🐴 The Year of the Horse: Running Forwards While Looking Back

The Horse doesn't look back.

In Chinese zodiac symbolism, the Horse is all forward momentum: energetic, independent, running toward the horizon with barely a glance at what's behind. It's fitting, then, that we're entering the Year of the Horse at a moment when AI is accelerating so fast that last year's breakthrough is this year's baseline, and next month's capabilities are anyone's guess.

But here's what I've been thinking about on this first day of the new year: what if the most Horse-like thing we could do right now isn't just running faster, but choosing what to run towards, and what to carry with us when we do?

The Speed We've Normalised

I've lived in Southeast Asia for nearly 14 years now. Long enough to stop being a tourist, not long enough to stop noticing things that amaze me.

One of those things is the pace of change.

My parents' generation in the UK migrated across industries as manufacturing gave way to services, a slow, painful transition that took decades. What I've watched happen across Asia in just the past few years makes that look glacial. This region is migrating across realities (analog to digital, human-only work to human-AI collaboration, certainty to permanent ambiguity) and doing it at a speed that would give Western change management consultants heart palpitations.

In the past 18 months alone, we've gone from "wow, ChatGPT can write emails" to "of course the AI can analyse my company's entire codebase, why are you impressed?" The acceleration isn't slowing. If anything, the gap between "impossible" and the "new normal" is collapsing faster than ever.

This is especially visible here. Singapore's Smart Nation isn't just a vision anymore, instead, it's infrastructure. China's AI development is moving at a pace that makes Silicon Valley nervous. Southeast Asian startups are solving problems with AI that the West hasn't even named yet.

The Horse energy is real. The question is whether we're running towards something, or just running.

What Gets Lost at Full Gallop

Here's what worries me.

Last night, I was at a reunion dinner with Singaporean colleagues, something that would have felt completely foreign when I first arrived here 14 years ago but now feels like exactly where I should be on Chinese New Year's Eve. Three generations around the table, four different languages being spoken. The grandmother in Teochew, the parents in Mandarin, the kids in English, and the toddler in whatever amazing linguistic chaos bilingual kids create.

Someone pulled out Google Translate. Conversation continued. Problem solved.

Except, is it?

Because what we optimised for was information transfer, while what we lost was the music of language - that untranslatable wordplay, where certain phrases only make sense in the cultural context they were born in. We gained efficiency, but we lost the nuance.

I'm acutely aware that I'm an outsider observing this. I don't speak Mandarin or Hokkien, and I will never fully understand the weight of cultural transmission across generations in a way that someone born into it does. But 14 years in this region has taught me to recognise when something valuable could be at risk.

This is the thing about Horse years and AI acceleration is we get very good at solving problems quickly, but we don't always pause to ask whether speed was the actual problem.

And this is exactly the concern about something else we're losing, and something I've been thinking about lately: the middle.

If young executives only do what AI tells them to do, or worse, if entire middle management layers simply vanish, how do people learn? Not learn facts. But learn judgment. Learn when to trust instincts over the data, or how to fail at a pitch, recover, and then try again with better context.

I think about the traditional apprenticeship model I've seen across Asia: the way a young chef learns by spending years watching a master work, by burning the rice, by understanding why the wok needs to be that exact temperature before you add the oil. You can't download that knowledge. It has to be earned through repetition, failure, correction, muscle memory.

The furniture maker's apprentice doesn't get the answer from ChatGPT. They learn by watching the master's hands, by ruining expensive wood, by developing an eye for grain that only comes from years of mistakes. The knowledge is tacit, embodied, earned.

We're building AI tools that skip straight to "here's the perfect answer" without preserving the journey that teaches you why that's the answer. The Horse wants to skip the awkward adolescent years and go straight to galloping. But there's wisdom in stumbling first.

There's pattern recognition that only comes from lived experience, not downloaded knowledge.

We're optimising for speed without asking: what kind of leaders are we creating when we remove the friction that builds resilience?

The Tea Ceremony Paradox

There are so many examples of this in Asian culture. In fact, something I learned from watching Chinese and Japanese tea ceremonies over the years is that the most radical act in a world obsessed with speed is deliberate slowness.

Every movement in a tea ceremony is intentional. You can't rush it without destroying the entire point. The water must reach the right temperature. The tea must steep for the proper duration. The cup must be held a certain way. There are no shortcuts. The ceremony exists precisely because it cannot be optimised.

In a Horse year, and in an AI-accelerated world, this feels almost subversive.

We have AI that can draft documents in 30 seconds, generate strategies in 3 minutes, and automate entire workflows before lunch. The temptation is to use all of it, all the time, to move faster and faster until we're a blur.

But what if the wisdom is knowing when to deliberately slow down?

What if some decisions shouldn't be made in 30 seconds, even if the AI can give you an answer that fast? What if some conversations need to unfold over hours, not minutes? What if some relationships need time to steep? And that, just perhaps, human's still contain the innate skill of applying intelligence through lived human experiences in a different way. And never was this more true that in marketing strategy.

