Glen in Japan Transcript

local community um anyway so welcome to the special guest here's

the also the Mima is going to be moderate their to

so enjoy and uh if you have any opinion or something like that you can tweet

with the GR in Jaan or the Twitter yeah that's all welcome to

community great

so thank you very much Gr to joining us pleasure you some presentation I'm just

getting my presentation okay great so actually why you are now being in

Japan this time what's B uh well I was going to type I've got a big trip in Tai that will be very interesting and my

family when they were coming over with me wanted to see Japan because they my daughters have never been to Japan so oh

last time so and actually it's a really kind of strange

timing yeah well that's why we that's why we did this time because uh actually

the cheapest flight of the year to Tokyo from New York is on uh 12:35 in the

morning on New Year's Day because every no one wants to be flying that they all want to be celebrated and

so we we flew uh over eight time zones

uh with the fireworks because it kept changing back and back and back and from the air we saw the fireworks below us uh

and uh and then suddenly it was January 2nd and we landed in haneda and 8 hours

later a plane exploded there so we we bring good luck to you

you're don't they not afraid of the earthquake uh you okay yeah so uh I I

actually when I was 4 years old it was for the big earthquake they had in San Francisco so I guess I carry it with me

and so you get the earthquake and the plane explosion and hopefully many other terrible things will happen to you before I so um uh okay um do you have a

slide changer no okay I'll just do it

myself it's done work no it was working fine it just uh got disconnected be fine

if you can share the for the uh is GNA be changing right okay yeah so I'll just

maybe I'll just point to you when I um when I here you can um change the slide on here uh is that cool yeah okay

perfect great wonderful uh should I get started yeah get

started it's it's great to be here with you guys in Tokyo I've been having an amazing time so far I've probably slept

about half of the time I should have slept for the last five nights uh on my way here and I'm jetlagged 12 hours so

forgive me for that but um I wanted to tell you guys all about this plurality project and um up here on the slide are

some of the people who are making this uh happen uh from all around the world uh a community of people building this

common project um and uh the symbol for

it uh which I guess they they showed over there as well um has a lot of

things loaded into it so the word plurality uh originates from the uh fact

that these two symbols that you can barely see in traditional Mandarin I don't know if they also have those in

kanji um but these mean in in in Taiwan both plural and digital and plurality is

the attempt to render into English this uh sort of joining of technology and uh

social philosophy um and the symbols are also a Unicode character so you can now have a

an emoji that represents plurality uh which is these overlapping squares um in

this detailed you know one is Circ circles the other is squares and they give birth to this rounded square and

plurality is really all about that plurality is about cooperation across difference and how by bringing people

together across differences we can create uh Beauty and progress and

growth um anyway I won't tell you who all these people are you probably recognize some of them uh others

hopefully you'll come to recognize in coming years um okay next slide um so uh

plurality addresses the fact that technology and democracy are kind of on a collision course right now in most of

the world so you read all over the place about how technology is undermining uh

democratic governments by uh creating extremism creating silos and uh and

divisions and um polarization and spreading

misinformation and at the same time I think it's important we also acknowledge that many people in the tech World feel

that democracy is also at war with technology they feel that um and with some justice governments uh around the

uh Democratic World Focus overwhelmingly on restricting uh regulating prohibiting

uh the development of certain Technologies and that the government uh of governments of democratic countries

which used to invest huge amounts of resources in developing technologies have increasingly left the development

of Technologies to the private sector the the percentage of national income that Democratic countries are putting in

to uh technology development has gone way down and uh this contrast with authoritarian regimes which are often

building giant cities to accommodate drug lless cars uh and and really thinking about the future in this

proactive way next slide and our vision is that the reason this is happening is

that the two dominant ways of thinking about the future of technology are fundamentally anti-democratic in

character and um these two visions uh are kind of both visions of technology

and political Visions one of these uh we call corporate libertarianism um and this is associated

with people like Mark andreon Peter the B Serena Boston it's a vision that is

about sort of the individual um it's a vision that's about technology as a way to get around and

break down social organization um replacing trust with

with algorithms um and you know its favorite Technologies are like the crypto Suite

of Technologies privacy oriented things Etc another vision is what we call

synthetic technocracy um these terms by the way are derived from the game civilization 6

which I don't know if any of you have played it's the bestselling strategy game of all time and in it there are future governments and these are the

three future governments and they were derived from this discussion so another ideology is is associated with people

like Sam Alton Reed Hoffman the AI World Universal basic income this whole thing it's like we're going to make some giant

machine it will do everything for you and then you can all you know just party you know that's kind of the vision of it

uh when I was in uh college there was a guy who ran for uh the president of the

student council the you know student government and he said uh let the good

times Ro keep the good times rolling and the good stuff like alcohol flowing

while all the hard work is done by this guy whose name was smolen um and so the

this is division it's like we all have fun and the machine manages it you know

um but we think that there's another ideology another Vision uh that is

actually pop cultural Visions like Star Trek articulated as well as a philosophy

and so we think of these things when we think the future of technology and people have been building towards those as a result and because these are very

anti-democratic they're either hyper capitalist or hyper centralized whereas democracy is about diversity and and

networks and participation we therefore have gotten into this conflict between democracy and Technology next slide but

there's a place where that's not what's happening there's an island not so far from here um where uh democracy and

