Opinion | How AI, quantum and space technologies will define the Asian century

History rarely announces its turning points. More often, we wake up to find that the world we assumed was fixed has begun to shift beneath our feet. That is happening now.

Artificial intelligence, quantum technologies and space infrastructure are advancing at a pace that stretches our political instincts – even our imagination. Each is transformative on its own. Together, they are becoming the new architecture of global power, an engine that will determine which nations shape the century ahead and which struggle to keep pace.

A senior Asian policymaker remarked recently, half-jokingly: “We’re not competing on GDP any more – we’re competing on brainpower.” He wasn’t wrong. But the subtext was darker: brains without guardrails can burn down the house. The room went quiet after he said it – not because people disagreed, but because everyone knew he’d named the game.

One way to see the stakes is through a modern echo of Alan Turing’s famous question, “Can machines think?” For decades, passing the Turing test sounded like a distant milestone. It isn’t. Earlier this year, a leading large language model convincingly cleared a close variant of Turing’s original imitation game, with human judges mistaking it for a person roughly three-quarters of the time.

That moment matters not because it proves silicon has a soul, but because it marks a psychological threshold: at scale, people can no longer reliably tell where human judgment ends and machine agency begins.