The Truth About AI: Firms Will Profit, Workers Will Lose Jobs

Even if Singapore navigates the disruption well, it could still be hurt by the knock-on effects from reduced trade and demand.

- Ravi Velloor

One of the highlights of the recent dialogue with Prime Minister Lawrence Wong, organised by the Institute of Policy Studies and Singapore Business Federation, came when Professor Tommy Koh asked about how Singapore will help those people left behind by the rapid advances in technologies such as artificial intelligence—noting that even new graduates were having difficulty getting jobs.

PM Wong explained that more than the early movers and those at the cutting edge of technology, it was the broad-based adoption of technology that would decide the winners and losers.

If there is any country that can do that, it is us, because we are small, we are compact, and we can do this company by company, PM Wong said.

"So I would say that even as we think about broad-based adoption of AI, which we have to do because we have no choice—we have to harness technology—we also have to think equally hard about applying technologies like AI in a meaningful and deliberate manner that creates jobs for Singaporeans."

Thank God for Singapore's tripartite system, its proactive government, and a people tuned to never being complacent. The Republic will probably escape the worst of the ravages of the technological cyclone combining automation, robotics, and generative AI. Perhaps it may even thrive, as law academic Ben Chester Cheong's optimistic OpEd suggested in these pages.

Elsewhere, things may not be so rosy. And, since no island is truly an island, it is the knock-on effects on trade, new non-tariff walls and reduced demand from the job dislocations that AI is already causing—whether it is demand for goods, or services such as tourism and healthcare—that could potentially hurt Singapore.