling out open data initiative in 2012, 2013, and by 2014 well integrated into the open data landscape in Taiwan serving, at that time, Open Data Council in National Development Committee. However, what we are now seeing is that if we push open API before open data, it actually lowers everybody's risk. Because if you push open data and if public servants need to review it before publishing, it creates more work for them, it's more risk for them if things go wrong. And they get less trust from people if things go wrong. But if we push open API, meaning that data is published as soon as it is collected without human review or human intervention, then it saves their time. It builds trust. When people criticize about the data quality or the data pipeline, everybody can offer the solutions together and no public servants would be saying "this is a waste of time" because it didn't spend time to begin with. So I would begin the automated API-based open data much sooner than what we actually did in 2016. That's the first thing I would change. The second thing that I would change in my ways is to make sure that a public service hosts the discussion themselves. Previously in 2012, 2013, we relied on the outside people to chair the committees of transformations and so on. But it turns out that the carrier public service already knew how to make such changes. It's just they weren't given the mandate, the authority. So we switched, by 2016, into one-by-one reverse mentorship relationship where the young people, outside experts, reverse-mentor the carrier public servants, but it's the carrier public servants that make the actual plans. This makes sure that they internalize the digital transformation instead of seeing these outside experts as contractors and so on. They have to see through this end-to-end process. That is something we could have introduced in 2013 or 2014 but we waited until 2016 to introduce that. I would also begin that sooner.
Ishikura: You mentioned the importance of trust in any accepts of the spaces of information, data, particularly because we have so much of information, and some of them are not facts. At the same time, I think we are not quite sure, it's not very clear to me whether we do have trust, the amount of trust we need to go on. Trust is very difficult to build. It takes time and you can lose it very very quickly. But it does take a lot of time to build. Do you have any suggestions? I think right now we have a little bit of government, private sector, and people who may trust the media or who may not trust vaccination or all sort of things. Any suggestions as to how to build the society with the trust? We talked about the importance of trust but when it comes to how to build it, it's a very challenging task.
Tang: Our habit is to invite people who criticise into the decision making process. So people who criticise actually care about this. Otherwise, they wouldn't bother criticising. And my favorite questions to ask is: if you are the digital minister than what would you do? And if they have a good idea, I apologize very quickly. I'm OK apologizing. And I say your idea will become national policy by next Thursday. Because we use an agile method, we deploy every Thursday. That's our sprint, iteration. So anyone who can call the toll-free number, 1922, more than two million people called that number last year, they understand that if they have a really good idea, chances are that the minister, me or Minister Chen Shih-chung, or the cabinet ministers, will acknowledge your contribution and invite them into the decision making process. And because they feel they are part of the solution, they wouldn't write off the trust. They can criticise about our incompetence. But once their idea becomes our policy, the criticise becomes constructive criticism. Then, it's not about attacking each other, canceling each other's trust. So, I think the two most important things. One is very quick iteration. If they have to wait a year, of course, there is no trust anymore. And the second is this swift apology. If I did something wrong, I just apologize very quickly and say, "Next Thursday your idea will become a policy".
Ishikura: This quick iteration is something that I don't quite see here. I think that's a key to digital world. At the same time, to build trust. I think things are changing to some extent. So, I have a hope. I'm optimistic. But we tend to sort of postpone it, keep it off, keep it off until we know what works or we have more information and let's decide. I mean, we can think of quite a few examples right now. We haven't made any decisions. We haven't done anything even though we sort of know that's the direction that we're going. Quick iteration is something that you build? How did you make sure that that does take place in Taiwan?