The tea ceremony teaches something essential: not everything that can be accelerated should be. Some processes have value precisely because they take time. The slowness isn't a bug. It's the feature.

This isn't about rejecting AI or pretending we can turn back the clock. It's about choosing, consciously and deliberately, which parts of our lives we protect from optimisation. It's about saying "yes, I could automate this, but I won't, because the manual process is where the meaning lives."

Running Forwards, Looking Back

There's a paradox I've been noticing in how different parts of Asia are approaching the AI revolution.

Take Taiwan. The island manufactures the chips that power most of the world's AI infrastructure. TSMC's fabs are literally enabling the global AI acceleration we're all experiencing. They're making the Horse run faster.

And yet, Taiwan is simultaneously one of the most thoughtful places in the world about AI sustainability. Not just environmental sustainability (though they're deeply focused on energy consumption and infrastructure efficiency), but sustainability of democracy, of cultural identity, of human agency in an AI-saturated world. They're asking hard questions about what it means to be the engine of AI acceleration while protecting what makes their society worth accelerating toward.

It's the embodiment of the tension this Horse year is asking us to navigate: how do you enable speed while insisting on wisdom? How do you build the future without abandoning the values that make that future worth living in?

They're not slowing down chip production. They're not opting out of the AI revolution. They're running forwards while simultaneously asking "where are we running to, and what are we carrying with us?"

That's the model we need. Not rejection of AI. Not blind acceleration. But intentional momentum.

What I've Learned as a Long-Term Guest In Asia

There's something particular about experiencing the AI revolution from Asia when you're not from here.

I watch the engineers building frontier models, not all in San Francisco, but in Singapore, Beijing, Bangalore, Seoul. I see applications being deployed at scale that solve Asian problems, in Asian languages, with Asian cultural context baked in. The innovation isn't coming from the West anymore; it's happening here, by people who live here, for communities who need different solutions than Silicon Valley imagines.

But I also see something the Western tech press often misses: the people building this future are also guardians of some of the world's oldest continuous cultures. They're organizing their lives around lunar calendars and festival cycles that predate the internet by millennia. They're measuring family success across generations, not quarters. They're navigating languages their kids might not speak and traditions their grandchildren might not understand.

They're building the future while being responsible for the past.

And that creates a tension that I think Horse year is asking us (all of us, from anywhere) to confront: How do we run forwards without leaving critical things behind? How do we innovate without erasing? How do we let AI help us without letting it homogenize us?

As someone who came from a culture that mostly automated its own workflows during the Great Industrialisation, I've learned to recognize what's at stake when speed becomes the only value.

What the Horse Carries

The Horse in Chinese culture isn't just about speed. It's about nobility, loyalty, and knowing when to rest. The best horses weren't the ones that ran themselves to death; they were the ones that knew their own strength and used it wisely.

Maybe that's the reframe we need.

AI will continue accelerating. Models will get more capable. Integration will get deeper. That's not a choice. That's momentum. But what we choose to preserve, protect, and carry forwards into that AI-augmented future? That's a choice.

I'm thinking about the tools and wisdom that actually matter:

• AI that preserves, not just translates. What if we built models that didn't just convert Hokkien to English, but helped younger generations understand why certain phrases matter, what cultural context they carry, how they connect to identity? What if the goal wasn't just information transfer, but cultural transmission?
• AI that teaches failure, not just success. What if we designed AI tools that deliberately showed young professionals the messy middle: the failed approaches, the wrong turns, the context that led to eventual breakthroughs? Not just "here's the right answer" but "here's why three other answers seemed right and weren't." Tools that preserve the apprenticeship model even when the master isn't physically present.
• AI that amplifies local context, not flattens it. The best AI tools I've seen in Asia aren't the ones that import Western templates. They're the ones built by people who understand that "networking event" means something different in Jakarta than in New York, that gift-giving has rules that vary by relationship and region, that politeness in Seoul looks nothing like politeness in Sydney.
• AI that protects deliberate slowness. Tools that help us identify which processes should be accelerated and which should be protected. AI that says "this email can wait until morning" instead of "send it now at 11pm because it's optimally timed." Technology that enhances our ability to be intentional, not just efficient.
• AI that helps us be more human, not less. The reunion dinner planner that gives someone back three hours isn't valuable because it saves time. It's valuable because those three hours lets them actually sit with family instead of stress-cooking in isolation. The AI calendar that handles scheduling isn't replacing connection, it's removing the friction that prevents it.

But tools alone aren't enough. The question isn't just what we build, but how we build it.

I've been thinking about this a lot lately: how do you move from AI experimentation (where most organisations are stuck) to AI capability (where value actually lives)? How do you run forwards with discipline, not just speed?

