Rise of the machines (1)
SINGAPORE — Technology reshaping the world was top of mind among the thousands of people who attended the 15-17 November Singapore FinTech Festival in Changi, including this nation’s president, the Harvard-educated Tharman Shanmugaratnam.
In a fireside chat, Tharman fleshed out the often nebulous concepts surrounding two topics, namely, finances and technology, which, taken together, form the portmanteau fintech. AI, or artificial intelligence, in its many emerging forms, no doubt, hogged the attention at SFF 2023.
Before becoming the ninth president of Singapore, Tharman served as Senior Minister, Coordinating Minister for Social Policies, and Chairman of the Monetary Authority. Having played a significant role in past SFF stagings, Tharman was asked what had changed in him since then.
“That’s an interesting question because you have got to keep changing through life without changing yourself. And I’ve always believed, from the time I was young, through all the ups and downs in my life, that you must not try to change what’s in you,” Tharman said.
“Be yourself… and I think if we all do that, we will also discover the selves in each of us, the strength in each other. So, I don’t think very much about philosophy in life, but I don’t see myself changing in any fundamental way each time I change a job or take on a new role.”
Much of President Tharman’s discussion centered on how things like AI and digital assets are paving new directions and pushing the frontiers of the global economy. And with fintech easing cross-border inter-country, business-to-business, and business-to-consumer trade, issues like hacking and other cybersecurity threats have reared their ugly heads.
Financial services, according to Tharman, will be “more impacted or more quickly impacted than other sectors, but this is going to be economywide and society-wide.” He cited the lightning speed by which ChatGPT got 100 million users in just two months.
A cause for amazement or concern for those who fear AI-powered systems is that they would render many humans jobless in the near future. This may be inevitable to some extent, as the Singaporean official described AI starting as science fiction to become a reality. He pointed to “large language model-powered chatbots” taking in more human characteristics.
“And we wondered whether we will reach that point of singularity, where the machine becomes equivalent to or smarter than the human brain.
There’s no intrinsic reason why it can’t happen. I don’t think this is going to happen suddenly, where we wake up one day and find singularity. It’s going to happen progressively.”
Okay, if jobs are safe for the next three years, according to Tharman, in 10 to 15 years, people will have to retool, adapt, reinvent themselves, and, more importantly, be able to use technology in general and AI, in particular, to stay relevant as members of the workforce. A recent United States study showed that even as you read this, “for 80 percent of jobs, about 10 percent of the work can be replaced by AI.”
If Tharman can be described as anything, it would not be as alarmist as he tagged the AI revolution as a mere “continuum” of the digital march to progress, saying that for one out of every four people, at least 50 percent of their tasks can be easily replaced by AI.
“It may not mean that they will lose their jobs, but their jobs are going to change in a fundamental way,” Tharman said. “If I have to guess, I would say AI is going to be faster than previous technologies in replacing human tasks and enabling humans at the same time.”
“AI is going to be faster than previous technologies in replacing human tasks and enabling humans at the same time.
“A cause for amazement or concern for those who fear AI-powered systems is that they would render many humans jobless in the near future.