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Inequality, the Challenge for Asia
Asia has come a long way in the last 70 years. The region has experienced an unprecedented growth in prosperity, and while the West still accounts for the lion’s share of global GDP, the economic center of gravity has slowly but surely shifted east. Asia now accounts for about one-third of gross world product, with its share set to rise to more than half by 2050. Some have called this the “Asian Century,” but others might argue that Asia is merely reclaiming its trad...
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Technology's Impact on Asia's Rapid Ascent
In recent years, global growth has been fueled by Asia’s rapid economic development, with China and India leading the way. China is poised to surpass the U.S. as the world’s largest economy, and India is expected to become the third-largest economy by 2025. In the short term, however, Asia must address ongoing global trade tensions. A China-U.S. face-off could shape the global landscape for some time. The current trade war sees the two countries adopting very differe...
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Tomorrow's Economic Indicators Sit in Today's Classrooms
Millions of parents in low-income Asian communities live in fear that their children will miss out on a quality education. And as societies continue to rapidly urbanize, many are migrating to cities in search of better opportunities for their families. Yet once they arrive, they often find they’ve landed in a place where there are education haves and have nots. Due to the system that I refer to as the lottery of life, low-income kids often lack access to quality schoo...
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Be Agile to Thrive
Retaining agility and flexibility will be the biggest challenge facing businesses in Asia in the future. Some of Asia’s most famous recent success stories, such as China’s Alibaba and Tencent, have built massive multi-industry businesses by reinventing business models and embracing digital. This agility has enabled them to tear up the rule book. To be successful long-term, companies must make agility and change part of their DNA. Companies are already facing reduced...
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Southeast Asia's AI Moment
You’ve probably heard of Watson, the IBM supercomputer that famously beat Jeopardy! champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter in a 2011 exhibition match. Watson deserves credit for stoking the recent artificial intelligence frenzy, but one of the growing stars of the AI movement is Sophia, a humanlike robot developed by Hong Kong-based Hanson Robotics. Sophia has literally become the face of AI, appearing at industry events and on late-night television. I met her at the ...
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Preparing for the Future: Ready to Junk Hierarchy?
Call it my aha moment if you will—the other day, I watched in amazement as my two-and-a-half-year-old grandson keyed in the passcode to unlock the iPad. His finger swiped over the screen and for a moment, I thought he was going to skip the YouTube Kids app. I pre-empted him with a swift tap on the right app. It then dawned on me that someday, sooner than I perhaps thought, he will be the one in control and guiding me on where to find information, how to get things do...
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Towards a Mixed Society: The Dream of Humanity
As a computer scientist in the early eighties, I dreamt of automatons similar to those of the 18th century: a realistic sculpture representing an aesthetic human with the ability to sing, write and, for example, play a piano, which can be seen in museums around Switzerland. Inspired by these sophisticated automatons, I began to research virtual humans and, in 1987, for the first time in history, demonstrated a 3-D virtual Marilyn Monroe meeting with a 3-D Humphrey Bo...
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Investing for Immortality
A good financial investment can give you great returns and make you very rich. But it cannot buy you time. We all have finite time on this earth. A good diet, regular exercise, and healthy relationships can extend your life a bit; yet, whether after 50 years or 100, all must come to an end. This is the law of nature. But some people seem to defy time. Humanity remembers their names. As one walks the narrow streets of Florence, it is impossible to ignore their impact—...