Why I’m Writing Now

I turned 40 last year. I’ve been around computers for most of my life: MS-DOS, Linux in the 90s, teenage tech jobs, school computer privileges revoked after I hacked the network and published a how-to guide about it. Technology has been the through-line of my life for three decades. And yet I’ve published very little in public.

I’ve always had opinions, generally pretty strong ones. I’ve written notes, articles, arguments, and general thoughts in journals and apps. But they stayed private. I would talk myself out of publishing anything, or taking a public stand, because why me? What did I have to meaningfully contribute to the conversation? What credentials did I have to lend weight and authority to my thoughts?

I watched weaker arguments with thinner sourcing travel farther than my private drafts, gaining traction and distracting from the real issues. My silence and personal rigor contributed nothing and helped no one.

A few things changed the calculus of hesitation and silence for me. I’ve been living and working in the Philippines for 16 years now. It is, essentially, my adopted country. My daughter has lived here her whole life. The most successful portion of my career has been here. I’ve built a life I enjoy and am proud of here.

As AI has advanced since the ChatGPT moment, I’ve watched the local ecosystem continue to bank on the BPO industry while still struggling with the same execution problems that have slowed so many national transitions here. Yet the conversations around AI and the industry that powered the Philippine growth story of the last three decades felt woefully inadequate for the scale of the risk and change.

This is a subject where my background actually gives me standing: technology, local company-building, services businesses, AI, and the Philippine market all overlap here.

I’ve helped build over a dozen businesses locally in and around this space. I track the markets religiously and am a bit of a policy wonk. I’ve been a technologist since I first touched MS-DOS. I may not be Filipino, but this is a place I care about, and it will be heavily impacted by a topic I am intimately familiar with and passionate about.

Too much of what I saw on LinkedIn was naked optimism about BPO growth or generic AI hype. Too much of the policy conversation focused on protecting the seats the country is already selling. Too much of the industry conversation stopped at headline growth numbers.

I did not see the piece that said plainly what seemed obvious after running the models: the risk is structural, not cyclical.

So I had to write it.

The risk is that AI compresses the value of the labor-arbitrage model before the Philippines has built enough owned capability — domestic firms, IP, technical infrastructure, and strategic leverage — to capture the next layer of value. I won’t rehash the full argument here; I’ve laid it out in the Philippine AI Transition series, starting with From Rented Labor to Owned Capability.

What was absolutely critical to me was approaching the topic pragmatically, with an honest evaluation of the evidence, holding myself to rigorous standards while still taking a stand. I’m not an AI doomer. Nor am I a pure techno-accelerationist. The technology we’re seeing develop can create enormous new capability, but it can also cause real harm.

So why am I writing now?

Because silence has a cost.

Not every opinion I have deserves space on a page. But when you understand something that can hurt people, especially people you care about, and the public conversation is still dancing around the obvious risk, I believe you have an obligation to say and do something about it.

And so I’m going to write about what AI does to work here, who has leverage, who doesn’t, and what it would take for the Philippines to own more of its future.

That is why I’m writing now: not because I finally feel fully authorized or credentialed, but because the cost of silence started to feel larger than the risk of being wrong in public.