Technology have worked hand inand where um Civic technology movement has pushed

forward technology development rather than just the private sector or the state where they've used it to have the

world's best performance in addressing Co to have the most technology intensive

economic growth and in a way that's actually reduced inequality over time and reduced Capital share of income um a

place where uh the the Civil SE sector has hacked the government and

continually upgraded the quality of government services without asking permission from the government to do it

and the government follows and incorporates these things um we're they're having the best in the world

performance on addressing pollution and the uh and the pollution of the information landscape by a large

adversary using the involvement of the public and uh uh Ordinary People next

slide and um this was made uh possible

by among others uh a collaborator of mine Audrey Tong uh the first

transgender minister in the world um who in the wake of the occupation of their

National legislature in 2014 think about that January 6 in the United States they

came in to the National legislature for 3 hours think of what a trauma that was

for the country these people were 24 times as long uh more than that uh uh more than

100 times as long three weeks they occupy the national legislature how Trump atic that was for Taiwan and yet

using these tools they found a way to build consensus to get a

program articulated and adopted by the oppos opposite party and then the opposite party

brought in the people from this movement as mentors reverse mentors to the government and then they were voted out

and she became the digital minister of the country so that is the sort of

social change social consensus that we can build from moments of trauma if we use these types of tools now obviously

she's been working very hard on the ground doing these things and she's also tried to articulate them next slide but

she articulates more in poetry than in Pros so uh this is her job description

she said that she wrote for herself 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 The Human

Experience and whenever we hear that the singularity is near let us remember the

plurality is here next slide but of

course action is amazing poetry is amazing but people also need Pros they

need things to put their hands on and grab so that they can do and build and

extend and so that's why we're writing this book together along with hundreds of people around the world um plurality

the future of collaborative uh technology and democracy it will be digitally finalized in March and thanks

to the incredible work of our friend Aki Nori here and many others in the community will be available it's already

available many of the most of the chapters uh to people around the world and then it will come out in print in uh

traditional Mandarin uh and simplified Mandarin in June and in English in June

and hopefully with your help in Japanese not uh far thereafter next

slide um so what is plurality um the definition is technology to facilitate

collaboration across social difference so this is very much inspired

by this idea from Star Trek so uh in Star Trek uh the Vulcans uh who Audrey

very much identifies with have a philosophy that they call infinite diversity and infinite comp ation this

is the idea that all truth beauty and progress come from the union of things

that are different so this is symbolized here by a triangle uniting with a circle and

giving birth to a a diamond of light um and uh this to be a little bit more uh

pedantic about it next slide um you can think of this idea

as coming from three great thinkers um so Hana arent one of the

great uh uh philosophers of the 20th century used the word plurality in her

book The Human Condition to represent this idea that the world is made up of diverse and intersecting social groups

not of individuals and society as a whole that is fundamentally we should

think of things in terms of networks or hyper RS would be the the technical way

to put it rather than in terms of you know isolated individuals and then the society as a whole second Danielle Allen

uh who I have a paper with that just came out yesterday uh encourage you to take a look at it it's in the Journal of

democracy um and it uh it she in her uh

paper on towards connected Society built on this idea from arent to propose sort of a fundamental idea of political

philosophy which is that the engine driving societies forward is

collaboration across social diversity and that diversity is the fuel for that engine so what do I mean by this there

there's actually a very direct and tight analogy here to thermodynamics and how

energy actually works so if you think about what is it that is powerful about oil or about uranium or any of these

things it's that they're in a low entropy state it's not that they have energy if

everything was just very hot it would have a lot of energy that's not powerful what what

actually does work is when you have things separated when something's hot here and cold here when you have

something that wants to react but you stop it from reacting and then you control the reaction and of course whenever that's the case it's dangerous

right uranium can fision bomb oil can explode and burn but it can also fuel

power powerful work right and diversity social

diversity is the same thing that's the key idea behind this social diversity yes it can cause conflict it can cause

War it can cause polarization but it can also produce new things it can produce

Innovation and progress and growth and that is the key idea that Daniel Allen

proposed is that we should think about organizing politics of around how do we

harness yes avoid the explosion but more importantly harness for Progress social

diversity and finally what Audrey said in 2016 is that the central role of

digital technology should be precisely to facilitate allowing us to do that

better to harness to to build the engines of the future the more efficient

engines the more safe engines of harnessing diversity for for Progress

okay next slide so how do we do that well we

there's there's this powerful analogy between the way that democracies work and the way that operating systems work

that we want to draw on so the basic fundamental idea behind liberal democracy is that there are these

fundamental rights that people have that allow for a democracy to exist if we

can't if you can't know that there are individual people then how can you have voting

right if there's no notion of separate people you can't vote because voting is counting up people right so you need to

have a notion of personhood and the the sanctity of the person or there's no way

that democracy can exist you can't without um people being

able to form groups and political parties and associations people can't act together to achieve things you can't

have democracy without that right so democracy is grounded on these fundamental rights and in the same way

