AI-assisted teaching is the reform, not the threat Shift assessment from answer-hunting to reasoning and disclosure Train every teacher and set simple norms so AI boosts equity and learning A single statistic should reframe the

Undersea cable security is now core education infrastructure in Southeast Asia Taiwan’s 2025 cable disruptions show how gray-zone incidents can cut classes, exams, and research ASEAN must build redundancy and protect its seabed links

A DNA search engine replaces lists with graph-native matching MetaGraph proves scalable, fast, accurate, and low-cost sequence search Education should adopt path-based search with strong data governance Public archives now hold

AI tongue diagnosis turns a centuries-old check into fast, cheap triage With phones and clear protocols, it flags likely risks for confirmatory tests Deploy in primary care with consent, calibration, and monitoring to scale safely

Smartphone bans offer a blueprint for AI policy in schools Use age-tiered access, strict privacy, and teacher oversight Evaluate results publicly to protect attention, equity, and integrity Let's begin with a significant figu

AI energy use is rising, but efficiency per task is collapsing Education improves outcomes by optimizing energy usage and focusing on small models.Do this, and costs and emissions fall while learning quality holds The key fig

AI is collapsing routine “middle” software work as adoption soars Schools must teach systems thinking, safe AI use, and verification-first delivery Employers will favor small, senior-led teams; therefore, curricula must reflect this reality

Real-time data can mislead because overload and autocorrelation turn noise into policy Treat fresh numbers as estimates: blend vintages (replay-style), weight by revision risk, and require causal identification Teach revision-aware literacy and measure decisions by how well they age, not how fast they react

babies is inevitable—focus on smart guardrails, not bans Mandate strict privacy, proven developmental claims, and designs that boost caregiver–infant serve-and-return Advance equity with vetted, prompt-only co-play tools in public settings and firm vendor standards

China’s R&D surge and alliance politics are reshaping global education Export controls and demographics redirect students and research Universities must hedge, manage openness, and diversify Here is the number that shou

Europe’s schools rely on foreign AI infrastructure, creating vulnerability A neutral European stack with local compute and governance can secure continuity This ensures resilient, interoperable education under global tensions

The real risk isn’t the LLM’s words but the agent’s actions with your credentials Malicious images, pages, or files can hijack agents and trigger privileged workflows Treat agents as superusers: least privilege, gated tools, full logs, and human checks

AI translation reshapes the labor market, eroding low-skill roles while rewarding domain expertise Education must shift toward “language plus” skills—pairing translation with data, law, or health Policy should teach students to work with machines, not against them

Southeast Asia needs a maritime compact, not an Asian NATO Prioritize shared surveillance and coast-guard rules Outside partners support; ASEAN states lead

Tariffs framed as job protection often act instead as taxes on critical inputs Employment in U.S.

More value now courses through stablecoins and other crypto rails than most policy conversations acknowledge: the IMF’s 2025 analysis maps roughly $2 trillion in cross-border stablecoin flows in 2024, concentrated in North America and the Asia-Pacific, and significant relative to GDP in emerging regions. Meanwhile, FATF reports that a third of surveyed jurisdictions still lacked full Travel Rule legislation as of mid-2024, and even among adopters, supervision and enforcement lag.

A recent wave of coverage claimed that Reinforcement Learning (RL) had leaped pure math by navigating the notoriously thorny Andrews-Curtis landscape, downplaying long-term potential counterexamples and hinting – breathlessly – at tools that could one day predict stock crashes, pandemics, and even climate disasters years in advance. The research team made progress: by combining the RL standard with intelligent motion compression ("supermoves"), they found paths through cases that had resisted search for decades.

This article was independently developed by The Economy editorial team and draws on original analysis published by East Asia Forum. The content has been substantially rewritten, expanded, and reframed for broader context and relevance. All views expressed are solely those of the author and do not represent the official position of East Asia Forum or its contributors.

This article is based on ideas originally published by VoxEU – Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR) and has been independently rewritten and extended by The Economy editorial team. While inspired by the original analysis, the content presented here reflects a broader interpretation and additional commentary. The views expressed do not necessarily represent those of VoxEU or CEPR.