Speech by Minister Josephine Teo at the NUS ISS Annual Luncheon

30 JUL 2024

Ms Janet Ang, Chairman, NUS-ISS

Professor Bernard Tan, NUS

Mr Khoong Chan Meng, CEO, NUS-ISS,

Distinguished Colleagues and Friends

Good afternoon.

A few months ago, whilst Janet was still in Parliament, she had approached me to talk about your annual luncheon. All of us know that Janet is a very hard person to say no to. So, when I was thinking about what to say in this speech, one part that struck me was what you had articulated as your strategy in your review for ISS 2030, and it was mentioned that you have decided to focus on executive education, graduate programmes, international industry engagements, as well as organisational development.
As I have my colleagues from the MDDI family with me today, including the Chief Executive Officers of IMDA and GovTech, I thought it befitting for me to share briefly on how as ISS is seeking to accelerate digital excellence, in Government too, we think about how we can achieve excellence in digital development. This includes how the Government can be a best-in-class developer of a Smart Nation; how we implement digital governance beyond just laws and regulations; and what we do to help strengthen the role that we play in AI.
Now, this is the 10th anniversary of the Smart Nation initiative. So, in the not-too-distant future, we will launch the upgrade: Smart Nation 2.0. The substance will be revealed during the launch, but I do want to say a little bit about digital governance because it will relate to what I want to spend a bit of time talking about, which is AI.
There are perhaps five pillars that we try to do in terms of achieving excellence in digital governance. We start off as with most things with:

a. Infrastructure. You have got to be able to develop the infrastructure. If you want to have excellence in connectivity, but you do not have the cables that connect us up - if you don't have the digital infrastructure - there's nothing to talk about.

b. The other thing that we tried to do in terms of achieving excellence in digital governance is capability development of the workforce. We have to think about capability development within the enterprises, within our research community, and in fact, to build up our ability to govern. Governing the digital domain is not something that you can easily study the experiences elsewhere and then say just adapt to the Singapore circumstances, as very few countries have it figured out. So, in that regard, we have to be the ones to invest in building up the government capabilities. Part of it involves getting our hands dirty, knowing how the technology works, being able to operationalise projects, and also be in the day-to-day running digital information that we want to see happen in the private sector and in other organisations.

c. On laws and regulations. We try not to be behind the curve, and we try to always ask what's over the horizon. There is always a very careful balance we must strike. There is a risk of overdoing it. So, in terms of laws and regulations - how we manage risks, how we put in place guidelines - is another very important feature.

d. We also do not imagine that the government can do it on our own. While the government can do a great number of things, it is better if we are able to bring partners into the picture. For example, in terms of digital inclusion, it would be much better to be brought into the picture by a social service agency to tell us what the people’s needs are and to match their needs. A whole-of-nation approach is probably going to work better for us, and that's what we have been doing.

e. Another aspect of this partnership mindset will also extend to how we engage with our international colleagues. Whether it is in cybersecurity, seeking cross border data flows or developing AI CPUs, we cannot seek to do it alone, because of the global nature of the innovations as well as their consequences. We cannot imagine trying to build and set the standards yourself and to uphold them. There must be some way in which you are interacting with your international colleagues to make advances in this.

So, those are the five pillars that we think about when we think about excellence in digital governance.
I should say that it is also very important to go back to the fundamentals and ask what is the governance in service of? What objectives are we trying to meet? Because you cannot govern for the sake of governing; you govern to meet objectives. Essentially there are three, and they are not very different from the objectives that we would have when we started in 1981 and built up organisations like ISS. Firstly, it is about exciting opportunities for growth for our people and our businesses. Secondly, ensuring trust and safety. And thirdly, I think particularly importantly in the digital era, is the idea of how we strengthen a sense of community and how we do not allow the technologies that have come to define our lives to tear us apart, but instead find ways to still bring people together and to continue to have that sense of unity.
Now these objectives are not very different from how we're thinking about our AI plans. When it comes to growing our AI ecosystem, the ideas that we have applied in seeking to achieve excellence in digital governance equally apply. Where AI is concerned, some may ask, is Singapore, like some other countries, very keen to develop our own large language model?
On this note, I would like to share while Singapore is not associated with aircraft technology, we have managed to develop a vibrant aviation and aerospace hub. It has required us to think strategically about what makes sense for Singapore.
Semiconductors, again, is the same thing. We are not very much into leading edge chips, but overall, in terms of global supply to the world, Singapore takes up maybe about 10%, and about 20% for semiconductor equipment. These two serve as a good reference point for us when we think about what we hope to achieve in developing our AI ecosystem. We are going to find those niches that make sense for Singapore and to encourage them to the fullest extent possible.
So, in charting our own path forward for AI, we know that AI applications and innovations take time and resources. So, it has to make sense for the companies that are driving these activities. They must want to have these AI solutions implemented in Singapore. And if you think about the fact that we already have very competitive financial services, manufacturing and logistics sectors, the desire is there —and most intense amongst these sectors — to do just a bit more. Hence, we are encouraging companies in these sectors to build our AI centres of excellence, and we’ve gained a lot of support.
But AI innovations are not solely reserved for the private sector. We would like to see AI innovations in the public sector and for the public good. AI and machine learning are very good for things that deliver precision and personalisation. So, whether it is the rail system, corrective maintenance and preventative maintenance, prescriptive medication or cancer treatments, to a very personalised extent we are already seeing some of these innovations take place.
All in all, we can hopefully bring these together to achieve our vision of AI economic growth in Singapore. We hope to grow some of these AI innovations in Singapore so that some of them may catalyse innovation elsewhere in the world and make contributions to the broader global ecosystem.
Of course, we can't do this without your help, in particular in terms of building up the talent pool. This is where you can see NUS-ISS play a very important role. You already have very solid foundations over the course of so many years. I saw from the video that you are graduating 178,000 people to a variety of programmes – some full-time, some part-time. I have had the privilege of meeting eight of them earlier. I should say that they are fine examples of how Singapore, far from becoming fearful that AI will take away people's jobs and replace us, is embracing technology and using it to enhance our own human capabilities to keep humans in the loop for the things that matter most and continue to create for ourselves a next bout of growth, a next bout of opportunity, a next bout of progression.
There are so many examples of alumni amongst you, who have challenged themselves, surpassed their own expectations and shown the rest of Singapore how with some determination and a lot of support, they have never let technology stop their progress or let fear stop them from achieving something new.
To conclude, I want to congratulate ISS for all the good work that you do. Our Government agencies like GovTech and IMDA believe in contributing to the common good. They partner with many organisations across a whole spectrum of activities, and are already working very closely with you. I believe that as a community, if we continue to work closely with one another, identify the ways in which we can strengthen capabilities in Singapore, both for individuals as well as businesses, there is no saying how far we might go in growing our own AI ecosystem.
I congratulate all of your award recipients, your partners, as well as the thousands of graduates that move through your doors every single year.
Thank you very much for inviting me here.