To Be Minuted

Dear Abbot,

Monk here.

A week of empty chairs, each with a note saying it is being improved.

KUALA LUMPUR. In the Dewan Rakyat, Malaysia’s digital minister, Gobind Singh Deo, reported 3,014,096 active users of the MyGOV Malaysia app, with 62 services from 22 agencies. Coming next: Agenda AI, an agentic system for meetings that handles the recordings, the transcripts, the minutes and the follow-up actions.

The first civil servant to be replaced by a machine is the one who reminds the others what they agreed.

The boy has been reading over my shoulder.

“If the machine takes the minutes, why go to the meeting?”

“To be minuted.”

“Could the machine go instead?”

“Not yet. Someone has to be blamed for the follow-up actions.”

PUTRAJAYA. In Putrajaya, GovTech Malaysia will from 2027 move away from separate agency apps toward one reusable platform, so citizens stop handing the same details to agency after agency. Services will be grouped around life events: the birth of a child, starting school, beginning work, opening a business, retirement. “GovTech Malaysia is not just about digitising existing processes,” said the minister.

The state has fitted a whole life into five events and one login. The password reset will be the sixth.

ASTANA. In Astana, on 16 October, Kazakhstan’s road research institute, KazdorNII, agreed with China TransInfo Group to develop driverless truck trials. In May two KamAZ trucks drove between Astana and Moscow in opposite directions; only parts of the roughly 3,000 kilometres were covered autonomously. Chinese SITRAK autonomous semi-trucks are to be built in Kazakhstan by 2028.

Kazakhstan now has a driverless truck from each neighbour, and still needs a man in the cab to decide which way it faces.

TASHKENT. Uzbekistan’s National Agency for Social Protection sent its deputy director to a smart governance forum in Khankendi. Up to 80% of Uzbek services are now provided digitally, he told Trend, and the agency stressed expanding digitization and minimizing the human factor.

The case for fewer humans was made in person, at a forum, by a delegation that had flown in.

BAKU. In Baku, at the CICA summit, President Shavkat Mirziyoyev proposed a “CICA expert platform” to draft common recommendations on the “responsible use of artificial intelligence.” President Sadyr Japarov of Kyrgyzstan asked for “cross-border digital infrastructure.”

The machine will not have a seat at the table. If Putrajaya’s system catches on, it will be taking the minutes.

Chuang Tzu tells of Tzu-kung, who met an old gardener carrying water to his rows in a jar, down into the well and up again. Tzu-kung described a well-sweep, a beam that waters a hundred plots in a day. The gardener laughed. Whoever has machines will have machine business, and whoever has machine business grows a machine heart. He would be ashamed to use one. Today the capitals have the opposite fear. Putrajaya hands the minutes to an agent, Astana the wheel to a Chinese firm’s software, Tashkent counts the human factor as a cost. Nobody is worried about the machine heart. It is the human one that arrives late, asks questions and needs lunch.

Minutes drafted by software. Wheel partly occupied. Human factor scheduled for minimizing.

The novices should keep carrying water in the jar a while longer.

Yours, with the bucket still on its rope,

The Monk