all applications of computers rely on an operating system that's a common

underlying base of code and assumptions that you have to build those

applications on and they draw on those things and if you think about the way that the internet was imagined as the

shared set of protocols that we have fundamentally that's a perfect Fusion of

the operating system and the idea of Rights it's this underlying set of affordances that all of our social

interactions in the digital world can rely upon but so far that's only for

like communication protocols and packet switching and maybe hypertext and things like this and the vision of the founders

of the internet like jcr Li later was that this would extend much further that this would come to Encompass the full

sets of things that empower democracy and collaboration across diversity identity Technologies of

privacy and Association of property and contract and asset sharing on in the

online world and of Commerce and payments and so forth and so we believe

that the foundation of allowing cooperation AC cross difference in the digital age is to have this much more

ambitious vision of what internet Protocols are to build open protocols that are shared and inter operable that

Empower this richer set of uh of properties than we've currently built

into the internet Bas layer and then on top of that next slide we can build this broad range of

applications of cooperation across difference so what do I mean by applications so there's a tradeoff

inherent in cooperation across difference because the deeper you

cooperate with someone the fewer people that that can reach right you have the

richest deepest connections with people who are most similar to you or at least

a small number of people and on the other hand the things that reach the most people are the thinnest the most

basic forms of cooperation and so one way we can see that is at present

there's this spectrum between like intimacy on the one hand and capitalism

on the other hand capitalism connects every almost everyone on the planet and yet it's very thin it's like money and

these very commercial relationships and then intimacy is this very very deep thing but usually it's just a couple of

people who are participating in an intimate relationship right and you can in fact quantify this you can think

about the number of people who are participating versus the richness of the information they share so when in in

capitalism it's like this dollar amount right or Yen amount right so it's a it's a scaler um voting is more like a vector

of opinions you have on different things and in different organizations um then there's structured

language like laws and and things like this natural language in conversation um and then there's

unisensory immersion like you would have if you see like a film there's multisensory immersion like

if you're at a party and then there's you know propri exception your internal

feeling of yourself so propri exception is the idea like if you close your eyes and stick out your arm you know that

your arm is out even though none of your senses tell you that it's not sight smell taste but it's the internal sense

of yourself and in an intimate relationship it's that thing that you begin to start to share with someone

right and what plurality is all about is pushing back the trade-off between these things allowing us to share more deeply

more broadly reducing that tradeoff and so for example it's about making us able to

have this type of conversation a that I hope we'll all have but with many more people or it's allowing us to have

markets that take into account our social relationships or it's allowing us to go from our intimate relationships to

ones where we can actually telepathically share with each other using things like brain computer interface so all those types of

Technologies from the social Technologies to you know brain computer interface AI all these things can be

thought of as different points along this spectrum in this goal of pushing out the trade-off between depth and

breadth of collaboration next slide um and we think that this range of

things can transform so many domains of human life this is you know we talk

about democracy but this is about every part of life not just the

public sector this is about the workplace how we have remote work that

is really connects us uh powerfully to our teams how we organize companies in

ways that don't have to be hierarchical but can instead allow people to form networks and collaborate differently

this is about reimagining the media um by having more powerful ways to

empathize with people across Difference by having um ways of uh funding the

media that support bridging people rather than dividing them this is about the environment this is about health

this is about um the energy systems this is about education and learning all of

these domains we believe that these Technologies can can help transform next

slide um and to do that we need to draw

on the lessons that were used to build the original internet we're used to thinking of the private sector as the

engine of technological progress but the internet was built by the support of governments by the engagement of the the

civil and academic sector and with the integration in key scaling roles of the

private sector but not just the private sector driving the whole agenda and um

that is uh possible today with work like what Audrey's been doing in Taiwan with

digital Ministries collaborating across countries on digital public

infrastructure um and to mik Tillman who is one of the top advisers to uh vice

president presid Biden um when he was vice president is uh writing the chapter

that we're doing about all these policy issues and at the same time it's just announced he's leading one of the largest philanthropic efforts in the

world around decentralization project Liberty uh by Frank mcord in the United States so next

slide um and we need people from all sectors to participate and contribute we

have a Oscar winning documentary filmmaker coming to taipe with us next week to make a movie about Audrey Tong's

life and to tell this story to bring it home to people all around the world there are legislator around the world

implementing quadratic voting to make decisions and resolve their issues um

yeah um great and uh there are um there

are technology uh companies like anthropic writing their constitutions using ideas

like this there are academics organizing around this like plurality Institute next slide and uh the book itself is

being written in a participatory way and I hope many of you will join in Us in in doing this uh it's an open public book

it's no copyrights everything is on get anyone can make a PR and become part of

the community and all contributions will be credited uh formally like in a dow

but not with money instead with Community currency that allows you to govern and and control the project next

slide using something that we call the plural management protocol and again I'm running low in time so I'll skip over

this a little bit next slide um but uh I hope many of you will join in that will'll contribute to the base text

we'll contribute to the translation and uh Japanese that nishio is uh leading um

and uh next slide um this uses all kinds of the

mechanisms from the book so we're building the book in a way that illustrates the book's ideas many of the

book's ideas are going to be Illustrated through the way the book is built next slide um and so I hope you'll join us uh

you can get a link to the website uh through that QR code thank you so

much

thank you very much um yeah so yeah we had actually the like to talk about

your coming books to translate them in Japanese inial

doing and actually the one maybe I think that you know this most translation

about plal itself yeah we it's not so common word in

Japan neither is it in English really it's so and we often confus with divers

diversity and plurality but your great Keynotes sounds like maybe plurality is

a kind of Technology tool for making di is that right yeah so I I I I hope you

guys will find and I'm sure much better than I can ever imagine a word in Japanese or characters in Japanese or or

kanji in Japanese or whatever you know something that captures what I tried to capture in

