№ 817. Questions of the Day

  

Manila Times

Signs And Wonders

By Diwa C. Guinigundo

President Ferdinand Marcos, Jr. could not have chosen more telling words.

Speaking in Tokyo on May 29, he said: “I watched with horror that the Senate has become this.” He was referring to what should have been one of the country’s most important democratic institutions descending into a spectacle of personal loyalties, factional maneuvering, and institutional paralysis.

What has unfolded in the Senate over the past several weeks is no longer merely a political drama. It is becoming a test of whether Philippine democratic institutions can still function credibly amid intense political conflict.

The sequence of events is now familiar: the controversial reorganization of Senate leadership; the dramatic reappearance of a senator who had been absent for months; allegations of attacks on the Senate itself; the arrest of Senator Jinggoy Estrada on plunder charges; the continuing uncertainty surrounding Senator Ronald dela Rosa; and finally, the decision of the former majority bloc to boycott Senate proceedings.

Until Wednesday evening, the majority senators, with the exception of former Senate President Francis “Chiz” Escudero, refused to attend session. Invoking both the Constitution and Senate rules, the remaining senators, 11 from the minority together with Escudero, constituted a quorum, arguing that the arrest of Estrada and the impending arrest of Dela Rosa reduced the Senate’s effective membership to 22, making 12 senators sufficient to conduct business.

The legal debate is important. But the larger issue is institutional.

The message being sent to the public is that the Senate, constitutionally entrusted with legislation, oversight, investigations, and the confirmation of key appointments, is increasingly unable to perform its basic functions because political factions are placing partisan considerations above institutional responsibility.

That perception matters.

Because while financial markets often appear indifferent to political controversies, they are never indifferent to institutional deterioration.

 

№ 816. Lessons from Lord of the Rings

 

 

A Harvard University Law professor stood at a podium last week and told the graduating class that their credentials were not their qualification. He did it without saying the sentence. He picked a hobbit instead.

The story most people will tell about Benjamin Sachs’s last lecture is that a professor surprised his audience by quoting Tolkien instead of Rawls. That is the charming version. The actual version is that a senior labor scholar at Harvard Law School chose, in front of the next generation of corporate attorneys, to hand them the smallest character in the trilogy as their model. He could have given them Aragorn. He gave them Frodo. The choice was the whole sermon.

 

№ 815. 2026 Mother's Day Movie: Remarkably Bright Creatures

Latter Day Saint Geeks

 

Growing older with Remarkably Bright Creatures

Shelby Van Pelt’s novel was the perfect way to start my next decade of life.

№ 814. Geofencing: Police Power v. Privacy Rights

 

 

Supreme Court Wrangles With Police Use of Cell Location Data to Find Suspects 

Geofence searches allow law enforcement to find suspects and witnesses by sweeping up location data from cellphone users near crime scenes.

 

Medium

№ 813. Waking Up to Quantum Dreams: China

 

 

Inside the China fitness club

How? Jörg Wuttke, a former longtime president of the E.U. Chamber of Commerce in China, calls it “the China fitness club,” and it works like this:

China starts with an emphasis on STEM education — science, technology, engineering and math. Each year, the country produces some 3.5 million STEM graduates, about equal the number of graduates from associate, bachelor’s, master’s and Ph.D. programs in all disciplines in the United States.

When you have that many STEM graduates, you can throw more talent at any problem than anyone else. As the Times Beijing bureau chief, Keith Bradsher, reported last year: “China has 39 universities with programs to train engineers and researchers for the rare earths industry. Universities in the United States and Europe have mostly offered only occasional courses.”

And while many Chinese engineers may not graduate with M.I.T.-level skills, the best are world class, and there are a lot of them. There are 1.4 billion people there. That means that in China, when you are a one-in-a-million talent, there are 1,400 other people just like you.

As important, Chinese vocational schools graduate tens of thousands of electricians, welders, carpenters, mechanics and plumbers every year, so when someone has an idea for a new product and wants to throw up a factory, it can get built really fast. You need a pink polka dot button that can sing the Chinese national anthem backward? Someone here will have it for you by tomorrow. It will also get delivered fast. Over 550 Chinese cities are connected by high-speed rail that makes our Amtrak Acela look like the Pony Express.

And when you relentlessly digitize and connect everything to everything, you can get in and out of your hotel room fast with just facial recognition. Tech-savvy beggars who carry printouts of QR codes can accept donations fast by the scan of a cellphone. The whole system is set up for speed — including if you challenge the rule of the Communist Party, in which case, you will be arrested fast, given the security cameras everywhere, and disappear fast.

If we don’t build a similar fitness club behind any tariff wall, we’ll get just inflation and stagnation. You cannot tariff your way to prosperity, especially at the dawn of A.I.

I was also in China four months ago. Between then and now, China’s A.I. innovators demonstrated their ability to grow their own open-source A.I. engine, DeepSeek, with far fewer specialized U.S. chips. I could feel the mojo in the tech community. It was palpable. Last month Premier Li Qiang said at the opening ceremony of the National People’s Congress that the Chinese government is supporting “the extensive application of large-scale A.I. models.”

