2025 World Leader in AIWS Award Recipient
On June 9, 2025, former Taiwan Digital Minister Audrey Tang, recipient of the 2025 World Leader in AIWS Award, delivered a powerful keynote address at the inaugural Boston Plurality Summit.
Below are the full text and video of her inspiring speech:
“Good local time everyone and welcome to the Boston Plurality Summit. Today we stand at an inflection point. The code we write will decide whether intelligence is monopolized or democratized. Right now, the dominant narrative for AI is one of centralization, of raising to a super intelligence, a technological singularity. But there is another path, one grounded not in theory, but in proven democratic practice. For a decade, Taiwan built digital tools used not to broadcast messages from the top down, but to create a space for broad listening at scale. A place where complex national policies were co-written by thousands of citizens, bringing everyone from taxi drivers to tech pioneers into the same conversation network. The crucial lesson from the Taiwan model was about the power of trust. It proved that a system designed to listen to a plurality of voices, turning uncommon ground into common knowledge, doesn’t just produce better outcomes, it produces more legitimate outcomes. It builds epistemic security not through authority but through relationship. So now let us apply that lesson to this moment. What if we took the citizen centered model as the foundation for an AI ecosystem? This is the visionary leap that we must take. Imagine AI not as an oracle that dictates answers but as a facilitator that deepens our understanding. Imagine locally aligned models that don’t replace human judgment, but strengthen it by clarifying points of consensus and contention. Picture AI systems organically aligned with communities to represent an entire bio region like a river, not to speak for it, but to bring its data, its health, its renewal into our human economy with clarity. This isn’t artificial general intelligence. This is augmented group intelligence. The choice before us is clear. We can use AI to concentrate power to create brittle epistemic monoculture that sparrows out of control. Or we can use AI to distribute wisdom, fostering the resilient, positive mess of a truly pluralistic society. The future of intelligence is not singular. It is plural. And our task is not to build a machine that can outsink us, but to build the tools that help us think together. Thank you for listening. Live long and prosper.”
Please see video here: