The Fiery Horse and the Future of Frontier Tech
From Innovation to Stewardship
Today marks the first day of the Lunar New Year, the beginning of the Year of the Fiery Horse. As we enter this new cycle, I wish everyone great joy and prosperity. May this year bring big happiness and boundless joy to you, your families and your communities.
As I understand it, in the Chinese zodiac tradition the Horse symbolises movement, independence and forward momentum. Fire is associated with the heart, especially with sovereignty and virtue. At its finest, Fire represents dynamism, spontaneity and illumination. Out of balance, it becomes restlessness, recklessness and destruction.
And as we kick-off this new Year, I’m reflecting on how the Fiery Horse might inspire us in the tech governance space, particularly as we confront the governance of frontier technologies, mitigating their negative externalities and heading off the worst inclinations driving superintelligence.
Just work with me here. :-)
The evolution of frontier technologies that we are all experiencing, especially the accelerating push toward artificial general intelligence and superintelligence, is being driven largely from the Global North, and predominantly from the United States. The values embedded in this technological acceleration are neither broadly representative nor are they universally shared. And as we know from recent American history, few guardrails are in place and few are seen on the American horizon.
For decades, the world was told by tech evangelists in Silicon Valley that rapid technological innovation would bring us closer together, democratise opportunity, and deliver widespread prosperity. Instead, many societies now grapple with the externalities: misinformation that corrodes democratic institutions and destroys trust, surveillance capitalism that erodes privacy and autonomy, labour exploitation embedded in digital supply chains and public institutions and civil society forced to shoulder the cost of mitigating harms created elsewhere. All while those companies internalise the profits and power.
The promise of technological inevitability has too often masked this asymmetry.
Perhaps the Fiery Horse offers us a different way to think about this moment and this momentum. Maybe this new year gives us time to pause and shift gears.
Independence
The Horse is fiercely independent, moving under its own power.
For policymakers across the Global South, independence in technology governance means refusing to accept that regulatory actions (or inactions, as the case may be), business models and technological priorities should be imported wholesale from the North.
Independence means asserting that our societies have the authority and the intellectual capacity to define what responsible technology looks like in our own contexts. And importantly how we want that tech to be shaped by our societies, our values and our principals, rather than the other way around.
Independence requires shaping our own narratives and resisting the rhetoric of inevitability — the idea that we are in an unavoidable “AGI race,” that speed is paramount, that scale is the defining need.
Independence means we can openly and assertively ask: who decided that artificial general intelligence is humanity’s highest technological priority?
Forward Momentum
The Fiery Horse doesn’t sit still. It moves.
But remember, intentional movement is not the same as constant acceleration for its own sake.
Forward momentum in technology governance means advancing policy that reflects the values, cultures and needs of our societies, even when these conflict with the profit motives or libertarian impulses embedded in much of the current technology stack.
For too long, innovation has been largely framed as profit-seeking disruption (remember the “move fast and break things”?). What if we reframe it as civilisational stewardship?
If we do that, forward momentum might actually look like:
Building public-interest digital infrastructure.
Investing in domestic research ecosystems.
Prioritising AI justice and AI dignity — not only AI safety.
Aligning technological development with social cohesion, planetary health and human flourishing.
The Fiery Horse challenges us to seek innovation guided by meaningful purpose.
Sovereignty
Fire is associated with the Heart, and subsequently with sovereignty.
There may be no more urgent conversation for governments across the Global South and among middle powers than how to exert sovereignty over the foreign technologies that are reshaping their countries and societies.
The current digital order is characterised by structural asymmetries:
Infrastructure dependence on foreign cloud providers, chip manufacturers, and platforms.
Data extraction from populations without equitable value return.
Regulatory asymmetry, where harms are felt locally but governance power is concentrated elsewhere.
Narrative dominance, particularly the framing of a global “race” toward ever more powerful AI systems, where hesitation is characterised as proof of backwardness.
You see the picture: snowballing digital colonialism. The idea of sovereignty in this reality means asserting agency, not isolationism.
Sovereignty also means developing local knowledge ecosystems where we can build regulatory expertise that is rooted and constantly informed by lived experience. We can embed cultural wisdom and historical insight into the way technology is governed.
As an intellectual anchor, Asia has deep traditions of relational thinking, balance, social harmony and moral responsibility. These are not relics of old imperial histories. They are resources for the current generations.
Virtue
Fire, when balanced, illuminates. But when unbalanced, it burns and hurts.
I’ve seen how the race toward artificial general intelligence is often framed as an engineering challenge or a competitive sprint. But it is fundamentally a moral question. If technology governance lacks virtue, then any amount of dynamism becomes nothing but recklessness.
Virtue in this context means having a moral lighthouse and remembering that technology exists to serve human societies, never the other way around. The same sense of virtue forces us to consider some key questions:
Does this system enhance human dignity?
Does it strengthen communities?
Does it support the good life?
Or does it primarily concentrate power and profit?
Virtue requires courage. The courage to slow down when necessary, to regulate, to invest in public capacity rather than outsource responsibility. The courage that bolsters virtue helps us reject narratives that equate restraint with weakness.
A Year to Reset
So as I’ve been thinking about this, maybe the Year of the Fiery Horse really does offer us a symbolic invitation.
Independence — to define our own priorities.
Forward momentum — to move with purpose.
Sovereignty — to reclaim agency.
Virtue — to illuminate the path ahead with our moral lighthouse.
