A New AI Lexicon: Smart

Illustration by Somnath Bhatt

Goodness, smartness, and the postcolonial state: AI in Singapore

A guest post by Hallam Stevens & Daniel Vale. Hallam is an Associate Professor in the History Programme and in the School of Biological Sciences at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. Twitter: @hallam_stevens. Daniel is an external PhD candidate at eLaw — Center for Law and Digital Technologies, Leiden University, the Netherlands.

This essay is part of our ongoing “AI Lexicon” project, a call for contributions to generate alternate narratives, positionalities, and understandings to the better known and widely circulated ways of talking about AI.

Much of the history, meaning, and imagination of AI is discussed in relation to the West, often against a backdrop of cybernetics, “AI winters,” and Terminator androids. These narratives inform how we understand the risks and “social good” of AI. However, in Asia, AI takes on a multitude of different meanings and possibilities. This essay outlines some of the plans and visions that surround AI in one small, wealthy, Asian nation: Singapore. Specifically, this essay illustrates how the “social good” that motivates AI in Singapore is linked primarily to postcolonial narratives of economic development, social cohesion, and technological advancement. As part of Singapore’s “Smart Nation” initiative, AI provides an imagining of a digital, tech-driven, productive, and cohesive society. As such, it is less a technology, and more a rallying point.

Since its independence, the Singaporean government has crafted a series of technological visions of the future with educated, efficient, productive techno-citizens powering an increasingly digital economy. These narratives rely on two postcolonial tropes. First, that Singapore remains forever vulnerable to a range of external and internal threats, including economic and political challenges (Heng, 2013). Second, addressing those threats requires mobilization of the nation’s “only natural resource”: its population (The Economist, 2018).

From the 1980s onwards, Singapore has attempted to recreate itself in various iterations of a “smart” nation. The branding of the country as an “intelligent island” was consonant with the government’s attempt to move Singapore “up the value chain” from a manufacturing economy to an advanced service and technology-driven one (Clancey, 2012). The Singaporean government invested heavily in telecommunications and information technology infrastructure, the digitization of government services, financially supporting high-tech industries, as well as, perhaps most critically, technical education and research (including through creation of high-tech research and industrial parks, such as “Biopolis” and “Fusionopolis”).

During the 2010s, many of these efforts were re-branded as “smart city” goals. The “Smart Nation” initiative, announced by Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong in 2014, was described as a journey to “transform Singapore through technology” (p. 7). These initiatives were premised on the idea that technology would and should become even more important to Singaporeans’ lives and work in the twenty-first century: “Smart Nation is integral to Singapore’s next phase of nation building. To continue to prosper and stay relevant in the world, Singapore needs to ride the waves of the digital revolution and capture the opportunities it brings…” (p. 5). The initiative serves as a way of shoring up Singapore’s reputation and core identity — a high-tech nation.

Recently, AI has played an increasingly important role in this “smart nation” strategy. In 2017, the National Research Foundation provided a SGD150 million grant to create “AI Singapore,” a “national AI programme” to fund AI research, start-ups, education, as well as, more broadly, coordinate AI development and promote Singapore’s role in AI overseas. In 2019, the government formalized its commitment by creating a “National AI strategy” as a key component of Smart Nation Singapore. Yet this strategy document has remarkably little to say about what AI is. Rather than describing particular systems or examples, AI is imagined as a “general purpose technology” that will render changes comparable to “the advent of electricity… Any nation able to master this technology will be able to create tremendous social and economic value for its citizens. Societies that cannot adapt will fall behind.” (p. 12). This Darwinian language provides a crucial sense of mission: Singapore’s small size and limited resources means that it must continue to embrace new technologies. Put another way, the rapid acceleration of technological development associated with AI is generating a new vulnerability for Singapore — namely, the need to keep pace with cutting edge technological developments. According to the government, without continuous technical development, the nation risks falling behind and losing its economic edge.

