President Tharman: AI’s advantage should be leveraged up and down the workforce

SINGAPORE: In an interview on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, last month, President Tharman Shanmugaratnam said Singapore, being a small, very open nation that relies a lot on technology, will face the challenge of artificial intelligence (AI) faster than other countries.

The topic of discussion was on artificial intelligence in relation to the workforce. The interview was published on Sunday, February 1.

Mr Tharman is the co-chairman of the World Bank Group’s High-Level Advisory Council on Jobs.

Singapore looks at AI in the same way it does every other form of productivity improvement—as a plus.

The real challenges when it comes to AI, he added, “is that we want that plus to be distributed up and down the workforce.”

This is how countries should view AI, not as a threat, but in a positive light in relation to building up people’s capabilities, so that more and more people can thrive. This, in turn, is advantageous to a country’s economy as a whole.

By no means did President Tharman downplay the difficulties of this task, but he instead underlined the importance of investing in the larger middle layer of the workforce, white-collar workers, whether it’s finding jobs in industries that will have higher demand, such as healthcare, or equipping them so that they can work with AI.

This, he added, is already ongoing in Singapore with its SkillsFuture movement, which is just over a decade old.

During a panel discussion at Davos, Mr Tharman spoke on opportunities for job creation, especially in light of transitioning to more green technologies. Resource-rich Africa and South Asia may be sites for worldwide energy production, he added.

“This is a real opportunity that didn’t exist at the time that East Asia took off – the opportunity of creating jobs; unskilled, semi-skilled, and high-skilled through the renewable transition,” he said.

Mr Tharman also spoke on the possibility of moving production to other developing countries while China seeks to manage over-manufacturing issues. /TISG

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