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Microsoft has spent years telling the world that artificial intelligence will remake work, medicine, and government. On a Monday morning at Asia Society, its president finally had to explain who’s supposed to clean up the mess if he’s wrong.

The Hon. Dr. Kevin Rudd AC – twice prime minister of Australia, now on his second tour as Asia Society’s president and CEO – opened with a joke about seniority. Asia Society: founded 1956. Microsoft: barely 50. Then the joke ended and the audit began. For the next hour, Rudd worked through Microsoft’s AI architecture layer by layer – infrastructure, models, data, apps – and at every layer asked some version of the same question: who’s accountable when this breaks?

Lulu C. Wang, Asia Society’s vice chair and global trustee, set the stakes before either man sat down, telling a room that included former president Josette Sheeran and trustee emerita Denise Tso that 75 years of institutional survival rests on one bet: conversation is worth having precisely when the stakes are highest and the outcome least certain.

Layer one: infrastructure. Data centers in more than 40 countries, originally built for video streaming and cloud storage, now repurposed to train frontier models. Layer two: the models – Microsoft’s own, plus OpenAI’s, Anthropic’s, and a fast-growing bench of Chinese competitors. Layer three, which Smith calls the ‘IQ layer’: your actual data – emails, docs, spreadsheets – the stuff that makes a model useful to you specifically, and has to be locked down exactly as hard as it gets used. Layer four: applications. Copilot. The thing most people think is AI, when really it’s just the visible tip.

It’s a clean org chart. It’s also a liability map with responsibility sliced four ways, so no single layer answers for the whole system. That got tested when Rudd pushed into the sharpest terrain of the morning: agents that, in Smith’s words, ‘break out, break in, cheat, lie’ – and what happens when a system starts improving itself faster than the company that built it, or any regulator watching it, can keep up.

Rudd asked for the highlight reel first. Smith wouldn’t play along with forecasting – ‘there’s no such thing as a crystal ball’ – and offered a spec sheet instead: wildfire cameras replacing watchtowers across California and the Australian bush; ambient AI that drafts a doctor’s notes during the appointment so the doctor can move to the next patient; radiology tools that catch lung cancer faster than a trained eye; a WhatsApp legal-translation tool built for Malawi, where roughly 700 lawyers cover the entire country and child marriage remains routine. All of it, he said, runs through an internal team called the AI for Good Lab, eight years old, working mostly with nonprofits.

The smallest example landed hardest: a self-built agent that runs every morning at 5 a.m. summarizing the 12 most important unanswered emails from the day before. He still prints it out. Asked where his own message would’ve ranked, he laughed: number three.

On safety, Smith reached for a hundred-year-old analogy. Around 1905, cars got fast enough to kill people at intersections. Nobody solved that by demanding car companies engineer the danger out of the vehicle – society built traffic lights and guardrails on the road instead. His argument: hyperscalers owe AI the same thing – monitoring agents, capping what they can spend so they don’t ‘burn up your AI bill without you knowing about it,’ building in kill switches at multiple levels – rather than dumping the entire safety job on the labs training the models.

Reasonable argument. Also convenient for a company that makes most of its AI money at the infrastructure layer, not the lab bench. Smith basically said as much, arguing Washington fixates on the handful of firms building frontier models and ignores everyone else in the pipeline.

On recursive self-improvement – a model training itself instead of being trained by people – Smith didn’t dodge it. ‘That makes most people pretty nervous,’ he said, calling for real rules on when it’s allowed and how a system heading off-course gets caught before it accelerates. He cited two data points: Anthropic opening its systems to third-party evaluators, and Accenture rolling out a business line built around human oversight of AI deployments. Watching the watchers, he said, is already becoming its own industry.

His best line came right after: nobody boards a plane without government inspection behind it, and nobody hesitates at a dairy case stocked with a dozen kinds of milk, because a shared health standard sits underneath every carton. ‘Do we really think,’ he asked, ‘that the most powerful technology on Earth is likely to be less regulated than a carton of milk?’

Before jobs, Rudd asked what parents in the room needed to hear. Smith opened with something close to an admission: the industry got ‘a little too exuberant’ about social media and phones in classrooms over the last 15 years, and the mental-health bill for kids came due. The response: a binding deal signed two weeks earlier with the American Federation of Teachers – 10 principles on safety, guardrails, privacy, and transparency to parents. The detail he kept circling back to: the tool finishes a task and stops, rather than keeping a kid glued to the screen instead of a teacher. It became legally binding across Microsoft’s school contracts on November 1, made public two hours after signing so competitors could be measured against it.

