“HUMANITY IN A HUMAN-MACHINE CIVILISATION” PUBLIC LECTURE BY THE HONOURABLE DATO’ SERI ANWAR IBRAHIM PRIME MINISTER OF MALAYSIA AT THE RESEARCH CENTRE FOR ADVANCED SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY (RCAST) UNIVERSITY OF TOKYO 10 JUNE 2026

“HUMANITY IN A HUMAN-MACHINE CIVILISATION”

PUBLIC LECTURE BY

THE HONOURABLE DATO’ SERI ANWAR IBRAHIM

PRIME MINISTER OF MALAYSIA

 AT THE

RESEARCH CENTRE FOR

ADVANCED SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY (RCAST)

UNIVERSITY OF TOKYO

10 JUNE 2026

Distinguished guests,

Ladies and gentlemen,

 It is a privilege to be at the University of Tokyo and at the Research Centre for Advanced Science and Technology.

For generations, this university has nurtured some of Japan’s finest minds: scholars, scientists, writers, public servants, engineers and leaders who helped shape the modern life of this nation. To speak here is therefore a great honour.

Let me begin with one of the great modern voices of Japanese poetry, Masaoka Shiki, who believed that poetry should keep faith with real life, with what the eye sees and the heart recognises.

That is a useful reminder in our own age. Machines can now produce fluent language, beautiful images and confident answers. AI can compose melodious music and simulate the human voice crooning in perfect pitch. Yet the harder task remains ours: to see clearly, to judge carefully, and to ask what becomes of human beings when our tools begin to imitate so much of human expression.

Our concern today is the human meaning of Artificial Intelligence: how we live with systems that can learn from us, speak to us, advise us and, act for us.

This is nothing new for Japan for it has asked this question for many years: in its factories and laboratories, in its long experience with robotics, and in a culture that understands the importance of authenticity and history.

Malaysia brings its own experience to this conversation. Ours is a trading nation, long accustomed to working across languages, cultures and systems. We are already part of the semiconductor supply chain, and we have set ourselves the goal of becoming an AI Nation by 2030.

And there’s the rub: Beyond the slides and presentations and the PR razzmatazz, what does “becoming an AI nation” really mean? To my mind, this question transcends borders, certainly beyond our two nations. And Asia cannot enter the age of artificial intelligence only as a market, a manufacturing base and a source of data.

We must help shape a digital civilisation worthy of humankind. The question is: What does such a civilisation entail? Mankind has been modernising at a rapid pace, employing new jargon of technology and progress with a vengeance. Yet, are we witnessing any real changes being made to the state of human affairs?

The gross inequalities of civilisation continue to persist, the dehumanisation of society moves on at an even more aggressive pace with the eruption of military conflicts and outright wars while the savagery and barbarism of certain peoples and entities not only continue but have exacerbated.

As we stand on the precipice of a massive technological paradigm shift supposedly signifying mankind’s great advancement, these stark realities continue to stare us in the face: the genocide in Gaza, the brutal massacre of school girls in Iran even as they scramble for cover, the incessant bombardment and wanton destruction of Lebanon, and the energy crisis unleashed by the closure of the Strait of Hormuz.

To a great extent, the bitter irony is that these atrocities are effectively enabled by the advent of the digital revolution. Particularly, the great strides of AI. Can we in good conscience make the claim that such advancements are worthy of humankind?

“The Space Between Persons”

There is no doubt that technologies have their good side as well, and we have seen how they have altered the path of civilisation: from irrigation of human settlement to the steam engine and the dynamics in speed and scale. Hence, today, a journey that once demanded planning around the day could now be fitted into the hour. That is efficiency par excellence via technology. But AI cannot be treated as a question of efficiency alone. It is becoming a powerful mediator of human intention.

Moral philosopher Watsuji Tetsurō throws light on the word ningen (人間) and postulates the imperative for “human relationality.” The two characters carry a suggestion: the person, and the space between persons. A human being is never a solitary figure standing apart from the world. We are born into relation. We are shaped by family, by community, by history, and by the affections that pass between one life and another.

Nevertheless, in today’s discourse, our focus is that space is now being entered by systems that can mimic human interaction with extraordinary ease and fluency. But that fluency can be a dangerous disguise.

 A machine may produce words of comfort without knowing grief, or draft an apology without having wronged another. It may conjure an image of beauty without having stood before the sea and witnessed the golden hour of twilight. But it will never watch a parent grow old, or feel the silence after loss.

Shakespeare gives us the deeper test in King Lear: “Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.” Undeniably, LLMs can learn what ought to be said. What they cannot do is speak from the wound, the affection or the remorse that gives human speech its moral weight. Indeed, fervent advocates of agentic AI contend that the solution to this is already on the horizon, if not already realised. That to my mind still falls within the arena of conjecture.

A human-machine civilisation must therefore be judged by more than intelligence. Indeed, it must be judged by whether human beings remain capable of care, responsibility and judgement in the presence of systems that can imitate them.

Work, Dignity and Humanity

Distinguished guests,

Ladies and gentlemen,

The first place where many people will feel AI-induced change is work. Now, while human beings have adapted to job disruptions triggered by powerful technologies before, today we are looking at an unprecedented paradigm shift. Where before it was predominantly a case of automation of manual labour, now it is about autonomous cognitive and decision-making tasks, denigrating the human role from one of origination to mere curation, and of production to mere supervision.

