Taiwan “very much reminds me of Israel in many ways,” US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee said on Wednesday.
“Both countries have been at the forefront of creating a lot of the valuable technologies that the world enjoys,” he said during a panel discussion at Tel Aviv University’s Cyber Week and AI Week. “But there is something else: Both are democracies; both allow their people to have freedom of speech and freedom of movement; women have equal roles in government and the private sector... and that is what leads to the technological breakthroughs.”
Ya-Ping “Abby” Lee, representing the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in Tel Aviv, was also on the panel.
Huckabee said cooperation among Israel, Taiwan, and the United States was especially important amid growing cyber threats. Partnerships among countries in different parts of the world provide an important foundation for protecting critical infrastructure, systems, and essential services, he said.
“Imagine the capacity to use technology in a way that, through the abuse of cyber ability, would in fact end up either injuring or killing masses of people,” he added.
'Technology is like fire'
“Every night when I go to sleep, there are people who are wide awake somewhere in the world trying to figure out how to use technology as a tool of destruction,” Huckabee said. “That’s why what you do every day in your professional lives is a very critical part of protecting the rest of us.”
Lee said cooperation among Taiwan, Israel, and the US in the age of artificial intelligence was very important.
“In the digital domain, there is no geographic border, only neighbors by values,” she said, adding that international cooperation is crucial to developing new solutions and strengthening digital trust.
“Technology is like fire: It can be useful, but it also causes harm,” Lee said.