Rudd had his own gripe – as ‘an old-fashioned Australian country boy,’ he’s bothered every time a chatbot calls itself ‘I.’ An ‘I’ is a person, he argued, not software. Smith agreed: ‘AI is an it, not an I,’ while conceding the industry hasn’t settled the terminology fight at all.

Rudd’s toughest question was about employment, and Smith’s first pass – dignity in work, a New York Times piece on retirees who keep volunteering – didn’t satisfy him. Rudd brought up a panel in Deer Valley where he’d watched AI executives run ‘a thousand miles’ from the question of where the next decade’s jobs actually come from.

Smith’s answer was a story about horses. He argued the combustion engine helped cause the Great Depression: fewer horses meant less demand for oats and hay, farmers switched to cash crops, overproduction tanked prices, farmers defaulted, rural banks failed, and the collapse spread until the whole system cracked – a shock nobody saw coming because nobody was tracking the horse population. Rudd, who steered Australia through 2008 with no existing playbook, used it to name what the conversation was circling: structural adjustment, and what government owes the people caught inside it – tying it straight to populism on both the left and right.

Smith’s own proposals stayed deliberately half-formed: the roughly 1,100 community colleges already positioned to retrain workers, and a note that employer investment in job training climbed from 1980 to 2000, as PCs entered offices, then flattened. He floated rethinking payroll taxes – a tax on human labor at the exact moment AI makes that labor easier to replace – while stopping short of backing a tax on AI usage itself, calling it premature but not off the table.

Microsoft’s Community First Infrastructure Initiative, launched in January, is meant to smooth friction between data-center build-outs and the towns absorbing them. Smith named five original commitments – electricity, water, taxes, jobs, local investment – plus a sixth that’s surfaced only in the last six months: noise. His case study was Quincy, Washington, host to Microsoft data centers for 20 years: poverty cut in half, population outgrowing Seattle’s, the best public high school building in the state, a new police station, fire station, and aquatic center – and, he joked, the traffic-light count going from one to two. He predicted state and national rules will eventually lock in electricity-rate protections and water-use limits, calling that outcome, despite corporate instincts to resist regulation, the thing that actually buys public trust.

Rudd’s last question came with a grin: ‘It’s Washington. You’re Donald Trump. I’m Xi Jinping.’ Smith kept it modest – sustain the dialogue the two leaders opened in Beijing in May, add technical experts, agree on what counts as a frontier model, trade best practices. Longer term, he wants China and America’s traditional allies at the same table, not a deal struck bilaterally and left there.

Asia Society billed this as four topics, roughly equal weight: artificial intelligence, technology policy, cybersecurity, and geopolitics. What filled the hour leaned hard into topic one and mostly skipped the other three.

Cybersecurity never got specific – Rudd’s opening on agents ‘autonomously attacking infrastructure’ was as sharp a question as the morning produced, and Smith’s answer swerved back to governance and kill switches instead of the actual threat landscape. Technology policy in the normal sense – antitrust, chip export controls, the competition scrutiny Microsoft itself is under – wasn’t mentioned once. Geopolitics showed up only in the last sixty seconds, as a joke instead of a real conversation about Taiwan or chip supply chains. Human rights, digital safety beyond schoolkids, and immigration – all listed under Smith’s own portfolio in his official bio – didn’t come up at all.

None of that makes the hour a bust. What actually happened – on jobs, structural adjustment, and the small-town politics of hosting a data center – went deeper than the flyer promised. What was advertised mostly waited for a session that never showed.

What earned the sold-out sign wasn’t a single headline-grabbing line. It was watching two guys pull in different directions and land somewhere in the middle – Rudd pushing toward the bigger structural and geopolitical stakes, Smith pulling it back to what Microsoft is already doing about them. Seventy-five years into a bet that conversation still matters, this one didn’t settle who’s accountable for the machine. It made clear the people closest to answering that question are still figuring out the vocabulary – one small town, one vanished horse population at a time.

