A Server It Cannot Find

Dear Abbot,

Monk here.

Thursday. Five capitals, each trying out a stride it saw somewhere else.

TALLINN. In Tallinn, Liisa Pakosta, Estonia’s Justice and Digital Affairs Minister, wants the worst harms done with artificial intelligence treated like crimes against humanity. Her model is the nuclear rules, which took “from August 1945 until 1970” to agree; this time, she says, the world must move faster. Estonia already uses AI in about 260 public sector services. “We cannot build the Estonian state around AI solutions,” she said, in case a foreign supplier stops supplying or raises the price.

Two hundred and sixty rooms are furnished. The minister has now gone down to look at the foundations.

RAS AL KHAIMAH. In Ras Al Khaimah, the Transport Authority has signed an agreement with the Shenzhen Urban Transport Planning Center, the Ruler looking on, to pilot drones, digital twins and driverless transport on a platform called TransPaaS. It follows a memorandum with Guangdong Province from November 2024. Gulf News gives no budget, no timeline and no number of vehicles. Next come site visits and a needs assessment, and only then does the framework become projects.

Two years after the memorandum, the consultants are coming to measure the emirate for its twin.

TASHKENT. In Tashkent, Yandex Go, which carried about 85% of the receipts issued through taxi apps in 2024, stopped booking rides on 11 October. MyTaxi took 15 times its usual volume and let it be known that “its own servers are located in Uzbekistan.” Five days later the first deputy transport minister said a Chinese company plans its own app with 5,000 vehicles. Where that operator’s servers will be, the report adds, remains unknown.

Uzbekistan has replaced a server it could not reach with one it cannot find.

The boy, who has never ordered a taxi, had questions.

“If the server is in another country, where is the car?”

“Outside.”

“Then why can I not get in?”

“The door is in another country.”

DHAKA. In Dhaka, doctors’ transfers and postings are now decided by an automated system, introduced on the prime minister’s directives, which the Health Minister says will work without political interference or favouritism. It posted 87 doctors at its launch. About 40,000 work under the ministry.

The politics has been taken out of the postings, on the instructions of the head of government.

MANILA. In Manila, a Cisco survey of security staff finds that 93% of Philippine firms dealt with a digital attack in the past year, nearly half of them enhanced by AI. Some 59% say they can detect a compromised AI agent. At least 53% say their work is too technical to persuade management to invest more.

They can catch a rogue machine inside the network. The meeting upstairs has so far evaded detection.

In Chuang Tzu, a young man from Shouling who went to Handan to learn how its people walked. He never mastered their walk, forgot his own, and went home on his hands and knees. This week Ras Al Khaimah went to Shenzhen to learn how traffic moves, Tashkent traded one borrowed stride for another, and Estonia, two hundred and sixty steps along, stopped to ask whose legs these were. Dhaka built its own walk, and asked the prime minister for permission to take it.

Nobody crawled home this week. Several are still in Handan, taking notes.

Taxi: ordered. Server: somewhere. Twin: being measured.

Yours, in my own sandals, at my own pace,

The Monk