But ultimately, the fundamental question is: has the advent of AI taken us on a path of real advancement or caused us to double down on our imperfections and inequities? Do we want the advent of AI to fortify the excesses and wrongdoings that have been perpetrated in the name of progress and material growth? Do we continue to be blindsided by the self-referential statistics of so-called human advancement? These are not academic postulations. These questions hit us directly once we lift the mask of “technological advancement” and face the stark realities of our lived experiences.

 Indeed, AI will continue to render work more efficiently. But this comes at the price of diminishing critical thinking, eroding the life of the mind, and aggravating the loss of human compassion. Truth be told, the ruthless pursuit of efficiency, without more, may well strip away our very humanity. What would become of the espousal of traditional values such as empathy or consideration for others, which we well know as “Omoiyari”?

Let us not forget that work is also about dignity, agency and trust. If people feel that the future of work is being decided by firms they do not know, models they cannot see, and markets that move faster than public institutions, then the question becomes political as much as economic. The clichéd answer is invariably thrown back to us: It is said that this is inevitable because we cannot slow down, let alone stop, the march of modern civilization.

But to my mind, this is seeking recourse to convenient excuses because we are not prepared to face the inconvenient truth. Can we justify being preoccupied with this new obsession even as we persist to turn a blind eye to the gross social inequities and the expanding gap between the powerful and the weak? Why do we continue to accept as normal the exploitation of man by man because of technological superiority of one over the other?

Deep down, this poses an existential conundrum. Even before the AI tsunami, Nobel laureate Yasunari Kawabata warns that the unbridled pursuit of materialistic indulgence, much associated with the ascent of modernisation, could well throw humanity into “shock, trauma, psychological, and spiritual isolation.”

This is why some forms of work deserve particular care: teaching, nursing, medicine, craft, the patient work of listening to another human being. Undoubtedly, AI can assist much in this regard, but we must not allow it to impoverish the human experience.

Knowledge, Trust and Power

 Distinguished guests,

Ladies and gentlemen,

The university reminds us of another question: knowledge. Every civilisation depends on institutions that help human beings know the world with some measure of confidence: a university, a library, a court, a newspaper, a public archive. None is perfect. But together they give society a way of testing claims, preserving memory and passing judgement across generations.

 AI enters this world with extraordinary power. But knowledge is not the same as the mere retrieval of information. Understanding is not the same as summary for, as T.S. Eliot reminds us, not only is the knowledge lost in all that information, even wisdom may be lost in all that knowledge.

It is in this sphere, that I believe universities can and must contribute to ensuring that we stay on the path towards wisdom. It cannot be overstressed that the true value of education is character building: compassion, kindness, integrity, generosity, and understanding in people, particularly the young. I truly believe that this is a universal value that readily resonates with all of us.

There is also the question of AI’s relationship with power. The systems that shape this new world require data, chips, energy, cloud infrastructure, talent and capital. These are not distributed evenly. In fact, it is clear that globally, the digital divide is widening, not shrinking. A small number of countries and corporations hold great influence over the models, platforms and standards that others must use.

Some technology companies have begun to speak in the language of civilisational mission: war, national destiny, strategic rivalry and the future of democracy. They build systems for armed forces and intelligence agencies, and their platforms increasingly help states see patterns, sort risks and make decisions under pressure.

There is no gainsaying that states have legitimate security needs, and no serious government can or should ignore the capabilities that new technologies provide. But these companies go further, contending openly that advanced software and artificial intelligence are not meant to be harnessed for altruistic purposes. On the contrary, they need to be weaponised to serve geopolitical interests.

This should certainly give us pause, for when the language of civilisational competition becomes embedded in technologies, it breeds cultural superiority and fosters greater digital divide even as we should ask what else is being embedded with it. A platform offered as a tool may begin to carry the deeper logic of dominion: who sees, who decides, who sets the terms, and who must live within them.

Malaysia does not seek isolation. We know that technology grows through exchange, and that no country can build the future alone. But we do not wish to see great-power rivalry carried into every layer of digital life. We do not want an AI order in which every platform becomes a camp, every standard becomes a flag, and every dependency becomes a silent act of alignment.

Sovereignty is not just about ownership. It is about the capacity to engage the world without being absorbed by it. It is the ability to understand the systems we use, to set the rules, to protect our people from their misuse. Above all, it is about preserving the authority and setting the accountability of public institutions over society.

Malaysia, Japan and the Human Purpose of AI

For Malaysia, AI must answer to development: raising productivity, improving public services, supporting teachers, doctors, farmers, engineers and civil servants, and helping us prepare for an ageing society before those needs overwhelm us. We must resist treating AI policy as a race measured only by speed, efficiency, and scale. The better ambition is capability: talent, infrastructure, data governance and the confidence to decide where AI should be used, where it should be limited, and where human judgement must remain paramount.

Artificial intelligence will continue to advance. But it does not arrive with its purposes already written. Those purposes will be shaped by human beings, by our laws, our institutions, our markets, our universities and our moral courage. The question is whether we will guide this power with wisdom before it begins to guide too much of us, or worse, before it reaches that tipping point where its capabilities and growth rate are beyond human comprehension or control, posing an existential threat to humanity.

Ladies and gentlemen,

Let us be clear: We are no Luddites and we are all for embracing technological advancement. But if the machine is to enter our homes, our schools, our hospitals, our offices, our public institutions and even our imagination, then the challenge will indeed be formidable.

 The work before us is clear. We must build systems that serve human beings to enrich our humanity, not debase it, institutions that remain answerable to them, and societies that remember what no machine can inherit on our behalf: conscience, responsibility, integrity, and care for one another.

Thank you.