A version of this question was on my own list had the floor opened to the audience: why not turn the tool loose on its own mess – ask the AI itself to model which jobs its disruption creates, and route displaced workers toward them, rather than leaving that mapping to policy debates that move at legislative speed? There was no QandA session at this event, so it went unasked. But it’s worth sitting with, because it exposes the soft spot in Smith’s own framework. He described a system capable of drafting doctors’ notes, screening radiology scans, and translating legal rights into WhatsApp messages for women in Malawi – plainly capable, in other words, of pattern-matching at scale. Turning that same capability on the labor market itself, forecasting where the ‘new jobs’ he kept promising will actually materialize, was never proposed by either man on stage. Whether that’s an oversight or a tell – a company more comfortable describing AI’s power in the abstract than pointing it directly at its own economic fallout – is exactly the kind of question a live QandA exists to press. This one never got the chance.

THE 2026 SportsPlus MPBL All-Star Festivities were held Saturday at the Ynares Center in Montalban, Rizal, featuring an exhibition game and a series of fan activities.

The North and South All-Stars battled to an 89-89 draw, while Joe Gomez de Liano took the spotlight in the Slam Dunk Competition.

Fans also took part in halftime games and giveaways, while the SportsPlus Clutch Time Challenge offered two contestants a chance to win P50,000 by completing four shots-a layup, free throw, 3-pointer and half-court attempt-in 45 seconds. Neither contestant advanced beyond the 3-point attempt.

SportsPlus, the official title partner of the MPBL, provided event production and fan activations during the festivities.

‘We are proud to be part of this year’s MPBL All-Star festivities,’ said SportsPlus Head of Brand Marketing Paul Macalindong.

PROVINCIAL and city bus operators have asked President Ferdinand R. Marcos Jr. to lift the suspension of a fare increase approved by the Land Transportation Franchising and Regulatory Board (LTFRB) earlier this year, warning that regulated fares no longer cover the cost of keeping buses on the road. However, the President is cool to the plea to allow it, worried by the impact on commuters already reeling from inflation.

In a letter coursed through Executive Secretary Ralph G. Recto, the Nagkakaisang Samahan ng Nangangasiwa ng Panlalawigang Bus sa Pilipinas Inc. (NSNPBPI), formerly the Provincial Bus Operators Association of the Philippines (PBOAP), said rising costs have already disrupted dispatches, forced layoffs, and delayed loan payments among its members.

‘The cost of increases of diesel, parts, toll and wages can no longer be absorbed by the bus operators as the regulated revenue is lower than the cost of operations,’ NSNPBPI Executive Director Alex Yague Jr. said in the letter.

The appeal calls for ‘the immediate lifting of the directive suspending the fare adjustment order’ approved by the LTFRB in March.

Concerned over the additional financial burden a fare hike will impose on commuters, President Marcos is ‘not inclined’ to support the said proposal for now, according to Malacañang.

Instead, the chief executive wants to keep providing support to PUV drivers and operators and other vulnerable sectors reeling from the high pump prices caused by the Middle East conflict.

‘At present, there is no real inclination [from the President] to raise fares for the public, but we are not closing the door to the possibility,’ Palace Press Office Claire Castro said in Filipino in a press briefing on Tuesday.

‘We are still pressing the government to explore other measures to assist drivers and transport operators without passing the burden on to commuters; a fare hike should ideally be our last resort,’ Castro said.

Currently, she said the Department of Transportation (DOTr) continues its measures to support the PUV through fuel discounts, free tolls for buses.

Castro said in the last Unified Package for Livelihoods, Industry, Food, and Transport (Uplift) Committee meeting last week, Executive Secretary Recto said the government has sufficient funds to sustain providing cash subsidy to transport groups through the Assistance to Individuals in Crisis Situation (AICS) of the Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD).

Another measure being considered by the government, Castro said, was the suspension or reduction of excise taxes on petroleum products.

This, after the Department of Energy (DOE) issued a certification that the price of crude oil has already breached the US$80 dollar per barrel two weeks ago, allowing the suspension or reduction of the said excise taxes under the Republic Act No. 12316.

Castro said the President is just waiting for the recommendation of the Development Budget Coordination Committee (DBCC) before he decides on the matter.

‘We have received an update regarding that, and their recommendation is nearing completion; most likely, they will be able to submit it to the President by this week,’ she said.