The answer isn't more tools. It's structure. It's asking hard questions before you deploy, not afterwards. It's defining what intelligence means for your context before copying someone else's playbook. It's simulating governance scenarios before they become board crises. It's elevating what works while protecting what shouldn't be optimised away.

This is how you run like the Horse without running off a cliff.

Speed with intention. Acceleration with accountability. Innovation that carries forwards what matters instead of abandoning it for efficiency.

I've been working on a framework for exactly this: how to structure the adoption of applied intelligence with discipline. You can explore it at adrianwatkins.com/edge.

Thinking in Generations, Not Quarters

Here's perhaps the most important thing I've observed about how decisions get made differently here.

Western business culture thinks in quarters. Maybe years if you're being "long-term." Asian family culture thinks in generations.

When you're making decisions with the assumption that your grandchildren (who aren't born yet) will live with the consequences, you optimize for different things. You don't just ask "does this increase shareholder value this quarter?" You ask "what world are we building for people who will live here in 2080?"

This isn't romantic. It's pragmatic.

It's why Singapore plants trees that won't provide shade for 30 years. And why families invest in education that won't pay off until the next generation. And more significantly: why cultural preservation matters even when it's "inefficient."

And it's exactly the framework we need for thinking about AI development.

There's real momentum at SQREEM this year around asking harder questions before we build. Not just "can we do this?" but "should we, and for what purpose?" It's the difference between deploying AI and building intelligence infrastructure that serves markets we haven't even entered yet.

We're moving at Horse-year speed, making decisions about AI deployment in weeks that will have consequences for decades. We're optimising for what works now without asking what we're building for then.

What if we borrowed that generational thinking? What if we asked: "If my grandchildren are using this AI system in 2060, what would I want it to preserve? What cultural knowledge should it carry forwards? What human capabilities should it protect rather than replace?"

The quarterly thinking says: "This AI tool eliminates middle management and saves money, deploy it now."

The generational thinking says: "This AI tool eliminates the learning ground where future leaders are made. What are we trading long-term capability for short-term efficiency?"

Speed is the Horse's gift. Wisdom about what to run toward, that's ours to provide.

The Year Ahead

If you're reading this on the first day of the Lunar New Year, you're probably doing one of two things: recovering from last night's reunion dinner, or preparing for today's visiting rounds. You're tired. You're full. You're probably fielding questions about your life choices from relatives who mean well but don't quite get it.

And you're also probably thinking about the year ahead.

The Year of the Horse is going to be fast. AI development won't slow down because we need a breather. Markets won't pause because we're still processing last year's changes. The future will arrive whether we're ready or not.

Here's what I want to carry into this year, and what I hope resonates with you: We get to choose what we run towards.

Those of you navigating multiple cultures, multiple generations, multiple languages: you get to decide which traditions you preserve and which you let evolve. You get to determine what AI enhances versus what it replaces. You get to insist that technology serves your culture, not the other way around.

We get to choose what skills we protect. If you're managing teams, training young talent, or building companies: you get to decide whether to optimise purely for speed or to preserve the messy learning experiences that build actual wisdom. You can use AI to handle the repetitive work while ensuring your people still get to fail at the important stuff. You can build apprenticeship into your AI-augmented workflows, not eliminate it.

We get to choose when to slow down. You can acknowledge that some things (some conversations, some decisions, some relationships) need to unfold at tea ceremony pace, not algorithm pace. Not everything that can be optimised should be.

We get to choose our time horizon. You can ask not just "what increases efficiency this quarter" but "what kind of world are we building for 2050?" You can think like ancestors, not just executives.

The Horse runs forwards, but you hold the reins.

What I've learned living here is that Asia isn't just consuming the AI future. It's building it. And that means the people building it have the opportunity, and the responsibility, to build AI that understands that efficiency isn't the only value, that speed isn't the only goal, that newer isn't automatically better.

AI that helps a grandmother's dialect survive another generation. AI that makes traditional medicine research accessible without stripping it of context. AI that lets people work smarter so they can gather with family longer. AI that accelerates what matters and protects what's fragile. AI that shows young leaders not just the answer, but the journey to find it. AI that preserves the space for tea ceremonies in a Horse-year world.

Running forwards while looking back.

A Toast for the New Year

So here's to the Year of the Horse.

• May you run toward what excites you, not just what's expected.
• May you use AI to preserve what you love, not just optimize what you measure.
• May you have the energy to embrace change and the wisdom to know what shouldn't change.
• May you protect the middle: the messy years, the learning curve, the apprenticeship that builds real mastery.
• May you know when to sprint and when to steep the tea.
• May you think in generations, not just quarters.
• May you find the balance between moving fast and moving well.

And may you remember that the most valuable thing about the Horse isn't its speed. It's its ability to carry what matters across impossible distances without losing what it set out to protect.

恭喜发财. 万事如意. 身体健康.

Run well. Run wisely. And don't forget to rest.

Thanks for reading,

Adrian