AI is both a threat and an opportunity. The “general” and vague nature of AI discourse allows it to take on many different meanings and to encompass and represent different kinds of technologies. As such, AI has come to stand for a vision of technological change that will drive Singapore’s continued development and prosperity. “AI” here is not a specific technology, but rather a way of branding the digital transformation agenda of Singapore. AI is now a national mantra. This mantra is less a plan for research and development, but, rather, a blueprint for how to re-imagine Singapore for the twenty-first century:

The National AI strategy is a key step in our Smart Nation journey. It spells out our plans to deepen our use of AI technologies to transform our economy, going beyond just adopting technology, to fundamentally rethinking business models and making deep changes to reap productivity gains and create new areas of growth (p. 5).

AI will require planning for a fundamental change in Singapore’s economy, the strategy suggests. Figure 1 (p. 25) illustrates how the vision for AI is deeply embedded into the geography of Singapore — national projects are portrayed as literally fixed into the landscape of Singapore. AI must become integral to the nation itself, part of homes, businesses, interactions, transactions, and all aspects of daily life.

The strategy also articulates how AI will be intertwined into the social fabric of Singapore. In particular, it describes Singapore’s research efforts as focused on “human-centric” AI — AI that will “focus on benefits to citizens and businesses.” (p. 18). Singapore plans to deploy AI systems that understand and respond to human interactions. They will purportedly work collaboratively with humans, and understand culture and social norms (“especially Asian cultures and norms”) (p. 19). “Human-centric” AI responds to “speech, gestures, and touch” and can be taught by “instruction and demonstration” to create, we are promised, new synergies between humans and machines. As a result, “Singaporeans will trust the use of AI in their lives” (p. 16). How exactly this might be done is not described. As such, the transformation to an AI-driven society is imagined as a transformation of Singapore’s citizenry too. This will not only change traditional social interactions, but also, it is hoped, enhance human productivity, creating new kinds of workers empowered by AI-driven technologies.

Catherine Waldby has argued that Singapore’s turn towards the biomedical and pharmaceutical sectors in the first decade of the 21st century entailed a two-fold mobilization of its population (Waldby, 2009). Citizens were not only to be transformed into knowledge workers in high-value biomedical industries, but would be offered up as subjects for pharmaceutical testing. Singapore’s multi-ethnic (Chinese, Indian, Malay) population was showcased as a prime site for the testing of therapeutics destined for Asian markets. Likewise, the commitment to AI requires mobilization of the population not just as engineers and data scientists, but as citizens willing to proffer up their data. Singapore’s Smart Nation plans include gathering data from its population from digital payments, sensors embedded in street lamps, smart devices in public housing estates, and via government services. These data become the fuel that runs the future AI-based economy.

Likewise, the commitment to AI requires mobilization of the population not just as engineers and data scientists, but as citizens willing to proffer up their data.

Singapore’s government understands that reaping the benefits of AI is not just about building software and gadgets. Rather, AI technology must be thoroughly enmeshed into the social, political, and economic fabric of the city via trust, familiarity, education, and shared values. AI strategy is not merely a technology strategy but a way of re-imagining a tech-driven, deeply wired, productive, and cohesive society and nation. It is a future in which citizens are not only “smart” but also integrated with, trusting of, and productive alongside the machines that surround them. In this future, Singapore will be well-supplied with goods, healthy, well-educated, and seamlessly integrated within the global economy.

The “social good” that AI can provide for Singapore is linked primarily to postcolonial narratives of economic development, social cohesion, and technological advancement. Here, problems of AI ethics, governance, and explainability become issues of how to best create a “progressive and trusted” environment for AI. Ethical and “social” questions must be addressed not for their own sake but rather because they pose a challenge to citizens’ “acceptance” of AI. This acceptance is critical if citizens are to remain mobilized as the nation’s “only natural resource,” now re-imagined as sources of data.

Over the past forty years, Singapore has generated a series of technological imaginaries — visions of the future with educated, efficient, productive techno-citizens powering a digital economy. AI, as articulated in the national strategy, is the latest of such imaginaries. It is a narrative about how to be productive with technology and how to build a particular kind of society with and through technology. It tells a story of what kind of people (highly educated, productive, trusting of machines), government (responsive, tech-driven), and society (cohesive, wealthy) the state wishes to bring into fruition.