Ts Rushdi Abdul Rahim
President and Chief Executive Officer,
Malaysian Industry-Government Group for High Technology (MIGHT)
Artificial Intelligence (AI) dominates today’s strategic and intellectual discourse. From predictive algorithms to autonomous systems, AI is often cast as the protagonist, or antagonist of our collective future. But beneath the surface of this technological fascination lies a quieter, more corrosive force: indifference. Indifference is no longer just being passive. It has now become systemic. It is the normalisation of suffering, the erosion of empathy, and the strategic silence that allows injustice to unfold unchallenged. While AI may challenge our ethics, indifference dissolves them. In the architecture of tomorrow’s world, it is indifference and not artificial intelligence, that poses the greater existential threat. Indifference as a Systems Failure In foresight terms, indifference is a failure of attention. It is the blind spot in our scenario planning, the unmodeled variable in our simulations, the black elephant. It manifests not as a lack of data, but as a lack of care. And it is embedded in the very systems we rely on to shape the future. We see this in the way humanitarian crises are treated as background noise. In the way climate collapse is met with procedural delay. In the way AI itself is deployed, often without a moral foundation, it amplifies biases and disengagement. Indifference is not the opposite of action. It is the infrastructure of inaction.
