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Mr Speaker, may I congratulate you on your photo exhibition, which is aptly called “Our Place in the World.” Whether 700 years, or 200, Singapore’s place in the world remains geographically small. But with careful development and husbandry, we have seen our little place become more prosperous and more secure.
We often think that our dream of peace and safety can be secured by technology. And indeed, in our armed forces, in the way we have harnessed technology to our service in infrastructure, housing, and even parking, we have seen how things can be cheaper, easier and better.
But technology carries with it not just a chance at greater comfort and ease, but also a risk of great evil.
SCIENCE OR TECHNOLOGY
Sir, I would like to clarify briefly the difference between science and technology, two terms which we use interchangeably but as the historian of science Thomas Kuhn has said, they are “profoundly different.”
Technology is about process; it is an instrument which helps us to do things better, and is valuable for that reason. Science works to a different purpose – it is the pursuit of knowledge and truth – working towards an accumulation of not just how we do things, but in understanding the true nature of the universe – physical and human – that we work and live in.
In this sense, science can be “hard” or physical sciences”, or the human, social sciences.
One can, therefore, be a very good scientist, but a poor technologist. Alternatively, you can be a good technologist but a poor scientist. I make this distinction only to say that the pursuit of technological advances cannot be a blind one, but must contribute to a useful end.
For example, we would all agree that Parking.sg is a very useful technological product. It replaces paper coupons, makes it easy, quick and secure to pay for parking. You pay for what you use, and you get a refund for what you don’t. That’s an example where we used technology in a cost-effective efficient manner to get us a service which we find useful. Technology needs a master, and we ought to be always careful of the purpose to which it is employed.
As a labour MP I know that there are a lot of workers’ concerns on Industrial Relations 4.0. It covers issues such as the infringement of personal privacy because smart technologies can determine an employee’s whereabouts. Working life is also becoming more precarious for workers with no laws to protect them. It affects the way workers process information, their working time and workplace relationships.
The regulatory regime of our working life harks from the industrialisation era. This includes many of practices within Human Resources. For example, I hear of how a HR officer tried to convince her boss to install GPS tracking for drivers, so as to monitor whether a driver is working or not. I am not sure whether this is the sort of working life we want.
Meanwhile in the F&B sector, in the past we had in-house delivery riders eg in fast food chain. These are permanent employees hired by the fast food chain with rights and protection given to all full time employees. However when online food delivery platforms are up, fast food chain increasingly do not need the same number of in-house delivery riders. At the same time, riders themselves may opt to join delivery companies because they see their earnings improve.
They do not see the important considerations in the short term – a career plan, stability, insurance, and training.
Fairprice in our transformation journey is building automated distribution centres, online platforms and at the stores, adopting technology to help improve processes. Our HR side together working with the union have had to retrain our staff to take on new jobs and work with new machines and technology. This is important so that our staff, especially the older ones are not left behind. In terms of staff demographics, more than 50% of our workforce are above 50 years old. For sure, this is not a walk in the park but we are committed to this journey.
In an age of technological advance, the human resource divisions need to rise to the call – to remember that we are dealing with humans, and to ensure that our regulatory regime keeps up with very human needs and wants.
PEOPLE FIRST, TECHNOLOGY SECOND
There has been a lot of technological innovations in the payment ecosystem. With technology and the drive towards a cashless society, and with cashless payments becoming more widely accepted, a rising social issue could arise. The obvious question that comes to mind is: Will the poor be left out?
We have moved from drawing cash from banks, counting cash, issuing cash to workers on pay day to getting everyone to have bank accounts. When the banks imposed a ‘fall below fee’, it was the lower income who are likely to pay the cost.
With cashless payments, like using QR codes or mobile pay, the poor may become excluded. And yes, they may yet pay the cost of going cashless.
We need to guard against being technology-centric over being people centric. Let me share an example from Fairprice to make this clearer. In our move towards self-checkouts, we started with having self-checkouts that accepted only credit cards.
