Shawn Wang: belief

Transcript context

…So they will be complementary. There is the planning aspect of it. But if you wanted to use REG, it does not have individual personalised career paths to draw on. That one has got a frame, a proposal of how you could go about it. It could tell you, maybe from A, you could get to B. Whereas what you're talking about planning is that, well, here's how someone else has gotten from A to B by going through C, D, E in between. So they're complementary things. You and I talked a little bit this morning about winning the 30-year war, right? A lot of the plans are very short term, very like, how can we get it now? How can we, like, we got OpenAI to open an office here, great, let's go and get Anthropic, Google DeepMind, all these guys, the AI creators to move to Singapore. Hopefully we can get there, maybe not. Maybe, maybe not, right? It's hard to tell. The 30-year war, in my mind, is the kind of scale of operation that we did that leads me to speak English today. We as a government decided, strategically, English is an important thing, we'll teach it in schools, we'll adopt it as the language of business. And you and I discussed, like, is there something for code? Is it that level? Is it time for that kind of shift that we've done for English, for Mandarin? And like, is this the third one that we speak Python as a second language? And I want to just get your reactions to this crazy idea. This may not be so crazy, the idea that you need to acquire literacy in a particular field. I mean, some years ago, we decided that computer literacy was important for everyone to have and put in place quite a lot of programs in order to enable people at various stages of learning, including those who are already adult learners, to try and acquire these kinds of skills. So, you know, AI literacy is not a far-fetched idea. Is it all going to be coding? Perhaps for some people, this type of skills will be very relevant. Is it necessary for everyone? That's something I think the jury is out. I don't think that there is a clear conclusion. We've discussed this also with colleagues from around the world who are interested in trying to improve the educational outcomes. These are professional educators who are very interested in curriculum. They're interested in helping children become more effective in the future. And I think as far as we are able to see, there is no real landing point yet. Does everyone need to learn coding? And I think even for some of the participants that raised today, they did not necessarily start with a technical background. Some of them came into it quite late. This is not to say that we are completely close to the idea. I think it is something that we will continue to investigate. And the good thing about Singapore is that if and when we come to the conclusion that that's something that has to become either third language for everyone or has to become as widespread as mathematics or some other skillset, digital skills, or rather reading skills, then maybe it's something that we have to think about introducing on a wider scale.…

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