2026-11-03 –, Lotus Stage 2
Audrey Tang and Vitalik Buterin climb toward that question one level at a time, taking the questions the room upvotes in the Meerkat they share with Audrey's talk, which runs just before.
Level one covers everyday failures: an agent that makes a mistake, or one tricked from outside. Level two is the hard case, where no one can simply take the model makers' word, and asks what anyone can still check.
Civic hacker, co-author of «Plurality» (with Glen Weyl) and the forthcoming «Civic AI» (with Caroline Green). She is a Carnegie Distinguished Fellow at the Institute of Global Politics, Columbia SIPA and an inaugural Senior Accelerator Fellow at the Oxford Institute for Ethics in AI.
She served as Taiwan's first Minister of Digital Affairs (2022–2024), preceded by six years as Minister without Portfolio for Digital Affairs (2016–2022), and is the world's first nonbinary cabinet minister. Tang was instrumental in the g0v (gov-zero) network 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 through participatory democracy platforms like vTaiwan and Join, with innovations such as the "Mask Map" during COVID-19 and defenses against cyber interference in the 2024 elections.
In 2025, Tang received the Right Livelihood Award - often called the Alternative Nobel - "for advancing the social use of digital technology to empower citizens, renew democracy and heal divides."
Vitalik Buterin is the creator of Ethereum. After discovering blockchain technology and exploring its potential in 2011, he co-founded Bitcoin Magazine. In 2013, Vitalik wrote the Ethereum whitepaper, outlining a vision of a generalized framework for hosting decentralized applications and contracts. Today, he serves as a board member and continues his work as a researcher with the Ethereum Foundation.