• DIALOGUE WITH TUN MAHATHIR
customary dry wit. The former premier
and Honorary President of Perdana
Leadership Foundation explained that
while the MSC may have missed some
of its loftier goals of transforming
Cyberjaya into a Silicon Valley of Asia, it
has been successful in its main pur-
pose of raising awareness of the inter-
net’s commercial potential, generating
new jobs in the IT industry, attracting
multinationals to Malaysian shores, and
spurring the growth of new sectors of
business.
Certainly, for the majority of the audi-
ence who were under-35 and catego-
rised by the dialogue’s moderator, Mr
Eddin Khoo, as “Dr Mahathir’s children”
in that they grew up in a Malaysia
shaped by his policies, the thought of
a world without the Internet is unfath-
omable. Mr Khoo, though, who heads
Pusaka which seeks to preserve Malay
traditional culture, furnished some
needed skepticism towards technology
and its oft-lauded benefits by posing
a more philosophical question to Tun:
Isn’t technology also capable of great
harm and evil?
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PERDANA MAGAZINE 2017
“It’s up to you to
decide whether to use
technology to bomb
people, or to deliver
goods. It is the human
character that counts.
Technology is a tool,
and like any other tool,
whether it is harmful or
beneficial depends on
the people who use it.”
“Of course,” was the statesman’s re-
sponse. “It depends on the user. There
have been abuses enabled by technol-
ogy. With the (binary numbers) 1 and
0, we can communicate across thou-
sands of miles, do a lot of things, and
in future, maybe even program robots
to do things for us. But this technology
also makes it easier for us to murder
people. For example, it is now entirely
possible to fly an aeroplane loaded
with bombs without a human pilot,
and have the plane drop the bombs
on unfortunate people. On the other
hand, Amazon has used the same
technology to deliver goods to people.
So, it’s up to you to decide whether to
use technology to bomb people, or to
deliver goods. It is the human character
that counts. Technology is a tool, and
like any other tool, whether it is harm-
ful or beneficial depends on the people
who use it.” Other instances of dangers
were drawn, including fake news, cyber
hacking, pornography, and bitcoin theft.
It was human nature, then, that defines
the good or bad of technology, just as
human nature has been the defining
variable for the progress and regress of
the world since ancient times. In short,
while great changes abound, and rap-
idly too, the centre remains: people.
Given the centrality of human nature
in the use of technology, Tun stressed
on the importance of moral character
in the cyber-age. Moral education is
key to any education curriculum, he
emphasized, and leaders in particular
need to adhere to high moral codes.