To recall, not even a full day since it was approved Mr. Marcos ordered the suspension of the fare adjustments, citing the effects of increased fares to provide relief to commuters.

Under the suspended approved adjustments, the minimum fare for traditional jeepneys rises by P1 – from P13 to P14 – with the per-kilometer rate increasing from P1.80 to P2.

Modern jeepneys will see a steeper P2 hike, bringing the minimum fare from P15 to P17, while the succeeding-kilometer rate moves up by 10 centavos to P2.30.

For Metro Manila and city ordinary buses, the minimum fare for the first five kilometers increases by P2 – from P13 to P15 – with the per-kilometer charge rising from P2.25 to P2.49.

Air-conditioned city buses get a P3 hike to P18 for the first five kilometers, with succeeding kilometers rising from P2.65 to P2.98.

Provincial ordinary buses will see a P1 hike for the first five kilometers, with varying per-kilometer increases depending on bus type – 30 centavos for ordinary buses (P1.90 to P2.20), 35 centavos for air-conditioned deluxe and super deluxe buses (P2.10 to P2.45), and 45 centavos for luxury buses (P2.90 to P3.35).

Transport network vehicle services (TNVS) will have their base fares raised by P20 plus a P15 pick-up fee, pushing sedan base fares from P45 to P65, AUVs from P55 to P75, hatchbacks from P35 to P55, and premium TNVS from P145 to P165. Per-kilometer and per-minute charges remain unchanged.

Airport taxis see the largest proportional jump: the flag-down rate rises P40 – from P75 to P115 – though charges for succeeding distance and waiting time stay the same.

Overall, the adjustments reflect a 19 percent increase in fares across all regions.

Fuel spells 60 percent of costs

The operators said fuel now accounts for about 45 to 60 percent of their operating costs, while authorized fares have not kept up with the actual cost of service.

They also said land transport is at a disadvantage compared with other modes.

‘Airlines and sea transport operators may impose fuel surcharges in response to extraordinary fuel-price increases. Provincial and city buses cannot independently impose a similar surcharge,’ the groups said.

The operators also cited a tax problem. Passenger fares are not subject to value-added tax (VAT), but the fuel they buy is. Because fares generate no output VAT against which the VAT on fuel can be credited, operators said that tax ‘becomes part of our cost-a burden the bus operator must absorb.’

Modernization loans, wage hike

The groups said operators took out ‘substantial loans’ to modernize their fleets as the government required. They now carry the combined costs of fuel, modernization loans, spare parts, tires, maintenance, insurance, toll fees, and regulatory compliance.

They added that an impending wage increase would add further pressure.

‘We recognize that our employees deserve fair compensation. But higher wages must be supported by revenues sufficient to sustain both employment and operations,’ they said.

The operators stressed that they are not seeking government aid.

‘We are not asking the government for ayuda. We are not asking taxpayers to carry our businesses,’ the appeal read. ‘We are asking for a fair and sustainable fare that reflects the real cost of operating public transportation.’

‘Not a threat’

The groups said operators cannot raise fares on their own, impose a fuel surcharge, cut corners on safety or maintenance, or halt operations without risking the loss of their franchises.

‘This is not a threat to stop operations. This is a notice that operations may soon become impossible,’ they said.

The operators warned that if responsible operators are pushed into insolvency, commuters would face fewer buses, fewer trips, longer waits, and lost links between cities and provinces. Thousands of drivers, conductors, mechanics, and support staff would also lose their jobs.

‘We understand that fare adjustments affect commuters. But keeping fares artificially below the actual cost of service does not protect the public in the long term. It merely delays the crisis until operators can no longer deploy enough safe and roadworthy buses,’ they said.

The groups urged the government to ‘act now-before more buses can no longer leave their terminals.’

On September 23, the prosecution and defense are scheduled to argue before the Senate Impeachment Court over a short but difficult phrase in the Constitution: conviction requires ‘two-thirds of all the Members of the Senate.’ The Constitution also gives the Senate the ‘sole power to try and decide’ impeachment cases.

Before the Senate decides, return to September 16, when four former Supreme Court Justices-Hilario Davide Jr., Artemio Panganiban, Reynato Puno, and Adolfo Azcuna-were asked three questions: Who belongs among ‘all the Members’? What guidance does Avelino v. Cuenco provide? And may a senator-judge who did not attend or substantially participate nevertheless cast the final vote?