Tang: We need to institutionalize it. We are both democratic polities. So we already have iterations called voting. It's just voting is very long. It has a very low bit rate. It's three bits per person every four years. Give or take a couple of bits. So the bit rate being so low, it makes people not care about everyday decision making or corrective intelligence. Because they wouldn't think that their contributions of three bits for four years actually have such a good contribution to the society. So what we could do is to install new higher bandwidth types of technology. And I see democracy as a type of technology, social technology. For example, the petition website, join.gov.tw, just like how Amazon will recommend you books to read based on the books you have read, based on the petitions you have signed, the platform will suggest you other petitions that you might be interested in. Everyday, you can start a petition, join a petition, and so on, and increase the bit rate of contribution. And you can also of course criticise or offer alternate ideas to a petition. But we make sure that while you can comment on the counter panel and you can support on for/pro-panel, these two panels cannot reply to each other. So people don't waste time to criticise or fight each other. They spend time on the issue at hand, upvoting and downvoting. But they do not waste time canceling each other off. I call this pro-social media. So if we design the digital public infrastructure so it's pro-social and it's fun, people will participate. Key to more participation is to make their response fast, make their response fair, and also make it fun. If it is fast, fair, and fun, people spend more time on democracy. With higher engagement, naturally you get into a place where people feel shorter iteration is just fine because that is what we're used to responding anyway.
Ishikura: Very interesting. I thought it was like the reply button is not there. I think it is a very very interesting device that makes sure you don't criticise each other back and forth and back and forth which seems to be getting anywhere.
Ishikura: Let me go back to the younger generation sort of engagement. You have done this incredible job of engaging the younger generation. You talked about it in the last chapter of your book, which I read. The Japanese young people, even though I really do count on them, because they're the ones who create the future, and they're gonna be around, I'm not be gonna around 20 years from now, hopefully. It seems like they are not as engaged. I'm not sure whether they are not interested or they don't feel that whatever they say makes a difference. Also they're not as engaged particularly for the movement as you did in Taiwan. What would I do? Rather than just criticising the young generation don't have anything to say or whatever, you really need to make sure that you encourage them to participate. In a way, I do believe in do as I do, rather than do as I say. Any suggestions for the older generations, sort of 30 years old or older?
Tang: Speaking as a thirty-something, just for another month or so, I turn 40 the next month, I think this is a critical question because the young people are digital native. They think in terms of the digital world. They think in terms of the open spaces online. They don't actually feel that close to their neighbors unless their neighbors somehow makes them feel that their suggestions make sense. Otherwise, they are much more interested in influencing their community neighbors online which feels much closer to them. I think that idea of neighborhood of community really changes with the digital world. I think the way to fix this is actually very simple. It is just to make sure that their immediate neighbors, people in the same township and so on actually look for the guidance, the direction. The digital transformation from the young digital natives. I always say to the youth advisors that you decide on the direction and we provide the resources. Together, we form a vector. Right? They decide where to point. And we make sure we go there. To people who are young there is no shortage of new directions to go because they're very well connected. They see the best practices, or better practices in all the corners in the world. They are OK translating, introducing it to the people around them. So asking them to become, for example, social entrepreneurs, while absorbing the risk of failure by the education facility. That's what the Taiwanese people do. We make sure that in their undergraduate studies, they can use their start-up as their undergraduate capstone project. Making sure that the initial investment capital, if they have to pivot, is absorbed with the education budget and things like that. So they can try quite a few new things using cloud funding. If they fail spectacularly, which they probably will in the first couple of tries, they will write it up as field papers and also contribute to the science. So to make sure that there is no risk in failure, I encourage the young people care more about their immediate neighborhood.
Ishikura: I think you talked about a little bit of education in schools and so forth. What would the school and the education system with DX look like?
Tang: I think the campus, the idea of the place where we learn together, is going to be like everywhere. The promise of digital transformation is that it frees us from fixed structure, physical structure, that constrains the number of people who can listen to each other. On the online space, there is no such boundaries. Except for sleeping patterns and time zones, there is no easy burden that put on people's mind. If we say let's just connect on video conference, you don't automatically think, oh, what about travel, what about commuting, what about bus, schedules, and things like that, which tend to complicate things when people need to meet with people they barely know. So the weak links can form strong links online much more easily and gradually too, rather than the immediate burden people think about in the physical world. The same applies to educational institutions. Indeed, the whole city, the whole country, and the whole world may be a campus. And their "class mates" may be people in different sectors, in different age groups, in different disciplines, and so on, as long as they share the common value. So I think the education in the future will concentrate on the common good and the things people consider important regardless of their age, or culture, or place differences. Digital formation will form a study group with people who care about some value rather than just happen to share the same neighborhood.
