WHILE driving at night along Jalan Sungai Besi in Kuala Lumpur late last year, the voice in my navigation app suddenly said: “At the roundabout, take the sixth exit.”
I panicked because I could not see any roundabout and the phone screen showed I was in a mass of winding overpasses and underpasses.
But as I negotiated the long, roughly circular route with Tun Razak Exchange looming beside me, I did find exit number six.
Google Maps’ algorithms interpreted the area as being a roundabout, even when there is none.
My memories of living in Kuala Lumpur include hours-long traffic jams that made my left calf ache from continuously stepping on the clutch pedal (cars with automatic transmission were uncommon then).
But my recent drives as a visitor in Malaysia’s capital city made me feel that despite the number of cars there, at least traffic kept moving because so much road infrastructure and rail networks had been built.
Meanwhile in Penang, George Town has earned the ignominy of being “the slowest city in Malaysia”.
The latest Tom Tom Traffic Index 2024 reported that it took an average travel time of 26 minutes 36 seconds per 10km during morning rush hour in George Town.
The second slowest city in Malaysia is Kota Baru in Kelantan, needing 22 minutes 30 seconds to move 10km.
Imagine that, George Town ranked beside Kota Baru. Kuala Lumpur is fifth slowest, by the way.
In the Domestic Tourism Survey 2023 by our Statistics Department (DOSM), Johor took pride of place because it recorded 8.9 million domestic tourists.
Pahang and Selangor shared the No.2 spot with 8.5 million domestic tourists, while Perak bagged the bronze with 7.5 million domestic tourists.
Penang shared the 10th position with Kelantan and Terengganu, each recording 4.1 million domestic tourist arrivals in 2023.
(Incidentally, Penang hospitality players plus the state government publicly expressed that something must be wrong with DOSM’s tabulation methods).
No wonder whenever I urge my buddies from Klang Valley to visit me in Penang for a holiday, they say: “Don’t want la. Jam.”
And yet we have Penangites calling the planned Pan Island Link I a “controversial” project.
Whenever new roads are planned in Penang, some Penangites will protest, as they want absolutely nothing built anywhere.
I realise that a segment of Penangites are sentimental, even parochial and provincial. They resist change and want to keep things the way they are.
But change is not only coming, it is already here.
Last year, I came to learn that there is a new kind of global business operating in Penang, and they are in a sector broadly called Artificial Intelligence (AI) training.
Their workers comprise well-educated South Koreans, Japanese, Filipinos, Thais, Middle Eastern folk, China nationals and so many more.
They are skilled in their native tongues and many are computer coders.
Their job is to train the AI programmes owned by giants such as Microsoft, Google and Apple, teaching the systems to comprehend and communicate with humans in myriad languages.
They answer tens of thousands of queries a day for these large language machine learning models to absorb.
They are knowledge workers in this burgeoning sub-sector of the creative economy and they don’t work in industrial estates.
In fact, their companies rent office space in the heart of George Town because their bosses recognise that such workers need a vibrant, urban environment to gain job satisfaction.
Their numbers will only grow, and because they earn decent salaries, I foresee that their socio-economic influence will turn George Town into a metropolis in the coming years.
If AI training companies like to set up shop in Penang, that is that. Penang has a one-way ticket to becoming a global metropolis.
It will need more roads, rail infrastructure and even water taxis to move people around, and no one can stop that kind of change.
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