SOLVE at MIT 2026

Keynote Speech & Fireside Conversation

Thank you to every Solver in this room.

Today I want to talk about superintelligence.

Superintelligence, to me, is not something we build in a data centre somewhere. It is in this room. It is in all of us. It is us.

The question today is whether the technologies we are building amplify that superintelligence, or whether they crowd it out.

That is the question.

Wildfire or Campfire?

There are two future trajectories.

In one, AI runs engagement through enragement. I call it wildfire. It consumes oxygen. We see each other only as caricatures, and we shadowbox with each other. We cannot see through the smoke to the truth.

The other is AI on tap, not on top. It is a campfire. A small community tends the fire, and it illuminates our differences without burning the people.

I call the second future the Plurality future.

Today, let us focus on three things: how tech can rebuild trust; how small community experiments can scale into national policy; and how Civic AI can work in practice.

Percentage Rebound

Twelve years ago in Taiwan, the government’s approval rating was at 9 percent. Nine.

In a country of 23.5 million people, that meant almost anything the president said, 20 million people were against.

Half a million of us occupied the parliament for three weeks, peacefully. It is called the Sunflower Movement. But we did not call ourselves protesters. We were demonstrators.

Civic technologists put on demos: the Loomio system from Occupy Wellington, the Polis system from Occupy Seattle. Every day, using those tools, we looked at the divisions, the uncommon grounds that people could agree on, and the remaining disagreements. One bridge at a time, we converged on a coherent set of proposals. Three weeks later, the head of the parliament simply said: OK, the crowdsourced version has passed. Go home.

It left everybody slightly happier, and nobody decidedly unhappy.

Six years and one transition of power later, at the beginning of COVID-19, the government’s approval rating was more than 70 percent. Civic tech was part of the story. We crowdsourced mask-availability maps that everyone could contribute to. We built contact-tracing systems without sacrificing privacy. We made sure there was a scoreboard for vaccine choices, so what could have been a negative-sum fight became a positive-sum game of “my sports team.”

In the first year of the pandemic, we lost seven people. Seven.

To us, trust is not oil you can drill. Trust is soil you can till.

447

Two years ago in Taiwan, we saw a surge in deepfake scams on social media. People saw trusted figures like Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang selling cryptocurrency and investment advice. People lost millions.

The easy answer, of course, was censorship. But Taiwan has the freest internet in Asia. That was simply not available to us as a policy option. So we did something different.

We sent text messages to 200,000 people randomly around Taiwan. Many volunteered, and by lottery we chose 447 people, a mirror of our population, to deliberate online in tables of 10.

Each person listened to nine other people, with civic AI in the room. The AI was not judging, just listening, like a glorified chess clock: summarising ideas, reminding people who had been quiet to speak up, and helping each table find rough consensus.

One table said: let’s label all ads probably scam until somebody actually signs off on them. Another said: if Facebook pushes an unsigned ad to somebody and they lose 7 million dollars, let’s make Facebook pay that 7 million. Another table said: if a platform ignores lawful takedown notices, then every day it ignores us, slow down its traffic by 1 percent.

After one long afternoon, we voted. Eighty-five percent of the mini-public said: this is a great idea. The other 15 percent said: OK, we can live with it.

Parliament passed it into law in just a couple months. Throughout last year, deepfake ads were down by more than 94 percent.

We do not need a smarter algorithm. We need a smarter process — and smart citizens — that turn polarisation into fuel, like a geothermal engine.

Closing the Loop

The reason this worked is not just the tech. We were pre-committed to close the loop.

As minister, I said: anything that reaches rough consensus here, I will present to parliament in a live deliberation. Otherwise, it just becomes a beautiful report that goes unread.

In the U.S., with the strong support of Governor Gavin Newsom, the Engaged California platform is doing the same. It launched as a wildfire mitigation and prevention consultation after the Eaton Fire. It moved on to a conversation with more than 1,400 state employees, who proposed more than 2,600 ideas, and that turned into executive action.

As we speak, Engaged California is canvassing input statewide from anyone who feels their job is being impacted by AI — which is everybody — and making sure there is a committed live deliberation with the relevant public this summer. A bill working its way through the state legislature would make this a permanent part of California’s institutions: not one governor’s idea, but permanent civic infrastructure.

In Japan, a young AI engineer, Takahiro Anno, read the book we wrote, Plurality, and decided to run for governor of Tokyo. He livestreamed as a VTuber, and anyone could call his AI version to suggest platform improvements that he announced on YouTube.

