How robots and social media will change Singapore

At the inaugural Singapore Summit last week, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong sketched future trends that will have an impact on the Singapore economy. Below are extracts from his comments on technology and social media.
The Straits Times, 6 Oct 2012

Will we be slaves to robots or will robots be our slaves?

THE global economy will become even more integrated.

As Thomas Friedman wrote in one of his pieces earlier, chief executive officers rarely talk about "outsourcing" any more because there is no more "in" or "out" to talk about, but it is really things being "Made in the World", in different places - designed in one place, made in different places, assembled in a third location.

The iPhone is designed in California and assembled in China, using parts from nine major suppliers in five countries, and that is just one example. In the future, this is going to apply not just to things, but even more to services and intellectual property by reaching out to the "Crowd via the Cloud", outsourcing on the Internet. That means many opportunities for the whole world.

Technology will continue to transform the world. You know that, but you do not know how.

Whether it is information technology (IT), robotics or biomedical sciences, it is going to impact every facet of our lives.

IT and robotics will revolutionise whole industries. It is automating not just physical work but also mental work.

And many routine tasks and jobs will either disappear or have to be reinvented. The long-term impact is huge, but which way is it going to go?

There are two possible scenarios. One, the optimistic scenario: Every time there is new technology, human beings have benefited. The Luddites were wrong, the machines were good. The robots will do the dirty work, the "3D" work - dull, dirty and dangerous. And the human beings will do the more complex tasks or live a life of leisure, as Keynes imagined.

One MIT professor Erik Brynjolfsson calls this the "Digital Athens" - because in Athens, the citizens lived leisurely lives and philosophised; the slaves did the work.

In the Digital Athens, the slaves will be the machines.

But there is an alternative scenario, where the robots take over the more complex tasks, sidelining the humans, not just the blue-collar workers but the professionals.

You may be a very skilled worker, but it does not necessarily mean that every skilled worker can learn to become a skilled programmer of robots or controller of the system.

Then we may end up in a different Digital Athens, today's Athens, where the people are suffering because the economy has become uncompetitive.

So it is hard to say which Athens we will see, but already we can see the impact of technology on income distributions - there is a huge premium on talent, and there is huge pressure on unskilled and routine jobs.

It is not just the workers from the emerging economies which are depressing wages, it is technology which is changing the value and the bargaining power of the workers, and soon not just the workers, but also the middle income - lawyers, accountants, even engineers.

There is a Princeton professor, Alan Blinder, who used to be on the Fed (the US Federal Reserve), who runs a course in Princeton now.

Every year, he asks his students to take a vote, whether they think that in 20 years' time, who will be earning more - a run-of-the-mill engineer or a skilled plumber?

In recent years, his economic students have all voted for the plumber.

We cannot stop this trend, but we will have to manage the impact on societies very, very carefully.


Social media and the Internet: force for good or ill

SOCIAL media is altering the way people interact with one another and with the states and governments. It enables individuals and small groups, who previously had no voice, to make themselves heard.

It makes it easy for people to organise themselves, to share interests, to support a campaign - President Barack Obama's campaign headquarters is a very high-tech command post - or to launch a revolution. And it is a force for good as well as for bad, because this is a channel to share knowledge more widely and transform the way we learn.

In America, you have Coursera.org, where many universities are putting their course material online. A small consortium, Harvard, Berkeley and MIT, have formed edX, not just offering course material, but offering courses online, including courses which are electronically graded.

Instead of a few hundred students taking the course in MIT, 150,000 people signed up for the first course, Design of Electronic Circuits, and 7,000 of them actually took the exam and passed.

The Internet helps societies to organise more effectively, for example through e-government. But it also makes it harder for societies to take the longer view, because governing becomes a 24/7 referendum. And it reduces the common ground that citizens of a country share with one another, because it makes it easier for people to interact only with the people they want to interact with.

You do not have to get along with your neighbours - your neighbour is the like-minded person on the other side of the world who shares your passion, whether it is for antique watches, stamps, or extreme right-wing politics.

And that makes it much more difficult to make a consensus, to form a community, to make common cause within a nation. It is a challenge for all societies, whether it is America with its free and open rules, whether it is China, trying its best to keep social order and a lid on discontent, or whether it is Singapore, finding our way forward as a very small player in a very uncertain world.


No place to hide: Singapore's response to globalisation

SOME Asian companies which are expanding globally prefer Singapore to be their base, rather than their home countries. (India's) Tata Communications' HQ is in Singapore, many Chinese companies have their HQs in Singapore, and we hope we can be host to many other firms like these as well.

At the same time, our own companies need to go beyond Singapore into the region and into the world, whether you are Keppel Corp, making oil drilling platforms, whether you are Olam, trading commodities, whether you are SingTel, in the IT/tele-communications business.

Singapore is too small a platform, a stage. You have to go out, you have to be competitive with the best in the world. We need to attract and develop talent that can thrive globally.

We have to equip our people with the skills and mindset to meet the competition because we have to know that it is impossible for us to shield ourselves completely from the competition.

There is no place to hide, however high your sea wall, however strong your barrier, the pressure is there, and it will seep through, and we must be ready to meet it.

We have to build up our foreign reserves and strengthen our social safety nets to cope with volatility and uncertainty.

People sometimes ask us, why do you need to have a sovereign wealth fund? The world is safe and you can float your currency. But we tell them that there are things that you cannot calculate, and your models may not predict all the events which can go wrong.

We need to master technology to embrace the innovations which can transform Singapore into a Smart City, whether it is broadband on fibre, whether it is intelligently managing our city traffic, whether it is being more efficient with a smart grid in our energy utilisation. If technology is applicable, we should be able to use it to the maximum. But we have to educate our people to use it to thrive in the new economy - to help students to learn how to learn, to promote lifelong learning among our workers.

And then we can use the technology to raise productivity and improve Singaporeans' lives, and not be sidelined by it.

We also need to adapt to the rapid social changes brought about by the social media. We are especially affected by this, probably more than other countries, because we are small, we are open, we are completely English-educated, you do not even need Google to translate the Web for you to understand.

We are fully wired up and totally wirelessly accessible. There is no magic formula or handbook for doing this; nobody has an answer, all are looking for their way forward, groping, and so are we, and we have to adapt as we go along.

We have to exploit fully the Internet and social media, but institute safeguards against their misuse. And do our best to strengthen our cohesiveness and sense of identity, because it is fine to be an avatar in cyberspace, but you need to be a human being in real life and make that connection with other human beings and other fellow Singaporeans in order to form a society and a country with an identity, able to hold its own, in a very porous and very rapidly changing world.

Then we can evolve our governance and politics to function in the new age differently but we need to make it work functionally, which the examples of the other countries show is not so easy, and we can keep Singapore a special place to live, work and play at the crossroads of Asia and the world.