Nations must exercise ‘agency’ to develop AI capabilities: Josephine Teo

[SINGAPORE] Nations need to exercise their agency when developing their artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities, said Minister of Digital Development and Information Josephine Teo on Wednesday (Nov 19).

She said that it is a given that not many countries would have all the desirable elements of an AI ecosystem, but that internally, each country could reshape conditions – invest in infrastructure, create the conditions for the technology to be used responsibly – to build that ecosystem to ready itself for an AI future.

“But to my mind, the single most important area of intervention, of worthwhile effort, and where you must exercise the most agency, is really in developing capabilities,” she said.

She stressed that the capabilities have to be thought of in a “holistic way”, and these include capabilities in the workforce, enterprises, academia, and even capabilities in AI governance and the usage of AI in the government itself.

The minister was speaking on a panel at the Bloomberg New Economy Forum held at Capella Singapore in Sentosa. Lila Ibrahim, chief operating officer at Google Deepmind, also spoke on the panel, which was moderated by Haslinda Amin, anchor and editor-at-large at Bloomberg Television.

AI can be put to use among small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), she said, but because of the “heterogenous” nature of these smaller businesses, their adoption of AI may take “different pathways”.

She emphasised that there are different ways for the Singapore government to support SMEs in the implementation and usage of AI.

“Some will come through tools that are made available by bigger platforms. Some will be through efforts that are targeted at the sector,” she said.

Open models are very important in the push for widespread adoption of AI, she said.

With the scaling up of AI adoption and the wide variety of applications of AI within organisations, the lack of open models to individuals would be “quite problematic”, she noted.

She acknowledged, however, that open models are not a one-size-fits-all solution. This would be the case among financial institutions and organisations holding intellectual property or sensitive information, for example; it would not be feasible for them to rely on open models.

Saying that a mix of these different kinds of access would be made available, she added: “We must do our part to try and ensure that access remains open as widely as possible – If we want to see widespread adoption.”

And for adoption of AI to be widespread, the education system would need to prep the workforce accordingly.

She commented that the current implementation of AI in schools – with teachers using AI assistants to outsource their mundane administrative work – “misses the point of using AI for education”.

“The great value of AI is in personalising learning in a way that attends to the unique strengths and shortcomings of every learner, and trying to find ways to enable them to achieve better learning outcomes,” she said.

She said that the Ministry of Education is looking at ways to use the technology to not just support teachers, but also to support learning in schools.

AI can be used to benefit both Singapore and the world, she said.

“We hope that the benefits (of AI) don’t just accrue to students in Singapore, but potentially to students elsewhere,” she said.