TIME magazine has named Taiwan digital minister Audry Tang (唐鳳) among its 100 most influential people working in Artificial Intelligence. The list also includes some Taiwan-born and Taiwanese-American entrepreneurs. These include Nvidia president and co-founder Jensen Huang, chairman and CEO of Sinnovation Kai-Fu Lee (李開復), and U.S. Congressman Ted Lieu.
TIME’s profile of Tang says that she has the difficult dual tasks of ensuring Taiwan’s digital resilience while navigating AI’s risks and opportunities for democracy. The profile highlights Tang’s work on the “Alignment Assemblies” platform with the Collective Intelligence Project. The platform uses a chatbot to engage with citizens about their views on how AI technologies and regulations should progress.
The piece also highlights Tang’s efforts at public consultation in policymaking, citing the 2015 process for regulating the ridesharing company Uber as an example.
Tang says in the profile that AI models need to avoid what she calls “epistemic injustice”, whereby existing assumptions in AI training may cause some people to feel excluded. She says that this requires getting a rough consensus from specific communities, and then retraining AI models to fit their needs, rather than the other way around.