From Outrage to Overlap: Civic AI and the 6-Pack of Care by Taiwan's Cyber Ambassador Audrey Tang

Thursday, 28 May 2026, 12pm to 1.15pm

AI governance is often framed as a top-down problem: write better rules, infer better preferences, and train better models. This talk offers a different starting point. Drawing on Taiwan’s experience with digital democracy, Audrey Tang shows how Civic AI can strengthen collective self-government when it is bounded by local accountability and community needs. Audrey introduces the 6-Pack of Care — six design principles for Civic AI: attentiveness, responsibility, competence, responsiveness, solidarity, and symbiosis. Rather than treating ethics as a static checklist, this approach asks whether a system operates at the community scale, can be corrected quickly, and increases a community’s capacity to cooperate. The unit of deployment is the “Kami” — a bounded local steward, not a universal governor. Using examples from Taiwan’s Alignment Assembly on deepfake scam advertisements, bridging algorithms that turn outrage into overlap, and federated safety infrastructure, the talk demonstrates what governance looks like when communities can inspect, contest, and shut down the systems that serve them. The breakthrough is not smarter chatbots; it is stronger self-government.

Audrey Tang is the 2025 Right Livelihood Laureate and Taiwan’s Cyber Ambassador. She is a civic hacker, co-author of Plurality and the forthcoming 6-Pack of Care, and an inaugural Senior Fellow at the Oxford Institute for Ethics in AI. She served as Taiwan’s first Digital Minister (2016–2024) and the world’s first non-binary cabinet minister. In 2025, Audrey was awarded the Right Livelihood Award for “advancing the social use of digital technology to empower citizens, renew democracy and heal divides.” A child prodigy who practised Taoism to manage a congenital heart condition, Tang left formal schooling at 14 to pursue self-education. By the age of 19, she had become an entrepreneur in Silicon Valley and a leader in the free and open-source software communities, revitalising the Haskell and Perl languages. Audrey was instrumental in the creation of g0v (gov-zero) and played a pivotal role in the 2014 Sunflower Movement, facilitating digital consensus-building during the occupation of Taiwan’s legislature. As Digital Minister, she implemented radical transparency and participatory democracy platforms such as vTaiwan and Join. Her tenure saw public trust in Taiwan’s government rise from single digits to over 70%, driven by innovations such as the “Mask Map” during COVID-19 and efforts to defend against cyber interference in the 2024 elections. Currently, Audrey advocates for “Plurality”: collaborative technology that bridges divides. In 2025, she co-launched ROOST (Robust Open Online Safety Tools) in Paris to develop decentralised safety infrastructure. She describes her philosophy as becoming a “good enough ancestor”, striving to leave future generations a wider canvas for democratic possibility.

The seminar will be chaired by Dr Bo-jiun Jing, Senior Research Fellow and Programme Manager in Taiwan Studies at the Oxford School of Global and Area Studies, and is held in partnership with St Antony’s International Review (STAIR).

Speaker(s): Audrey Tang (Oxford Institute for Ethics in AI), Bo-jiun Jing (Oxford School of Global and Area Studies)

Series: Oxford Taiwan Studies Seminar Series

Venue: Nissan Institute of Japanese Studies - Lecture Theatre - St Antony's College 27 Winchester Road Oxford Oxfordshire OX2 6NA United Kingdom

Department: Oxford School of Global and Area Studies (Department)

Organiser: Dr Bo-jiun Jing

Host: Dr Bo-jiun Jing

Register here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/from-outrage-to-overlap-civic-ai-and-the-6-pack-of-care-amb-audrey-tang-tickets-1989801700450