There was indeed good take-up but after a while, the level of usage stagnated. We talked to our customers. We realised that not everyone had a credit card and there were also some who, even though they had one, preferred to use cash and so we worked to develop self-checkouts which also accepted cash in addition to credit cards.
Not surprisingly, with this new generation of self-checkouts, we saw a huge jump in customer numbers.
SMART NATION, USER PROBLEM
Sir, we have put quite a large budget towards our move to smart nation, but should we pause to reconsider that even as machine become more powerful, people remain equally frail?
Technological changes allows us great power but the case of the leaked HIV identities and the MOH data leaks show us – that user problems are as present as ever.
Sir, we will always have the careless, the malicious and the spiteful among us. We will always have unfriendly states, underhanded attacks, subversions.
The difference is that technology gives us all greater power. Therefore, I say, while we should not stop in our journey towards a smart nation, we ought always remember “user problems” and give pause.
Remember Parking.sg? It’s a great app if everything works. If it doesn’t, well, you ought to know that the following pieces of information have been given by you – your credit or debit card details, the location which you were at a certain point in time, your vehicle number. I think it is a risk many of us are willing to take, and I certainly don’t want to paint alarmist hypotheticals.
My concern is a separate one.
We can try and ring fence technological gaps. But how do we guard against the bitter, the disaffected, the maladjusted, or the pathological? The greater the power, the greater the evil that men can do.
One thing we can and should do to invest more in humans, even as we invest in technology. For each course in IT, data analytics, cyber security, we need one on psychology, sociology, human relations. For each new resource in the IT department, a similar one in the HR department. We talk about industrial revolution but the quieter yet more violent one lies in the companion revolution in the way we work and relate to each other.
Technology allows us to do more. The humanities allow us to know why and how we ought to deploy our new powers. This calls for a way we think and invest in education, but also, what we can do, in government.
BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL
Finally, Sir, I want to make one specific suggestion. We have long vaunted our ability to tell “hard truths”, to value “doing the right thing” over doing the popular one.
But with increasing use of artificial intelligence and machines, our ability to tell what is the right thing we ought to do maybe severely compromised. Our ability to incorporate technology in our lives has far outstripped our ability to reason morally about the choices that we will be forced to make as a technological society. This is no longer a choice between the right and the popular, the short and the long term, but the choice on how to programme machines to make choices that are not just about efficiency and speed, but about values – good, bad, right, wrong.
We know of the accident with the autonomous vehicle at One North, where thankfully no one was hurt. If there was, to whom would we attribute the blame? There is a recently rendition of the classic “trolley problem”, where people all over the world voted on how they would resolve moral dilemmas. Would they save one or many? Would they save the young or the old? Would they kill their friends or strangers? Answers differ all over the world.
Sir, as Singapore develops into a smart nation, we need a collection of people – from the government, ordinary men and women, policy scholars and moral philosophers, as well as scientists and private corporations, to think about ethical issues and how they ought to be tackled.
There are different ethics committees now, embedded in different ministries and agencies, for example, in biomedical studies and research. Given the complexity and interlinkages, I think there is a case and I would argue for a National Committee for Ethics in Science and Technology, giving inputs on hard cases at the frontiers of new decisions relating to science and technology. I must clarify that the frontiers are not those of technological progress along, but on how they affect humans, and human relationships. And what, whether and how - technology should be deployed.
Sir, this Budget has invited heavily in technology – it has made important provisions to keep us safe in the online space. The Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA)’s Home Team Science & Technology Agency is one. Putting Digital Defence as our 6th pillar is another.
Sir, we should make a small additional provision to keep us not just safe, but strong, by allowing members of the public, as well as experts from the various humanities and social sciences, to debate, consider and crystallise our key ideas and feelings about what is right or wrong for us to do, using all the technological means we have at our disposal.
Sir, our “Place in the World” for the past 200 years has been secured in large part because we know how to exploit and work with technology. In the next 200 years, changes will be even faster and more severe. We need to not just understand science to take advantage of these changes, but also what it means to be human. Our investment therefore, cannot be lopsided in favour of technology. Only then can we have a Strong and United Singapore.
Sir, I thank you.
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