Abstract

Across Southeast Asia, the development of AI governance frameworks has largely followed the rapid mainstreaming of generative AI and its applications. In many cases, governance has emerged as a response to already-operational systems, institutional uptake, and commercial pressures—reflecting a reactive rather than anticipatory orientation. AI, in this sense, has become embedded before it has been fully problematised as an object of policy.

Quantum science and technology, by contrast, remain at a much earlier stage of regional visibility. With the declaration of 2025 as the International Year of Quantum Science and Technology, quantum is entering public and policy discourse—but without the same immediacy of deployment, familiarity, or institutional momentum. This creates a different temporal horizon: one where anticipation is still possible, but is not yet structured.

This talk approaches AI and quantum as elements of a technological continuum whose trajectories overlap, but whose governance timelines are misaligned. Rather than proposing policy solutions, the discussion asks how ASEAN states might avoid reproducing a reactive posture in the quantum domain—and what it would mean to treat quantum as an object of strategic foresight rather than late-stage response. The aim is to open space for reflection on how to think about “emerging technology” when one technology is already embedded, and the other is still in the process of coming into view.

About the Speaker

Clarissa Ai Ling Lee is a Malaysian researcher whose work examines the ethical, political, and societal dimensions of emerging technologies, with a focus on responsible innovation in quantum technologies. Her research draws on a background spanning physics, digital media, and creative/innovation studies to analyse how scientific and technological development intersects with governance, equity, and global policy. Her earlier work on nuclear technoscience in postcolonial Malaysia informs her current attention to how states in Southeast Asia negotiate technological futures, infrastructure-building, and scientific capacity within uneven global systems.

She is currently a Lecturer in the Department of Management at Monash University Malaysia’s School of Business, where she teaches postgraduate and advanced undergraduate subjects in international business and entrepreneurship.