Answered raw tape
D 5 · C 5 · P 4 · Cm 4 4.60
Q of your previous interviews, and even the choice of the name development in the ministry name was very specific. You mentioned naming is your ethos. Can you explain maybe a bit about what the ministry does, which is not simply funding R&D, but it's also thinking about how to apply these technologies and industry, and just maybe give people an overview, since there's not really an equivalent in the US?
A Yeah, so when people talk about our smart nation efforts, It was helpful in articulating a few key pillars. We talked about one pillar being a vibrant digital economy. We also talk about a stable digital society because digital technologies, the way in which they are used, can sometimes cause divisions in society or entrench polarization. They can also have the potential of causing social upheaval. So when we talked about Stable digital society. That was what we had in mind. How do you preserve cohesion? Then we said that in this domain, government has to be progressive too. You can't expect, you know, the rest of Singapore to digitalize, and yet the government is falling behind. So a progressive digital government is another very important pillar. And underpinning all of this has to be comprehensive digital security. There is, of course, cybersecurity, but there is also how individuals feel safe in the digital domain. Whether as users on social media, or if they're using devices and they're using services that are delivered digitally. So when we talk about these four pillars of a smart nation, people get it. And when we then asked ourselves, what is the appropriate way to think of the ministry? We used to be known as the Ministry of Communications and Information, and we had been Doing all this digital stuff without actually putting it into our name. So when we eventually deci…
AI assessment note: “ultimately we decided on digital development because it wasn't the technologies... impact to society”
Answered raw tape
D 4 · C 5 · P 4 · Cm 4 4.30
Q know what the process was because we have a new PM. Most of our audience is not going to be Singaporeans. They're going to be more Singaporeans than normal, but most of our audience are not Singaporeans. They've never heard of it, but they all come from countries which are all trying to figure out their national AI strategy. So how did you go about defining a national AI strategy?
A Well, in some sense, we went back to the drawing board and said, What do we want to see AI be able to do in Singapore? I mean, there are all these exciting developments obviously would like to be part of the action. It has to be in service of something. And what we were interested in is just try and find a way to continuously uplift our people because ultimately for any national strategy to work, it must bring benefits to the local communities. And the local communities can be defined very broadly. You have citizen communities, and citizens would like to be able to do better jobs, and they would like to be able to earn higher wages. But it's not just citizen communities. Citizens are themselves sometimes involved in businesses. So how about the enterprise community? And in the enterprise community, in the Singapore landscape is really interesting. Like most other economies, we do have SMEs, but we also have multinationals. That are at the very cutting edge, because in order to succeed in Singapore, they have to be very competitive. So the question is, how can they, through the use of technologies, and including AI, offer an even higher value proposition to their customers, to their owners. And so we were very interested in seeing enterprise applications of AI. That in a way also relates back to the workforce because for all of the employees of these organizations, then to see t…
AI assessment note: “we went back to the drawing board and said, What do we want to see”
