In 2024, Taiwan was flooded with deepfake scam ads. Instead of a crackdown, the government texted 200,000 random citizens: what should we do? People’s proposals became law within months, and by 2025 deepfake ads were down 94%.
In this episode, we speak with Audrey Tang, Taiwan's former digital minister. A self-taught programmer who dropped out at 14, she first helped occupy Taiwan's parliament during the 2014 Sunflower Movement, then joined the government two years later.
We cover:
This episode is part of our AI Pathways series, where we explore the choices we can still make about how AI gets built.
Chapters:
0:00 Cold open
0:48 How the Sunflower Movement led Audrey Tang into government
3:06 What is d/acc, and how does it work in practice?
5:39 How do you make democratic deliberation actually work?
6:49 Civic tech in action: Taiwan's deepfake scam crisis, and how citizens solved it
9:10 What a d/acc world could look like in 10 years
11:09 What frontier AI labs get right about public input
13:13 What AI labs are doing wrong on closing the public input loop
15:14 Can Taiwan's model work anywhere else?
18:10 Can one person cause catastrophic harm with AI?
22:02 Where Audrey Tang disagrees with the mainstream d/acc take
24:10 What Audrey Tang got wrong about transparency
26:36 What does it mean to be a \"good enough ancestor\"?
28:20 How to start your own civic AI project
30:25 The best advice Audrey Tang ever received