Repair

One of the darkest contradictions of our digital age?

I recently had the privilege of visiting Mount Bokor, Cambodia. Rising above the Gulf of Thailand, it is a place of striking beauty, but also one marked by the most challenging times of Cambodian history. A colonial hill station was once established there, at the cost of many human lives. Then came decades of war, abandonment, and more recently a lesser-known and particularly terrible kind of exploitation: compounds on the mountain were reported as scam centres, according to Amnesty International. In such places, people lured by fake job offers are being trafficked, confined and forced to run online scams across the world.

Human beings forced to power systems designed to exploit other human beings.

Passionate as I am about AI, I keep thinking that Bokor may ask a question to all of us who build, fund, deploy or govern digital technologies:

One phrase from Magnifica Humanitas stayed with me: the fight against new forms of slavery is a "decisive test for the ethical discernment of AI and digital transformation".

At the centre of the mountain, a small stone church built in 1928, scarred by bullets and battered by time, still stands. I was deeply moved by Father Will Conquer's determination to restore it. For Mount Bokor, and for Cambodian communities so deeply wounded by the criminal abuse of digital technologies, I keep seeing the restoration of this surviving church—which will turn 100 in 2028—as a symbol of "repair", a word that deserves more room in a digital world that talks constantly about building.

Faced with this tragedy, we could look away and scroll on to the next news item. I believe that, as AI solves the most complex problems one by one, it falls to us in the digital industry to take on digital crime, as a collective responsibility. Just as oil companies are asked to bear part of the cost of their externalities, measured long after the damage was done, tech platforms, banks and other players across the industry have a share in this one. If we let the system corrupt itself from within, we will all pay for it later.

What if Bokor were reborn as a place of digital creativity for the common good?

To OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, Microsoft, banks and the wider tech community: is our industry ready to take responsibility? Could we imagine some kind of "Digital Campus for Dignity", a healthy ecosystem of mission-driven companies, researchers and local initiatives giving a second life to what scam networks left behind, as a shared commitment to repair? The door is open to everyone with a stake in the future of ethical AI, as this exploratory idea is taking shape.

If you work in technology, AI, cybersecurity, finance, education or philanthropy and believe digital innovation should serve human dignity, please DM me. Let's explore what we could build together.