English with plurality but it would really it's the Chinese that it comes from right that's that's the original

it's that digital and plural are the same thing in in traditional Mandarin I hope you find a way to capture this well

in Japanese but plurality is not a common word in English either so it's it's a little bit new it's a little bit

Tech it's a little bit social philosophy it's both that's the spirit that it's trying to capture is that there's

technology that makes diversity work I see you know what I mean so now we will

implementing the meaning of the poity now just everyone okay thank you very

much so let's move to it's a really great keynote and we we're now going to talk about the examples in upon how to

how you know and we have two leading player for implementing theology for our society so could we just introduce a bit

about that's great absolutely thank you so could you go and anytime you could um

jum yeah yeah absolutely uh again thank you so much

for being here and my honor yeah it's verying and my name is Yoshi I work for

the CB city office and by the way sh as slogan we have a slogan

it's means like a diversity empowers City in the people exactly so that's

Japanese but thank you yeah well so yeah so uh sh is known as a center of

cultures but uh 9 years ago we we we are nothing it's just one of the lural r is

in Tokyo but uh um uh since then we we get like a lot of people from outside of

Japan and then like a mix of the different regions people and also the after the war us bace is here and then

like a Chinese American Japanese American and those people creat like a diverse cultures and that's how Shia was

created and then uh what I do is I I'm running this uh Innovation divisions uh

for last four years and then uh I I tried to create a platform of the

innovation uh for example like uh we uh we started a startup visa to bring a entrepreneur

from outside of Japans and then like you're are welcome to use that start to

come I'm getting my gold card in Taiwan yeah Taiwan are you king yeah yeah it's

going to be a ceremony in two two weeks from today in Taiwan for me to get this yeah those of you who don't know about

goldart is a it's a creation digital agency of Taiwan and then you can apply

right now and then you can go to Taiwan anyway so yeah but uh the uh I

used to work for the big Corporation startups Central governments now I work for the city and then the city means

like uh I Implement uh policy to the people and then now I realize lot of the

issues we have and then uh I hope that you know your uh philosophy and the

Technologies and the people here super encouraging the wrting talks speakers it's it's wonderful and uh I hope you

know we can do something really new how many people live in shuya 2

230,000 people okay per perfect so in in the book we have this argument we say what's the right scale for uh plural

Innovation to start well on the one hand you want diversity

within because if you don't have diversity within how can you show that the engine works but on the other hand

you want diversity AC cross because otherwise you can't have a diversity of Innovations so we argue that the best

you know the optimal scale is sort of like what we call the square root scale which is to say that there should be as

many of units of that size in the world as there are people within that unit and

the square root of 10 billion about 10 billion people in the world is 100,000 so city is kind of very good

scale for plural Innovation right so shabuya uh good great fit for us

right good I hope you know we we all can do something together yeah let's do the kind of

experimental yeah yeah project I want to pass to so okay let's move to from City

to the kind of could you show up my

slide could you oh okay all right so uh

I at to thank you for coming today and very

important holay for these people okay so we currently working on

this L CP project uh with an idea of uh creating the local government itself

from scratch and U as you know guys as you know it is said that by 2040 half of

local government disappear in Japan and as the population Decline and the asan

and tax revenue declining also Social Security cost will uh continue to rise

so it's it's clear that uh it's difficult for local government themselves to uh provide to continue to

provide public service and system in their current States but if it's a large

city like Shibuya uh I think it will be uh uh effective to take approach of

reforming the local government uh it's but given that more than the half of the 1,700 local

government uh those are quite small and uh with less than 30,000 people uh

elderly people and so-call depop depopulation earlier so I don't think

there's much point in changing them so rather than that I think it would be better if everyone could just uh create

a new local government who like uh create uh something like a second

government so here we are creating the the local government from scratch while using the blockchain the CP technology

such as like uh uh could use a next

next okay so this a small village in the Deep Mountain this is a area it's only

uh 1,200 people living and the next

and it's a beautiful Fisherman's place it's only 300 people and and uh over 60%

of population uh over 65 years old and there are over 100 vacant houses so

that's the uh what what happening in the rural rural area in Japan yeah can I can

I uh mention a couple things about that so first of all um do you know know John Dewey have you ever read John Dewey no

so uh the public and its problems is one of my favorite books of all time John Dewey is uh in the book one of the real

patron saints of plurality and actually I learned that he's very important to

why plurality has been so successful in Taiwan as it turns out that John Dey came and visited

