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Riding the Fire Horse: culture change and Philippine readiness in the Intelligence Age
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DOI：10.1007/s00146-026-03315-z.png)
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Abstract
En 中文
The year 2026 marks the return of the Fire Horse (Kabayong Apoy) in the lunar calendar—a symbol of volatility and irreversible change. This metaphor provides a lens for understanding the Philippines’ position in the transition to the Intelligence Age, where artificial intelligence has moved beyond being a digital tool to become a primary interpretive infrastructure. This paper argues that the Philippines is caught in a triple bind of velocity, direction, and readiness. The rate of AI advancement outpaces the institutional capacity for absorption; AI systems are oriented toward Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) cultural norms that privilege individualism over relational frameworks—a directionality this paper examines while acknowledging the Philippines’ own historical entanglement with these norms. Drawing on Filipino psychological concepts—kapwa, hiya, sumpong—as diagnostic tools, this paper argues that AI’s interpretive authority may systematically misread indigenous experience. It introduces the “Rizal Test” as a methodological proposal for evaluating cultural fidelity in AI-generated content and proposes operational criteria for its use. This analysis concludes that the primary risk is not technological displacement but cultural unintelligibility: the erosion of indigenous meaning-making as WEIRD frameworks become the invisible baseline for truth. This paper offers a diagnostic framework, a research agenda, and a concrete methodological contribution, while explicitly acknowledging the limitations of its theoretical and predictive scope.
Keywords:
Artificial intelligence
Culture change
Philippines
WEIRD psychology
Interpretive infrastructure
Psychological anthropology
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