A new job and a new book chapter

It's been a while since I updated! I am now gainfully employed and no longer part of the informal economy. In July 2022 I joined Khazanah Research Institute full time as a Senior Research Associate. It is great. I enjoy the working environment, I enjoy my colleagues, and I now think about my years of work precarity in past tense. It is too early for nostalgia as yet.

What I appreciate the most, apart from having a stable routine and salary, is being in good company of other policy researchers - something that I didn't have much working independently. Gone are the days of banging my lone head on the room wall. I have a cubicle now and around it are other heads. It is fun listening to what the others are working on, and I also relish the opportunity of bouncing ideas with other researchers. Cautiously I remind myself that I'm still in a honeymoon phase where everything is new and shiny, but at the same time I'm just enjoying enjoying myself.

Another piece of news is that my book chapter with Digital Futures Lab and Konrad Adenauer Stiftung is out! The chapter is titled "To What Extent Does Malaysia’s National Fourth Industrial Revolution Policy Address AI Security Risks?", and you can download it here. On the book's microsite you can find a video summary of the chapter.

The abstract is as follows:

The National Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) Policy was launched in July 2021 as a guiding document for Malaysia’s direction in maximizing growth opportunities and mitigating potential risks arising from 4IR technologies. This chapter explores the policy to examine the extent to which Artificial Intelligence (AI) security risks are addressed, using the AI Security Map by Newman (2019) as a framework. In the policy, 4IR technologies including AI are seen through a techno-utopian lens, therefore its focus centres on rapid adoption rather than regulation and resilience. It is found that most of the policy initiatives focus on economic security and capacity building for the state, in order to keep up with the developmental race. Other areas of AI security such as the risks of unintended consequences or unsafe outcomes of AI, or risks of AI being used for malicious purposes, receive much less attention. However, as the N4IRP is still in its nascent stages of implementation, there is still room for its cross- ministerial governance structure to work on providing safeguards across different domains and sectors to achieve holistic and sustainable development.

Download the entire book here.