Josephine Teo: preference

Transcript context

…I was listening to some of your previous interviews, and even the choice of the name development in the ministry name was very specific. You mentioned naming is your ethos. Can you explain maybe a bit about what the ministry does, which is not simply funding R&D, but it's also thinking about how to apply the technologies in industry and just maybe give people an overview since there's not really an equivalent in the US? Yeah, so when people talk about our Smart Nation efforts, it was helpful in articulating a few key pillars. We talked about one pillar being a vibrant digital economy. We also talk about a stable digital society because digital technologies, the way in which they are used, can sometimes cause divisions in society or entrench polarisation. They can also have the potential of causing social upheaval. So when we talked about stable digital society, that was what we had in mind. How do you preserve cohesion? Then we said that in this domain, government has to be progressive too. You can't expect the rest of Singapore to digitalise, and yet the government is falling behind. So a progressive digital government is another very important pillar. And underpinning all of this has to be comprehensive digital security. There is, of course, cyber security, but there is also how individuals feel safe in the digital domain, whether as users on social media or if they're using devices and they're using services that are delivered digitally. So when we talk about these four pillars of a Smart Nation, people get it. When we then asked ourselves, what is the appropriate way to think of the ministry? We used to be known as the Ministry of Communications and Information, and we had been doing all this digital stuff without actually putting it into our name. So when we eventually decided to rename the ministry, there were a couple of options to choose from. We could have gone for digital technologies, we could have gone for digital advancement, we could have gone for digital innovation. But ultimately we decided on digital development because it wasn't the technologies, the advancements or the innovation that we cared about, they are important, but we're really more interested in their impact to society, impact to communities. So how do we shape those developments? How do we achieve a digital experience that is trustworthy? How do we make sure that everyone, not just individuals who are savvy from the get-go in digital engagements, how does everyone in society, regardless of age, regardless of background, also feel that they have a sense of progression, that embracing technology brings benefits to them? And we also believe that if you don't pay attention to it, then you might not consciously apply the use of technology to bring people together. And you may passively just allow society to break apart without being too... Oh my god, that's drastic.…

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