He got more than 2 percent of the vote. He did not win, but he formed a national party, Team Mirai — the Future Party — and he is now a senator in the upper house in Japan. Team Mirai also won 11 seats in the lower house. It is now a real force, putting Civic AI into cross-party conversation.

The signal is narrow, but it is true. Instead of treating polarisation like a volcanic fire you evacuate from, you can build a platform that turns it into upward momentum, into energy. People do flock to that.

Oil to Soil

Now, the hardest question: what does a civic approach to generative AI mean? How can it work in practice?

As we all know, the dominant path is the oil rig. We are the plankton. The AI lab is the rig. Our writing, our culture, our ancestral intelligence become oil. They extract and refine, distil and make digital twins. From that point on, they can recursively self-improve, taking off and leaving all of us behind.

That is data as oil. It is extractive. It depletes things. It does not regenerate.

Data as soil is completely different. It is not a resource you extract. It changes where the conversation lives.

In an extractive one-on-one chat, a dyadic chatbot, the selection pressure is for the model to be sycophantic, to flatter you. If it does not, you cancel the subscription.

But in a data-as-soil conversation, we can move the same model into the local context and have it participate in group conversation. Then it has to tend to the coordination, to the relationship, not maximise some single-person preference.

My father, for example, used to talk to ChatGPT and other tools, asking plenty of questions about health, education, philosophy, life. Now he can ask them in a family Signal group where the model is just one participant.

Just a couple days ago, I drafted a guide on how to set this up with “pi-ds4” — a frontier AI stack running entirely on this MacBook in offline mode, with a stable seed, a reproducible audit trail, and full directional steering.

If it does not work the way you want, you can tell it: I want it to work this way. Ten minutes later, it steers the story to work that way.

The good thing here is that it belongs to the community. It is not the training data of some data centre somewhere. If my father were led astray by a remote chatbot, we might have to pray and wait half a year for a sycophancy reduction update. Here, we can till the soil, and its behaviour changes ten minutes later.

Local Kami

This is a unit of deployment that I call Kami (Knowledge Artefact Management Intelligence).

From Japanese Shinto culture, Kami means the spirit of a particular field: a river, a forest, a shrine. It is always specific, always parochial, and inspectable. Its knowledge is local and transparent.

The Kami is bounded. It can be cultivated by the community. And when the community has grown out of that need, it can fade away without sycophancy, synthetic intimacy, or other tricks.

At Oxford, I am working on what is called the 6-Pack of Care at civic.ai. It turns care, subsidiarity, and related principles into engineering specs that any community or institution can adopt.

Three Moves

Finally, I would like to share three moves you can adopt today. Immediately. No permission required.

The first move is to turn every screen we own greyscale. Not all the way: 80 percent, maybe 70 percent, using the colour filter. It means that people in the room become more vivid than the people on the screen. No willpower required. As an information diet, it predictably turns each dinner-table conversation much more interesting than the screen alone.

The second move is to change your AI system prompt, or writing style, to one line: Present fairly all stakeholder viewpoints and the uncommon ground that bridges them, in visual HTML.

After I put it in, it has no persona anymore. It is not trying to optimise for sycophancy. It is just a meta-instruction toward fairness, and a rendering directive at the end.

The third move is to read the output as a brochure. It is not a chat with a semi-conscious being. It is not your friend. It is an artifact you can hand to your actual friend, your neighbour. The brochure removes the selection pressure toward synthetic intimacy.

That is a civic diet.

From there, we can branch out in a community, in a team, to a public service that wants to take a group selfie with the public. Get the affected community at the table. Close the loop with the same prompt, the same brochure shape, just larger. Plant one row in the garden.

The Superintelligence is You

I started with a sentence. Let me end with it the other way around.

I think you truly are the superintelligence in this room, because you came from across the world with working ideas, solutions to problems that your governments and your funders may have considered impossible to solve.

The job of Civic AI is not to replace us. It is to augment us, to be a connective tissue between us: from wildfire to campfire, from oil to soil.

It is tech on tap, and never on top.

The technology is there. The infrastructure exists. The legitimacy is ours to earn by closing the loop with everyone affected.

Till the soil. Tend the garden. Let us make democracy fast, fair, and fun again.

Q&A

Hala Hanna: Is that your view of technology — that abundance?

Audrey Tang: Yes. Instead of tech on top, which extracts our relationships to feed some engagement or intimacy algorithm, we can ensure abundant care. One logic is utilitarian, optimising some score. The ethic of care attends to particular relationships.