Ishikura: That opens up tremendous opportunities for a lot of people to connect and do things together. I think the collaboration is one of the key thing you often mention and share and so forth. Then the question is: what happens, I mean, I love to ask questions "what if", what if digitalization and digital things disappear one day?
Tang: So it means that it goes to quantum or something, right? So, it's no longer digital. We have analog ministers and then digital ministers. And maybe we'll have quantum ministers, yes. I think that the world is looking towards new ways of conversations and communications. These are the core human needs. Be it analog technologies, pen and paper, which are pretty good by the way, or the digital technologies like the video conference we are having now, or maybe one day the quantum technologies of secure communications that cannot be eavesdropped or direct links between the quantum states of our brains so that we can feel each other's emotions pattern, and so on. I think the common hope is to link people together, as you said, to collaborate. And the digital or the digital tools are just the face or the instrument. Someday maybe quantum or non-digital ways will replace this generation of tools.
Ishikura: That'll be very interesting. I agree that digital is just a means. And yet, I think a lot of people tend to think that digital is it without thinking of what kind of society or what kind of things you'd like to do. That's something we have to get away. It's much easy to think about and measure if we're talking about how-tos, techniques, or methods. But we really need to think about what kind of society or what kind of world we'd like to create. How does the individual happiness fit in? We talk really often about creating the common good. How does individual happiness fit in?
Tang: It's a positive cycle. If I feel happy, more able to share. If I'm happy on average, even on the time where I'm unhappy, I'm motivated to write why I feel unhappy and what I did to make myself happier, and share it with the world. The more base happiness, the more sharing. And when the world shares these tips, these ideas, and so on, it makes supportive environment to make it easier for people to feel happy. So, happiness is joy, is fun, feeds into this cycle. I think the importance of individual happiness is not that you have to feel happy. It's just you need to mingle with the community that is on average happy. Then you can support the community and the community can support you.
Ishikura: We tend to think everything in terms of the conflict, this versus that, online and offline, there is diverse, and so on. But I think what you're saying is that it's much more comprehensive and, as we talked about, inclusive. That's the kind of things you're talking about individuals, society or the world.
Ishikura: Let me change the subject as we have two more minutes. Let't talk a little bit about private, personal matters. You described your day in the book, in very clear way. You walk to the place, you make coffee, make ice and all sorts of things. What comes to your mind when you start a day?
Tang: When I wake up, I look at my surroundings and I write down, often with this stylus, the things I leant in my sleep. Because I read material without casting judgements going into sleep. So I often wake up with a synthesis, with a new idea that brings those different things together. For example, you mentioned about this versus that. So, I would sometimes go to sleep thinking about a comment that I read on Tala Cohen's blog at one day where the commentator says, "Audrey calls herself a digital minister but she also says she's non-binary. How can a digital minister be non-binary? Because we know that digital world is a binary world". I would fall asleep with that. And I wake up and I write down my comment to that. I actually did write that down and said, "Actually digital is not binary". We have ten digits (showing both hands) so it could be decimal. Because "digits" means "fingers". So a decimal is also digital. In our mind, there can be more than one values, there could be ten different values. This plurality is also digital. So this is the kind of things that I just wake up with. Like inspiration, almost like a poem. And I just write it down.
Ishikura: That is something that I found either in your talk or in your book. I think that is by far the most important thing for me. I think while you sleep, you read also the things before you go to sleep. In the morning, you have some of key phrases or key concepts. I'm gonna practice it. We'll see whether that works or not.
Ishikura: I think we're just running out of time. Thank you so much for such an inspiring and such an exciting talk. And I do appreciate it very much. I hope we will meet in person and you will have a chance to visit Japan, to meet with all sorts of people in the real world.
Tang: Yes. In the analog and quantum world. Thank you for the very enjoyable conversation. Live long and prosper everyone!
Ishikura: ということで、今回のオードリー・タンさんとのセッションはこれで終わりました。とても面白かったと思うので、皆さんもいろいろ参考にしていただければ良いかと思います。ありがとうございました。