China uh During the Revolution and he uh he one of his

students hushi have you guys heard of hushi he was the founder of Academia senica um

and he was one of the you know the great intellectual advisers to sunat and he um built the whole

Taiwanese education system when the nationalists came to Taiwan and he built it around the principles of John Dewey

who is one who was considered the greatest American educator um but he was also one of the greatest American political philosophers and this book the

public and its problems is very very relevant for you so what what Dewey said in public and its problems is that

whenever there's new technologies people become interdependent in new ways uh you know the coal makes the coal

mining regions and the factories work together uhhuh uh the radio brings

people who didn't talk to talk every new technology creates new interdependence and so he said if we are going to have

democracy democracy does not mean nation states with some old

electoral system democracy means that when people are affected by something that they can control the thing that

affects them it means self-government and so we said democracy is dying and

democracy is dying because of technology technology will always kill

democracy unless you find new ways that the new forms of interdependence can be

governed by the people who are affected by them and this is what's happening with you yes exactly so those people are

used to do the self governance you know but uh uh once I mean the the L uh in

Japan the local government happens almost 120 years ago then and uh we got the uh

I mean the uh so people uh started to Outsourcing the local governance to the

local government yeah so they they kind of forget how to uh control their uh own

uh land and how to keep the the uh Community those kind of Etc you know

that's that's what's happening in Japan so so this this John D thing this is 1927 very old problem but it's very

relevant for us today and no one ever solved this problem because uh still it's nation states it's these old

jurisdictions but technology is so much faster than this uh demographic change so much faster than this uh and we need

to find a way to make those jurisdictions keep up with the pace of

that because if it doesn't democracy ends democracy is not something that

needs to be protected it's something that needs to be created a new every day

uh because if it isn't it just dies it dies naturally because it needs that

updating all the time so here's interesting story so this is my opin U

if I could choose a country like a web service I wouldn't choose Japan uh Taiwan looks like a better to

me however uh looking at the history of the Cooperative movement in Europe is

fascinating uh which is like uh the Spain's mon dragon oh Fair C

Etc I think it's it's the same in Japan because uh I recently discussed with the

uh about the local with the uh member of the National Diet yeah and he said uh

that was funny he said uh okay doing this centu will be cool but but locally

it's Innovation okay go ahead you know that's that's he said that so that it's

changing a lot so uh with the rapid population Decline and aging the crumbling local Administration system so

it's there's very uh big chance so we can create a new the Govern government

or new world in in in rural Japan that's uh what I'm thinking yeah I I it makes

total sense and you know um Audrey often calls herself a conservative

Anarchist uh and that sounds like a contradiction uh but um one thing I've

really learned from Audrey and from the tradition of the TA ching and you know taism is that often um because the world

is complex it's in contradictions that we find the truth uh because uh it to

express something simply is almost always to express it wrong uh and to express it in a complicated way is

almost always incomprehensible so it's only in Paradox that you are always left

to ask more questions and I think the Paradox that that that that you got right about conservative anarchism

is if we value not just people but also uh social

groups if we believe in plurality then we have to at the same

time be innovating but be innovating to lift up the truth and the wisdom of those local

traditions of the richness of those local traditions and not allow them to be papered over by you know

bureaucracy um that we need to find a way to empower that more using the

Innovations and that's the spirit that I think you're trying to manifest

you oh thank you very much um and then the one things I thought is

just um when did you contribute to the wire maybe two years ago that's about

about how people kind of going the wrong way about the decentralization it's kind of the the

compare with what we three and the PO and because you mentioned about

technology just we will use technology with just a local social context why you

know how to we Implement that you know the technology not

necessarily how could you explain about the difference between out so let me get

a little bit nerdy to be just very concrete the the way that a blockchain is conceived is that it's a global

public open Ledger that is uh available to

everyone um and then people put some privacy technology on top of this

to protect the individual privacy so it's public and private

that's the advision so just yeah

um I think this is the wrong way to think about information

governance there's a great quote from Alexander dville he was a Frenchman who

was an observer of American society and he said that um the

Tyrant uh is very happy for people to be

selfish as long as they hate each other it's fine if they also hate

him because um what he fears is that people love

each other because then they can do things and

what we need is not individual privacy what we need is

diverse social groups we need many publics we need not

public things or private things we need many different publics and each of those

publics need to have protection against other people looking in on them because

otherwise they lose their integrity so we need privacy but we also need them to come to a

shared understanding within them because otherwise we don't have that public so the problem with blockchain is that it

thinks about this binary rather than in about the creation of many different

social communities that are empowered to protect themselves and to act together

because that is democracy that the essence of democracy is not about individuals they're a part of it but the

essence of democracy is about empowered sets of people who can

collectively act outside of the state to achieve their common

ends yeah I was thinking about the case of shya uh I um for example like uh uh

our CH is very unique in terms of demographics uh most of the Japanese

cities like H son's helping is uh super aging societies right and then P Shia is

like you know we are our largest population is the 20s is 50s uh so means like active workers are