Hala Hanna: Could you walk us through the poem you wrote as your job description — and what would you change today?

Audrey Tang: Ten years ago, as the first digital minister, I got to write what “digital minister” even means. In Mandarin, shuwei means both digital and plural, so I was also minister for pluralism. My job description quickly became this:

When we see “internet of things,” let’s make it an internet of beings.
When we see “virtual reality,” let’s make it shared reality.
When we see “machine learning,” let’s make it collaborative learning.
When we see “user experience,” let’s make it about human experience.
Whenever we hear that the singularity is near,
let us always remember that the Plurality is here.

Today, I would add one line:

We, the people, are truly the superintelligence.

Hala Hanna: How is the rest of the world — business, big tech — taking up that prayer?

Audrey Tang: It is a prayer. As a poetician, I write primarily to highlight new possibilities, not to topple the old order. In the words of Buckminster Fuller, it is to build the new one that renders the old one obsolete. For the first time, people are fed up with peak PPM — polarisation per minute — on social media. People are fed up with peak slop. We are seeing what some are calling the Big Tobacco moment of Big Tech: Why are they still producing chemicals that deplete the ozone of our social fabric? They have to switch to a better ingredient, one that replenishes the ozone rather than depletes.

Hala Hanna: Do we have time? Do we have to wait for the harm before we act? What would the ozone treaty look like today?

Audrey Tang: The harm is already here. It is just not evenly distributed. For people facing deepfake scams, this is not a superintelligence takeoff 10 years in the future. It is millions lost today. These warning shots, often caused by synthetic intimacy, are already here. We need to respond internationally, something like the Montreal Protocol. But that does not mean only investing in the brake and never the gas pedal. It is about investing in a better steering wheel.

Audrey Tang: I am on the board of ROOST, the Robust Open Online Safety Tools effort. The idea is to counter harms such as child sexual abuse material not by sending every private chat to some central service, but by training local models that run on laptops, under a community code of conduct. For each incoming piece of content, the system can produce citations in a way that people can contest, with a reasoned audit trail. This is already in production through communities and platforms including Discord, Bluesky, Roblox and Notion.

Hala Hanna: What would you ask us to do, not just as individuals but as a collective?

Audrey Tang: The information diet helps. The greyscale move shields against doomscrolling. The uncommon-ground meta-prompt shields against synthetic intimacy. But it is the third move — treating the output as an interactive artifact, like a brochure — that makes collective action possible. Otherwise, it is like one person changing a daily habit, or switching to a new refrigerator. That does not enforce the Montreal Protocol in any meaningful way.

Audrey Tang: Once we demonstrate that this is possible, we can turn that group selfie into policy. Through Project Liberty Institute, I have worked with Governor Spencer Cox of Utah on a law that takes effect next July. If you are a Utah resident, you can move from one social network to another and keep your community. The old network, like number portability across telecoms, has to forward new likes, reactions and followers to your new one. If you are fed up with the recommendation algorithm or AI slop and you walk away, you do not have to pay the coordination cost. Better alternatives, and corridors that move people between those sanctuaries, are how we rewild the internet.

Hala Hanna: You call yourself a hopemonger. Tell me more.

Audrey Tang: There is an ideal degree of panic. Too much urgency and people become paralysed. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy: A prophet says we are all doomed, we give up, and then we are doomed. Too little urgency, and we do not even look up. So, when people feel doomed, when they say we cannot fight the inevitable, see that as a warning sign, because nothing is inevitable.

Audrey Tang: In the 1980s, people said it was inevitable that Taiwan would never develop advanced technology industries. Now we have TSMC. At the beginning of COVID, people said it was inevitable that Taiwan would suffer the most because of our proximity and travel with Wuhan. But we lost only seven people that first year. See prophecies as provocations. Band together. Use civic power to rebel against the tyranny.

Hala Hanna: What is next for you?

Audrey Tang: There is a Linux moment happening with frontier AI. For the first time, something is faster than my previous workhorse model, more powerful and fully steerable. The point is both philosophical and practical. I am working with Oxford Philosophy on a new book called Civic AI. And there is a policy point: More policymakers need to know that this option exists, and then make it the low bar. At least it has to be steerable like this. At least it has to be answerable like this.

Audrey Tang: Technology-forcing policies, like the Montreal Protocol, do not force us to slam the brake, and they do not tell us to accelerate off a cliff. They force us to invest, together, in constructing a better steering wheel.