As digital systems take over more of how we learn, decide, and form beliefs, the question of what people are entitled to expect from those systems gets answered early and then hardens. We may be among the last generations able to shape this while the shaping is still reversible—not because of any single decisive event, but because influence erodes incrementally, one convenient default at a time.
For a long time I framed the response as an education problem. If people were digitally literate enough, they could engage critically with media, safeguard their privacy, and assert their rights. I still think literacy matters. But in hindsight, treating it as only an educational issue was a form of avoidance—a way of deferring a large structural problem to the next generation instead of confronting what could be fixed now.
Co-drafting legislation with government bodies in Taiwan changed where I think the bottleneck sits. The binding constraint was never willingness to regulate. It was the absence of a technical predicate an agency could actually check.
That turns out to be the shape of most risks I care about: the harm is constituted by something no routine measurement captures, so governance has nothing to bind to. In AI-mediated learning—the case I work on directly—the quantity we instrument (performance with the tool in hand) and the quantity we care about (competence once it is withdrawn) move in opposite directions, and nothing in an ordinary deployment collects the second one. A population that cannot reason unassisted is disempowered by construction, and that erosion is invisible on every dashboard that exists today.
So I treat technical design and governance as complements rather than alternatives. Rules applied to a finished product cannot reach a harm constituted by the ordering of an interaction; a design commitment, on its own, binds nothing. Regulation underpins governance, governance supports inclusive education, and education cultivates a culture of rights awareness—but what holds that cycle together is measurement, without which none of the three has anything to act on.