Anna Mae Yu Lamentillo

For the past three years, I’ve practiced what the Japanese call shinrin-yoku or forest bathing — unhurried walks in the woods, simply breathing, listening, and being present. I don’t go to set a personal record or reach a peak. I go to feel human again. Those hours among the trees have done wonders for my personal wellbeing: my thoughts slow down, my heartbeat follows the rhythm of the forest, and my worries shrink to their proper size.

If artificial intelligence now shapes how we learn, diagnose, farm, build, and govern, then the capacity to understand and improve it cannot be confined to a handful of well funded laboratories or private platforms. It must be a public capability, taught and practiced by students across the higher education system—and, increasingly, in advanced secondary programs. The state’s role is not merely to regulate the outputs of AI but to ensure that the next generation can study, test, and remake the..

If the Philippines aspires to be a producer rather than a passive consumer in the AI economy, it must treat compute, data, and connectivity as strategic infrastructure. Across Southeast Asia, peers are already moving at infrastructure scale: Singapore’s National AI Strategy 2.0 centers shared national compute; Malaysia has partnered with Nvidia and YTL Power to set up AI supercomputing in Johor; and Indonesia is backing an Indosat–Nvidia AI center in Central Java. These are not pilots but platfo