here but uh still uh the voice is very small and then uh our seniors for

stronger probably than uh the uh our active uh uh ages so

and then like uh uh I think their uh interest is kind of very simple like

take care of me right and then like you know and then so don't don't take care

of like a younger people they they they okay there you know but uh like what you

say is probably like using technology might change the kind of like if we

allows those I mean I I'm really care about my elderly but but but if they we

listen to them uh we probably cannot leave anything to the Future generations

and then like how we can avoid that and it's like we have to change aition making process or we can protect somehow

the senior's interest but uh what you're saying is maybe we we respect shus but

those shus not only in shya but worlds

somehow I don't know like um and we Bridge the difference between them and and you know I was at marikon

yesterday uh those of you who have not been to marikon here you have a treasure

in this country it is uh the most wonderful uh physical space for

plurality I've ever been to uh it's it's I was so honored to to be there and um

they have an exhibit about aging uh that I think I'm going to use as an example in the book because it puts

people in the position of the elderly it makes them see what they

see uh technology can help us uh not make such a divide between

these things it can make us um you know for example

um there's this thing quadratic funding which maybe some of you know it's a way

of if many different people contribute to something that it gets support from the public maybe we can make

projects that get quadratic funding but across age groups so if the elderly and the young

both find a solution good then that's the right solution to

pursue right uh and these exhibits can make the young people understand what it

is about how they live that is challenging for the elderly and on the other hand the elderly maybe can learn a

different way to allow participation from other people so most systems 18 you

get the vote 18 what happened at 18 nothing it's just some day that was

written down what about instead people gradually acrew voting rights as they get older

and we have vote people vote different except what if the immigrants come and the day they begin to get some voting

rights but of course people are there longer have accumulated more what if you know one reason why you don't have the

young vote is that you think their parents just tell them what to do what if you have some quadratic voting thing

that accounts for the extent to which you are part of different social groups rather than just your parents so there

are lots of ways that with smart design we don't have the fight of the old and the young

we have the common cooperation of the old and the young together to make

things that work for all of them so that we we honor all the different sides of

the conversation thank you maybe we will

just Implement that expl in this yeah be wonderful then I at almost at the time

but I would ask you to about what do you think about local C actually and S

because you know you mentioned maybe about the you know just the one of the

plurality is how to make composable local controls yes absolutely and this

local coup is actually kind of trying to Second government in the local area and

how what could you think about them was a possibility so I didn't want to go on too long before but I but I think a very

natural way to do this is exactly what I was saying so I said old and young maybe is the conflict here but

different local municipalities is the problem for you it's fragmented so what if you had a

quadratic funding system for the creation of new

authorities so if different local governments get together and they put money into a

common project the federal government the national government provides some matching funds for this and so new

authorities can emerge from the existing authorities with the support of the

national level um so I mean they they do things like this in a very clunky Way by Fiat I

don't know if you've heard about the West Midlands Authority in the UK but they created a new Authority for several

of the Cities because it was depopulation and so forth but you could allow this to emerge in a decentralized

way with the support of the national level cool is anybody from people from

national government yeah that's nice idea yeah

great oh yeah that's your that's great great idea to to we

will Implement that and that area thank you very much so now that maybe you kind

running out of your time but maybe we could have we should take some question the Audi a great opportunity so yes

count guy you yeah yeah come come on here

bring thank you for your discussion um um it was pretty interesting for

me musical chairs we see uh my verion um so um I have Chris

about uh BL yeah so um so thir thing uh

not like your question I I just asking you to could you sign my book through of

course yeah I have one so happy after this if people want things

to or thank you so much um that's that's no question yeah so uh my question is so so

you said like you have like idea scale of democracy is that like a

two, 200,000 yeah and then so so I it's still some books about like a gek gek

like a democracy ancient Greek democracy so so um some centuries ago so and then

they say like uh it it the size the size of the Democracy or the size of the diet

in leag was like a l year 100 guess so so so I have k about so how do you how

do you find ancient like like democracy and do you have any question or so

sometimes you we should like learn from history and then history says like something that so so I think that

100,000 is a great scale for Innovation but of course things have to scale above that and they have to scale

below that in order for it's just a very good site for things to be tried out for

first time like like Greek democracy was an experiment very interesting experiment we learned some things from it we need to learn more we need to go

further that's we shouldn't get stuck on this you know the the the the bad way to honor an innovator is to treat them like

a god the good way to honor an innovator is to emulate them is to say I can be

like that you go to the Jefferson Memorial in the United States uh and it

you'll see on the wall that he says uh that every 30 years the Constitution needs to be Rewritten and then you go to the people

who admire Thomas Jefferson in the United States and they don't want to touch the Constitution at all so that's

a paradox right you read the words of Jesus Christ you read the words of

L uh and then you see the way that those things are practiced today and uh people

should emulate uh they should not write in stone you know and uh that's yes we

should learn from the Greek democracy but should we do Greek democracy today no we should

push forward like they pushed forward in in the same way today you know that's

yeah that's what it is thank you very much thank you so much

thank you and so

(Applause)

that's thank you for the discussion um I have a question yeah you position

digital democracy among the other two branches synthetic technocracy and corporate libertarianism and by virtue

of that I I do think that there's trade-offs to all of them like synthetic technocracy would have issues with you know um basic human rights or equality

or corporate libertarianism with um the the gap between capital y y and um what

would you say that the trade-off for um digital democracy is uh for example not

to mention you know I think a PR pretty obvious one is um the introduction of

significant complexity for participating individuals another one could be you know

it uh it makes it easier for certain interest groups to participate obviously

but but that in itself whether that's like an entirely good thing is a you know macroscopically itself I think is

worthy of a discussion so what are the sort of expected hardships of trying to

achieve digital democracy and how would you say that you know your your organization or you know in Taiwan or or

