SINGAPORE — The government has outlined a comprehensive artificial intelligence strategy centered on adopting AI quickly, preventing AI from causing harm, protecting workers displaced by AI, and ensuring AI remains useful enough to justify adopting it quickly.
Officials said the approach reflects Singapore’s longstanding preference for embracing technological change in a careful, orderly manner before technological change becomes disorderly somewhere else.
Under the plan, businesses will be encouraged to deploy AI to improve productivity, while workers will receive support to adapt to jobs altered or eliminated by those productivity improvements.
At the same time, regulators will develop safeguards for increasingly autonomous systems to ensure that machines capable of making independent decisions continue making only the kinds of independent decisions authorities are comfortable with.
The government also stressed that Singapore cannot afford to fall behind in the global AI race, particularly as other countries compete to develop systems powerful enough that everyone now agrees they require significantly more supervision.
Asked how policymakers would simultaneously accelerate adoption, limit risks, preserve employment and remain internationally competitive, officials said this was precisely why Singapore had a strategy.
The public was reassured that artificial intelligence will remain firmly under human control for as long as humans remain responsible for approving the next software update.
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