新加坡总理黄循财大谈自己没有智能手机的青年岁月

Take the problem of tackling a big issue like the pandemic. During the height of the pandemic, everyone said – let us work together to improve global surveillance systems so that if a virus were to start up again, we would know and we would get better at detecting it quickly and we can take appropriate safeguards and measures. That was at that time, now after so many years of talking and discussing, unfortunately, not much progress has been in strengthening the global surveillance system to guard against a future pandemic.

Take the problem of climate change, which is likely to be the biggest problem humanity has to confront in our time. People talk about wanting to cut back emissions. Countries make all sorts of commitments but unfortunately, we do see a backsliding in many of these commitments around the world. Particularly from the large emitters, which means, year-by-year emissions continuing to rise, global temperatures continuing to rise, and we are all headed towards a climate disaster. On the climate, it looks like things might very well get worse before it gets better.

Take another challenge, which is that of rapid technological advancement. I think we are on the cusp of yet another major wave of technological advancements and breakthroughs. When I was your age, the big thing was the internet that had just come into being. The World Wide Web, it was a novelty. That novelty that started in the early 90s led to huge breakthroughs and transformations across businesses. No one could have predicted in the early 90s what the internet could be used for. In the end, it led to e-commerce, business transformation, social media platforms and it is now creating the Internet of Things. So many transformations.

Today, what is new – AI. We are seeing the dawn of AI which I am sure in the next 20-30 years, will have an even bigger impact compared to the internet during my time. For now, everything we hear about AI is Large Language Models (LLMs), ChatGPT. But the potential use cases for AI goes well beyond ChatGPT. It will change how we innovate, how we work, how we learn and teach, how we collaborate and interact with one another. It will change everything for everyone. And you will experience these changes in your lifetime.

These are big and powerful forces shaping our operating environment. We do not have much control over them, they will happen. And sometimes, looking from our perspective in this tiny island: it can be easy to get overwhelmed by these big changes. But I say: never fear! We in Singapore have the ability to adapt and adjust to a new environment, and to survive and thrive in this dangerous world. In fact, this is what we have been doing this last 60 years as a nation. And we can continue to do so going forward.

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