A young Chinese auto engineer who once worked for Tesla here told me: “Now everyone is competing over how much A.I. is being inserted. Now you brag about how much A.I. you insert. Everyone is committed. ‘I will use A.I., even if I don’t know how right now.’ You are preparing for that, even if you are on a simple production line for manufacturing refrigerators. ‘I have to use A.I., because my boss told me to.’”

Attention, Kmart shoppers: When you already have a manufacturing engine as powerful and digitally connected as China’s and then you infuse it with A.I. at every level, it’s like injecting a stimulant that can optimize and accelerate every aspect of manufacturing, from design to testing to production.

Not a good time for U.S. lawmakers to be shunning visits to China for fear of being called panda huggers.

As Han Shen Lin, an American who works as the China country director for the Asia Group, put it to me over breakfast at Shanghai’s Peace Hotel, “DeepSeek should not have been a surprise.” But, he continued, with all the new U.S. “overseas investment restrictions and disincentives to collaborate, we are now blind to China tech developments. China is defining the tech standards of the future without U.S. input. This will put us at a serious competitive disadvantage in the future.”

 

 

№ 812. Railways to Our Future

Railways to Our Future

By: Cielito F. Habito - @inquirerdotnet

Philippine Daily Inquirer / 05:06 AM April 14, 2026

Finally, we’re seeing both the Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH) and the Department of Transportation (DOTr) publicly agree on a transport philosophy that upholds the primacy of commuters over cars. At least, that’s what DPWH Secretary Vince Dizon and DOTr Secretary Giovanni Lopez both declared on the same stage at the last general membership meeting of the Management Association of the Philippines. It would be a welcome departure from the car-centric approach that appears to have guided land transport planning and policy in our country over the past decades.

Car-centricity may not have been explicit in past government plans or policy documents, but was nonetheless evident in how public investments favored road construction and repair over the wide provision of public mass transport facilities, especially by rail. For instance, I’ve long considered it a mortal sin that our transport authorities deliberately missed connecting the Metro Manila mass rail transit system to the airport, even with the train depot of LRT-1 lying right beside the domestic air terminal. A transport official back then privately admitted to me the simple reason: the taxi industry strongly lobbied against the airport link. It amounted to favoring cars (as taxis) over mass transport. More disgusting was how it put the vested interests of a few (taxi operators) over the greater good of the many (the riding public), in a patently antipeople move.

Car-centricity also shaped the national vision embodied in Ambisyon Natin 2040, which included the average Filipino family’s aspiration to own a private vehicle—no doubt influenced by the prevailing context of a highly inadequate public transport system. This expressed aspiration might not have been so prominent had mass transport not been the punishing ordeal it has commonly been and continues to be. And as seen in most world capitals, central to convenient and extensive mass transport systems is rail transport, of which we have woefully little.

London today reportedly has 491 kilometers (km) of urban commuter rail lines, while New York has 399, Tokyo 337, and Seoul 327. Closer to home, our neighboring Asean capitals, Kuala Lumpur, Singapore, Bangkok, and Jakarta have 205, 241, 280, and 396 km, respectively. In terms of population density, London has about 28,500 people per km of commuter rail line, New York has 21,300; Tokyo 41,500; Seoul 29,400; Kuala Lumpur 10,300, Singapore 25,700, Bangkok 40,700, and Jakarta 27,000. For Metro Manila, it’s a measly 52 km of rail lines from LRT-1, LRT-2, and MRT-3 combined, for a density of 269,000 people per km. Even just aiming for 40,000 people per km, similar to Tokyo and Bangkok, Metro Manila should have at least 350 km of urban commuter rail lines, about 300 km more than what it has today. But if we aim for the more typical density of 30,000 people per km, we should really have 467 km, or nine times what we have today.

Japan, known to be among the top railway-capable countries worldwide, has long helped us develop our rail transport system, having in fact funded LRT-2 and the rehabilitation of MRT-3. It funds most of the ongoing 33-km, 17-station Metro Manila Subway Project (MMSP) from Valenzuela to Bicutan, branching to the Ninoy Aquino International Airport Terminal 3, thereby belatedly providing a railway link to the airport. Along with it is the 147-km, 36-station North-South Commuter Railway (NSCR) to run from New Clark City to Calamba, Laguna, also partly funded by the Asian Development Bank. The Japan International Cooperation Agency (Jica) has extended 727.8 billion yen in loans (around P300 billion) for MMSP since it broke ground in early 2019, and is contributing 786 billion yen (around P340 billion) for NSCR. Both projects have suffered repeated delays due to persistent and exasperating right-of-way issues. Then came the legislators who infamously shifted budget allocations for foreign-assisted projects to unprogrammed appropriations to give way to their questionable pet projects, thereby impeding budget releases for and stalling these crucial projects further. While both MMSP and NSCR were earlier planned to be partially operational by 2022 and fully operational by 2027 to 2028, DOTr now aims for completion in 2032, with more in the pipeline.