I think the best question is for us individuals to to sort of see that and um overcome that yeah I mean I I think

that um Han once said that uh one of the greatest freedoms is the freedom from

politics and incorrectly conceived or incorrectly pursued uh democracy uh is

the tyranny of politics right it's it's everyone having to all constantly be

thinking about uh things that are very far from their experience but that they're being called upon to consider as

some political issue so the the correct word conception that I would

have is actually not democracy exactly it's plurality it's many different

scales of interaction with many different Technologies empowering all those things to simultaneously exist and

that the one person one vote image of tech democracy the political quality

image of democracy is not the right way to conceive of it you know there's two different ways to be opposed to like

ranking people in some order one way is equality that reduces the dimensions it takes them order and puts it down the

better way I think is to say there are many more dimensions and so there is no way to rank because it's more complex

than that so so the real Vision honestly the Democracy word is one that people can grab a little bit so it's we talk

about it but but really it's not democracy it's PL that that is is the right way to

conceive it so yeah I completely agree but what do you think about the fact that in reality a lot of people probably

in this country especially but in many other Democratic countries they people find it hard to even go write a person's name every few years like that's a very

simple thing to do yeah and even that's like you know not like people don't feel

the need to participate and like commit to that right so how would you even expect people to particip iate and

commit to an added complex society which you know ideally theoretically would

help navigate this m multi-dimensionality that we have well I think we we we need to meet people where

they are and people where they are is often uh expressing themselves on many

things every time you go to a store every time you have an experience in the street every time you have a problem with the Metro you think something so

how do we take those thoughts and make it easy for them in natural language to them eventually translate into decisions

that are socially acted upon and the answer is some combination of you know

what's usually called AI having natural language models that can learn those things that can build a model of how

you'd like to express your preferences quantitatively using some model and and tools that allow the Expressions to

translate into action in a thoughtful way whether it be quadratic voting or some more sophisticated version of that

or even natural language processing based collective decision making things that can directly take those natural language and translate them to something

so uh you know that's we we need we're losing all that information you know you

you talk about how hard it is to write down the name yes but but but people are expressing things all the time and we're

losing it so there is possibility that you know this plural way of living might

actually come more naturally to people as a whole then actually you know write it down a name every few years which

that's what we want that that the the writing down a name a few years is is like some bureaucratic you know Vapor

like 19th century thing of structure that we put on to people who were

governing themselves and living in many different ways and and Technology might free us from the need to have this very

rigid structure and might allow us to live in in those more uh natural uh you

know and diverse uh social patterns that that that would be a great success I think thank you cool um before we go is

there a woman who'd like to ask a question because I know a very important thing in Japan is that we we have have

more inclusion and this is this is a challenge here uh on this panel as well

so if if there's I I would like to actively encourage if there's a woman who has a question to uh answer that

they come up and join

us hey hey I think I'm a you know diversity woman yeah right thank you

but this is another question but I want to know uh could you please describe about you know what is the bad about the

blockchain you said you know blockchain is open lger and also we put on the

Privacy you but I canot get you know that is not the uh right way to approach

you mention but I did not guess so could you please repat again please um let me describe an alternative structure that

I'm not saying is the optimal one but it gives you a sense of what you might go for that's different from a blockchain so this is an idea I've been developing

recently that we call um a designated verifier chain so what this is is it's a

group of people who have um do there's something called the designated verifier

signature so a designated verifier signature is a way of sending a message

where the people who you send the message to can know that you sent it but

no one else other than that person even if that person wants to share it can know that you actually sent that message

okay so um this uh is a way to stop when you send a message that person from

sharing it with anyone else all right right and so imagine a community of

people who share a common Ledger but they can't prove to anyone

outside of that Community what that ledger says without that Community collectively

yes adding that other person to The Ledger all right so that would be a data

structure that creates Collective privacy um interesting and it creates it

it prevents double spend within the community but outside the community no

one can ever verify non-double spend and therefore the money is not worth anything to anyone outside the community

right right so so so that gives you a sense of an alternative to a blockchain

that uses some similar tools but in a different combination that grounds itself in the notion of

community rather than in the notion of money you see what I mean yeah yeah yeah yeah oh W thank you so much but I I also

have a question so is that kind of the approach some you know startup or some you know people already creating some

application kind of thing yeah there there's absolutely various things going on you know in the space and the

florality you know there's radical Exchange which is a network of all the people building things like this and

there's um you know I run a research group at Microsoft that does things like this as well um so so absolutely there

are developments going on in that direction but there's always many many many more to do and uh you know I I say