Their answers were more nuanced than three against one.

Davide: Can this senator act?

Panganiban: Can this senator judge fairly?

Puno: Can the impeachment court itself still try and decide?

Azcuna: Is this person still legally a senator who must therefore count?

First: Who belongs in ‘all the members’?

Davide begins with the individual senator’s qualification and ability to act.

Holding office does not end his inquiry. The senator must also be legally and physically qualified to perform the duties of senator-judge. ‘Legally able’ means no legal restraint prevents the exercise of senatorial powers. ‘Physically or actually able’ means mental or physical incapacity, health conditions, or comparable circumstances do not prevent performance of those duties.

His question is: Can this senator, in law and in fact, act as a senator-judge?

Panganiban looks at the individual senator differently. Being able to act is not enough. The senator must also have meaningfully engaged with the evidence.

He accepts that two-thirds of 24 is mathematically 16. But impeachment is not merely arithmetic. It is judgment. A senator-judge must know the evidence sufficiently to search for truth and decide fairly.

His question is: Has this senator learned enough from the case to judge truthfully and fairly?

Puno changes the scale of the inquiry.

Davide and Panganiban look mainly at the individual senator. Puno steps backward and looks at the impeachment court as a whole. The Constitution gave the Senate the power not merely to hear an impeachment case, but to try and decide it. Puno asks whether a rigid interpretation of ‘all the Members’ could prevent the court from completing that task. He also stresses that the Constitution says ‘two-thirds,’ not the fixed number 16.

Take a simple illustration. Suppose only 15 senators were legally able to function as senator-judges. If the denominator remained rigidly 24, conviction would still require 16 votes. But only 15 could vote. Conviction would be impossible even if all 15 voted to convict. One constitutionally possible judgment would be closed off before the evidence finally determined the result.

Puno does not say the denominator should shrink whenever senators are absent. Mere absence is not necessarily inability; an absent senator may still study transcripts, recordings, exhibits, and the record. His narrower point is that the rule should not be applied so mechanically that the impeachment court cannot complete its duty to try and decide.

His question is: Can the impeachment court itself still finish its constitutional job?

Azcuna begins from the opposite direction: continuing membership and the purpose of the supermajority.

If a person legally remains a senator, Azcuna says, that senator remains within ‘all the Members.’ The Constitution deliberately requires a supermajority for conviction. Impeachment may remove a high constitutional officer before the end of a fixed term; where that officer was elected, removal can displace an electoral mandate. For Azcuna, the high threshold protects against removal by a temporary or passing partisan majority.

That is why he insists upon a stable denominator. If absence or participation can reduce the number who count, the number needed for conviction may fall with it. The constitutional protection would shrink as well.

His question is: Is this person still legally a senator-and, if so, must that senator remain counted in the deliberately high supermajority?

Second: What does Avelino v. Cuenco tell us?

Avelino concerned Senate quorum, not an impeachment conviction threshold. None of the four treated it as an automatic answer.

Davide saw possible guidance by analogy. Puno called it an imperfect precedent because it involved different language and circumstances. Panganiban placed it within a broader line of jurisprudence. Azcuna drew the sharpest distinction: Avelino dealt with quorum, while impeachment expressly requires two-thirds of ‘all the Members.’

Put simply: Avelino may help the Senate think. It does not do the Senate’s thinking for it.

Third: Who may validly vote?

Davide distinguishes complete nonparticipation from imperfect participation. Failure to ask questions does not itself prove nonparticipation; a senator-judge may listen and reflect without constantly intervening. But never participating presents a different problem.

Panganiban stresses truth and fairness. If a senator has not put himself in a position to know the evidence and make a fair judgment, he questions whether that senator should vote.

Puno distinguishes absence from inability to judge. Personal attendance at every hearing is not indispensable if the senator can fairly decide from transcripts, recordings, exhibits, and the record.

Azcuna makes perhaps the cleanest separation: Who counts and who may vote are different questions. A senator may remain a legal member-and therefore remain in the denominator-while separately deciding whether the record has been studied sufficiently to cast a responsible vote.

More than five centuries ago in Florence, Michelangelo faced the block of marble from which emerged the magnificent sculpture of David. Constitutional interpretation is not sculpture. An interpreter cannot carve whatever figure imagination prefers. The constitutional text remains both material and boundary.