Jica’s assistance toward our railway-enabled future included grant assistance to establish and operate the Philippine Railway Institute, a facility aimed to train over 15,000 personnel to support the coming new rail facilities. This complements Japan’s assistance on the hardware with assured “peopleware” to manage, operate, maintain, and sustain them.

If Dizon and Lopez will be true to their words, Filipino city dwellers can look forward to a future of more livable cities. But don’t hold your breath just yet. 

 

 

 

№ 811. Semana Santa 2026: Marilou Diaz-Abaya

 

 

№ 810. The Adolescence of Technology: Confronting and Overcoming the Risks of Powerful AI

Calvin & Hobbes

 

 

By Dario Amodei

 

January 2026

There is a scene in the movie version of Carl Sagan’s book Contact where the main character, an astronomer who has detected the first radio signal from an alien civilization, is being considered for the role of humanity’s representative to meet the aliens. The international panel interviewing her asks, “If you could ask [the aliens] just one question, what would it be?” Her reply is: “I’d ask them, ‘How did you do it? How did you evolve, how did you survive this technological adolescence without destroying yourself?” When I think about where humanity is now with AI—about what we’re on the cusp of—my mind keeps going back to that scene, because the question is so apt for our current situation, and I wish we had the aliens’ answer to guide us. I believe we are entering a rite of passage, both turbulent and inevitable, which will test who we are as a species. Humanity is about to be handed almost unimaginable power, and it is deeply unclear whether our social, political, and technological systems possess the maturity to wield it.

In my essay Machines of Loving Grace, I tried to lay out the dream of a civilization that had made it through to adulthood, where the risks had been addressed and powerful AI was applied with skill and compassion to raise the quality of life for everyone. I suggested that AI could contribute to enormous advances in biology, neuroscience, economic development, global peace, and work and meaning. I felt it was important to give people something inspiring to fight for, a task at which both AI accelerationists and AI safety advocates seemed—oddly—to have failed. But in this current essay, I want to confront the rite of passage itself: to map out the risks that we are about to face and try to begin making a battle plan to defeat them. I believe deeply in our ability to prevail, in humanity’s spirit and its nobility, but we must face the situation squarely and without illusions.

As with talking about the benefits, I think it is important to discuss risks in a careful and well-considered manner. In particular, I think it is critical to:

• Avoid doomerism. Here, I mean “doomerism” not just in the sense of believing doom is inevitable (which is both a false and self-fulfilling belief), but more generally, thinking about AI risks in a quasi-religious way.¹ Many people have been thinking in an analytic and sober way about AI risks for many years, but it’s my impression that during the peak of worries about AI risk in 2023–2024, some of the least sensible voices rose to the top, often through sensationalistic social media accounts. These voices used off-putting language reminiscent of religion or science fiction, and called for extreme actions without having the evidence that would justify them. It was clear even then that a backlash was inevitable, and that the issue would become culturally polarized and therefore gridlocked.² As of 2025–2026, the pendulum has swung, and AI opportunity, not AI risk, is driving many political decisions. This vacillation is unfortunate, as the technology itself doesn’t care about what is fashionable, and we are considerably closer to real danger in 2026 than we were in 2023. The lesson is that we need to discuss and address risks in a realistic, pragmatic manner: sober, fact-based, and well equipped to survive changing tides. 

• Acknowledge uncertainty. There are plenty of ways in which the concerns I’m raising in this piece could be moot. Nothing here is intended to communicate certainty or even likelihood. Most obviously, AI may simply not advance anywhere near as fast as I imagine.³ Or, even if it does advance quickly, some or all of the risks discussed here may not materialize (which would be great), or there may be other risks I haven’t considered. No one can predict the future with complete confidence—but we have to do the best we can to plan anyway.

• Intervene as surgically as possible. Addressing the risks of AI will require a mix of voluntary actions taken by companies (and private third-party actors) and actions taken by governments that bind everyone. The voluntary actions—both taking them and encouraging other companies to follow suit—are a no-brainer for me. I firmly believe that government actions will also be required to some extent, but these interventions are different in character because they can potentially destroy economic value or coerce unwilling actors who are skeptical of these risks (and there is some chance they are right!). It’s also common for regulations to backfire or worsen the problem they are intended to solve (and this is even more true for rapidly changing technologies). It’s thus very important for regulations to be judicious: they should seek to avoid collateral damage, be as simple as possible, and impose the least burden necessary to get the job done.⁴ It is easy to say, “No action is too extreme when the fate of humanity is at stake!,” but in practice this attitude simply leads to backlash. To be clear, I think there’s a decent chance we eventually reach a point where much more significant action is warranted, but that will depend on stronger evidence of imminent, concrete danger than we have today, as well as enough specificity about the danger to formulate rules that have a chance of addressing it. The most constructive thing we can do today is advocate for limited rules while we learn whether or not there is evidence to support stronger ones.⁵