Cyber Ambassador 🇹🇼 Taiwan

"I want to be a good enough ancestor for future generations."

2025 Right Livelihood Laureate · Senior Accelerator Fellow, Oxford Institute for Ethics in AI

Audrey Tang is a civic hacker, co-author of Plurality: The Future of Collaborative Technology and Democracy, and an inaugural Senior Accelerator Fellow at the Oxford Institute for Ethics in AI.

Taiwan's first Digital Minister and the world's first nonbinary cabinet minister, Tang was awarded the 2025 Right Livelihood Award for "advancing the social use of digital technology to empower citizens, renew democracy and heal divides."

A child prodigy who practiced Taoism to manage a congenital heart condition, Tang left formal schooling at 14 to pursue entrepreneurship. By 24, Tang was already a leader in the free and open-source software communities, revitalising the Haskell and Perl languages.

Geothermal Democracy — Right Livelihood Lecture · Zurich · December 2025 The hamster runs faster in the wheel — but goes nowhere. On moving from "human in the loop of AI" to "AI in the loop of humanity," and why democracy cannot be delegated.

Technology, Democracy & AI — Firing Line with Margaret Hoover · PBS · October 2025 "To give no trust is to get no trust." On Taiwan's citizens' assemblies, the illusion of polarisation, and how Civic AI built inside the occupied parliament became today's Community Notes.

Not to silence conflict, but to channel it — and for proving AI must connect us through uncommon ground, not divide us with outrage.

Presented by the Boston Global Forum at Harvard University's Loeb House for leadership in ethical AI development and global governance.

Named among the 100 Most Influential People in Artificial Intelligence for pioneering Alignment Assemblies and integrating AI into democratic processes.

Recognized for contributions to digital democracy alongside heads of state and internationally prominent policy leaders.

"We built a geothermal democracy — the crashing plates turned into positive energy for renewal." — Right Livelihood Award acceptance speech, Stockholm, December 2025

The dominant AI safety narrative is vertical: one superintelligent system, aligned once and for all to human values. But no amount of what is produces what ought to be. The 6-Pack of Care, developed with Caroline Green at Oxford, offers a horizontal alternative — many bounded, purpose-specific AI agents, each devoted to one community's relational health.

These agents are modeled on local kami: guardian spirits bound to a specific place. A kami that knows "enough is enough" won't cling to power or expand beyond its purpose. Instead of coding the "perfect" values once, the framework builds continuous governance rooted in care ethics — alignment by process, not by fiat. Six packs, drawn from Joan Tronto's political ethics of care, make this concrete:

Attentiveness — What do the people closest to pain notice that we're missing? Bridging algorithms surface cross-cutting concerns and amplify unheard voices — not the loudest ones.

Responsibility — Who is accountable, with what authority, and what happens if they fail? Engagement contracts with real deadlines, escrowed funds, and named officers.

Competence — Does the system demonstrably work? Graduated releases, decision traces for every action, guardrails-as-code, and automatic rollback when thresholds are breached.

Responsiveness — Can those affected correct the system — and does correction actually change it? Community-designed rewards, clear appeals with timers, and public repair logs.

Solidarity — Does the ecosystem reward cooperation over lock-in? Data portability, federated trust & safety, and bridging metrics that make bad-faith factionalism mathematically visible.

Symbiosis — Is the system bounded, sunset-ready, and incapable of imperial creep? Resource caps, non-expansion pacts, and succession plans. Complete the work and step back.

AI-generated scam ads impersonating Jensen Huang were costing Taiwanese citizens millions of dollars. 200,000 text messages went out to randomly selected numbers across Taiwan, asking one question: what should be done? Thousands volunteered; 447 were chosen by lottery to mirror the country's demographics. They deliberated in 44 virtual rooms. A sovereign language model synthesized their proposals the same day.

Three measures emerged — label unsigned ads as probable scams; hold platforms liable for losses from unsolicited deepfakes; slow down non-compliant services until they comply — actor-and-behavior regulation, not content moderation. 85% of the assembly agreed. The law passed with multiparty support. By 2025, impersonation ads on Taiwanese social media fell by 94%.

Read the full framework at https://6pack.care

Directed by Cynthia Wade (Oscar & Emmy-winning director). A documentary on democracy, mortality, and the courage to leave a wider canvas for future generations. Best Professional Documentary Short, SCAD Savannah Film Festival. Screened at the Woodstock Film Festival and Athena Film Festival. 21 min.

"I insist on relinquishing copyright because if I disappear tomorrow, the future generations can make use of the materials that I have."

Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=idudNrLy8ek

Tang was instrumental in the creation of g0v (gov-zero), now one of the largest civic technology communities in East Asia, and played a pivotal role in the 2014 Sunflower Movement, facilitating digital consensus-building during the occupation of Taiwan's legislature. By bringing live streaming and civic tech into the movement, Tang proved that radical transparency could transform governance from the bottom up.

As digital minister in 2016, Tang implemented radical transparency and participatory democracy platforms, including Join.gov.tw with millions of users. Tang's tenure saw public trust in Taiwan's government rise from single digits to over 70%, driven by innovations such as the real-time Mask Map and 1922 SMS during COVID-19 and pioneering prebunking defenses against cyber interference in national elections. Tang transitioned to the ambassadorial role in 2024; the platforms, the methodology, and the legislation outlasted the tenure — which is what "complete the work and step back" was designed to mean in practice.

Before government, Tang made foundational contributions to open-source software — initiating over 100 projects on CPAN, leading the first working implementation of Perl 6 (now Raku) in Haskell, and creating EtherCalc with Dan Bricklin, the inventor of the electronic spreadsheet. Tang also served as a computational linguistics consultant to Apple (2010–2016), developing software used in Siri.

Currently, Tang is developing techno-communitarianism — a synthesis of her Plurality framework with Glen Weyl, and Patrick Deneen's communitarian critique of liberalism — as a theory of Civic AI that fosters community rather than atomising it.

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