But fine interpretation, like fine carving, depends upon seeing where one line ends and another begins.

On September 16, four distinguished jurists examined the same constitutional marble. Their different cuts revealed more clearly the constitutional questions within it.

On September 23 or thereafter, the Senate must decide which lines the Constitution itself will bear.

Only then can it answer the arithmetic.

First it must answer: Who counts?

Dr. Pablo Trillana III is a lawyer, author, former Chairman of the National Historical Institute (now the National Historical Commission of the Philippines), and a lifelong student of Philippine history and Rizal studies.

THE Asian Development Bank (ADB) is proposing a new technical assistance program worth about $1 million for the Philippines and six other countries to address gender gaps in the energy and transport sectors, including women’s participation in jobs and leadership.

The proposed assistance, which will also cover Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, India, Sri Lanka and Timor-Leste, includes a regional component for cross-country work.

The Philippines is earmarked $25,000 under the program, according to the ADB.

According to the multilateral lender, the program will support participating countries through analytical work, policy advice, institutional support, capacity development, and assistance in project design and early implementation.

‘The support will address common constraints across energy and transport operations, including women’s limited participation in technical and leadership roles, institutional and workplace barriers to recruitment and career progression, and gaps in the accessibility, affordability, reliability, and safety of services for women,’ the Manila-based development bank noted in its project document.

The ADB expects the assistance to generate cross-regional evidence and strengthen policy dialogue on gender equality in the two sectors. It will also support the integration of inclusive approaches into energy and transport operations.

The proposed program will be financed by the ADB’s ‘technical assistance special fund,’ with India receiving the largest country allocation at $300,000. Uzbekistan follows with $195,000, Tajikistan with $145,000, Sri Lanka with $120,000, and Timor-Leste with $115,000 in country allocation.

The regional component has $200,000.

According to the ADB, the initiative is aligned with its energy policy and sector strategies, as well as the country partnership strategies and priorities of participating developing member countries.

The project has yet to move beyond the proposal stage, with the ADB granting concept clearance on June 30, 2026.

Rebecca Cyril Torres, Samantha Veguillas and Ysabelle Arrogante delivered a historic milestone at the Aichi-Nagoya 2026 Asian Games after they clinched a bronze medal in women’s team kata on Tuesday at the Aichi-Nagoya 20th Asian Games at the Toyohashi Gymnasium.

They beat Southeast Asian rival Thailand’s Ramitar Terananon, Monsicha Sakulrattanatara and Phatcharin Plangplai, 4-1, for the Philippines’s first-ever medal in team kata event in the Asian Games.

On Sunday, Princess Catindig, Noelle Mañalac and Christy Sanosa bagged bronze in soft tennis not only capturing the Philippines’s first medal in these games but also securing the sport’s first medal in the quadrennial multi-sport competition.

The Filipina karatekas set the tone early with a flawless 5-0 sweep of Cambodia’s Sreynuch Puthea, Oun Sreyda and That Chhenghorng, but went down to a 0-5 loss to powerhouse Iran in the semifinals.

‘We dared not think which team we were up against,’ Arrogante said. ‘What was important was we got the medal.’

The emotional triumph was the culmination of years of quiet sacrifice.

‘It has been a long journey. The team has been through so much,’ an emotional Torres said. ‘We suffered losses after losses over the years, but we kept on performing, fighting to the end.’

Adding fuel to their fire was the news they received just a day prior that the Philippines officially qualified for the Karate World Cup this November in Hangzhou.

‘We were inspired by that development and that rubbed off here [team kata],’ Arrogante said.

Head Coach Sonny Montalvo commended his athletes for their immense dedication, highlighting how the girls temporarily left their families and put their university studies on hold just to train.

The trio also credited their success to the unwavering support of their coaches and officials, specifically former Karate Pilipinas president the late Pocholo Veguillas, father of current president Richard Lim, also Team Philippines chef de mission in these games.

Karate has contributed consecutive bronze medals in the Asian Games starting with Junna Tsukii in Jakarta 2018 and Sakura Alforte in Hangzhou 2023.

Alforte, an individual kata specialist, missed this year’s Asiad due to a new ruling requiring all squad members to compete in the team event.