that in in uh in the more Singularity Visions uh there's like the truth and

you're digging down to the truth you're like on the earth and you're digging down to the truth and you hit the core of the truth and you pull throw away

false in plurality you're on the surface of the Earth and you're planting trees

and the trees as they grow up yeah they grow out and there's more space right so the further you go the

more space there is and so that's that's right the more we innovate the more we

advance the more there is to do not uh people have already done it you know

what I mean so yeah yeah thank you so much yeah pleasure

thank you very much almost three do you still have a time to just have a yeah I

have maybe one one uh yeah we should probably go pretty soon but I'll take maybe one two yes give

someone is that okay

yes hello thank you yeah um so this is kind of slightly different topic but I'm

I'm a filmmaker yeah um so barly just a very short question I'm curious about the film you mentioned being absolutely

can you tell us who yeah so the director is Cynthia Wade um she's an Oscar winning uh uh documentary maker and then

there's um another there there's the producer is um Terry witcraft who's an

Emmy winning former ABC News producer uh and it's going to be our aspiration is

the first cc0 um git based fully open- Source uh

film uh and so everything will be available for people to remix uh as they

choose so yeah that answers another question I had but uh uh I was also just

asking around the time of like radical markets and radical exchange starting you talked a lot about artists and

absolutely meaning to imagine the future that these kind of Technologies could bring into being I just wondered if

so you had mentioned civilization game as a good example I haven't played it I just wonder if you had any other

examples of like cuz you can imagine kind of someone who has architectural vision for the

future it's very easy to kind of imagine how as a filmmaker you can put that in

the world of the film and people can kind of see and feel it um with in a kind of natural way of a

story but that's a bit harder to imagine in the case of at least for me in the case of kind of me Democratic mechanisms

and this kind of complicated technological um new technologies and I just wonder if you if

there's any other examples of that that you're really inspired by uh yeah uh ruana emer's book a half-built garden is

a great example um Star Trek is the best example of all this stuff marayon is

number two uh really Mar kind is wonderful uh but Star Trek is is

fabulous Star Trek is an entire world it's not just has this Vulcan philosophy

the whole narrative Arc of Star Trek is not about Good and Evil it's about

people who are different figuring out how to be

allies overcoming various of communication overcoming cultural barriers that is the drama of Star

Trek uh that's a wonderful story to tell you know and uh that that's that's

plurality and action you know um but you know the the mechanisms are

only one thing the spirit of what is being done is what matters and the mechanisms can be alluded to because

they help achieve this you know because they and and you know we do that and and

in many of the chapters of this book begin with stories by Noah yet uh who's

one of the people on that first slide uh about um a world with with these things

but but what matters is not the mechanism matters is that in this world rather than you pay with money you uh

find a better way that I make an introduction of a friend and you are a guest in my house you know and that technology

facilitates that but what matters is that I don't use the money I use my relationships you know uh what matters

is that in this future um we have media

that tell inclusive stories uh and that there's support for that and yeah there's some economic mechanism

behind that but you don't need to describe the mechanism what you need to describe is the media and the way that it works you know um but yes there there

are other examples ursul leuin is a wonderful example of of things like this

um so I think there are there are not enough there are never enough but but there are good there are good examples

Richard Garfield the creator of Magic the Gathering is making games about many of these ideas that include them in the

Dynamics of the game in Civilization 6 just has these things but also the voting in that is quadratic voting so

that's showing millions of people every day what quadratic voting is so yeah

thank you very much thank you very much so far complete

in we just let's go to the yeah and and and hopefully when we

come back this summer we do something with ion that would be wonderful yeah thank you very much so

(Music)

may take it thank you for coming everyone so the talk talk session ended

practice also the uh I'm just curious about um does gr's going to be coming to

next D to Japan yeah so uh I'm going to be in Tai for a week uh and so we'll do

something in Japan we'll we'll figure out how to make it all coordinate we got a we got figure out the best way to do

it but let's uh let's let's bring the me message to everyone and let's uh let's

really make a difference here and with with with all of you uh as the leaders and I hope many of you know the way the

book tour is going to work is that yes Audrey and I will go but also the people who are writing the book the people who are doing the books in local communities

they will talk and uh we're going to have thousands of people I hope around the world uh doing the book tour right

this right this right this is's going to be more absolutely yeah all right so uh

um wait I just want to announcement funding

the commons Tokyo we are preparing by prity Tokyo and the D Tokyo and funding

the comment is one the event of the maybe you guys has interest like this

event FTC is the more big big bigger bigger huge like this

so uh yeah maybe the is going to be coming here let's try let's try to find

the week that we do this and the week that we do you want to come yeah yeah come it's actually the same week we're

doing like polarity Summit July 27 so in taipe we're also doing polarity Summit

uh July 27th if you guys are interested in any of the concept Glen just mentioned come to Taiwan in July 17 uh

27th and uh it's like going to be the same week as funny Comm Tokyo so like

right out of Tokyo well let's let's let's let's figure it out

(Applause)

anyway so thank you for the coming G

please thank

(Applause])

you all right so after R uh we GNA take a photo with everyone so if you want to

don't uh don't enjo the photo uh go ahead go all right so coming here

comeing here everyone everyone

yes

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