DPM Tharman Shanmugaratnam at the launch of Watson Centre on 9 June 2016

Mr Bruno Di Leo, Senior Vice President, IBM Corporation 
Mr Randy Walker, Chairman and CEO, IBM Asia Pacific 
Distinguished guests, 
Ladies and Gentlemen,

Introduction

Good morning. It is a real pleasure to join you here this morning. Congratulations on the establishment of this new Watson Centre at Marina Bay.

I just had a quick tour of a couple of things you are doing at the Centre – applying IoT and predictive analytics with Parkway Pantai, and applying some blockchain to logistics and supply chain management. I want to make only a few points, because we have had a few very good presentations already.

First, the locating of IBM’s Asia Pacific Headquarters in Singapore and Watson Center is another important advance in our relationship. Relationships are very important. The Singapore economy, because it’s not very large, is really all about relationships – between government and companies large and small, and between companies and their clients and people. We have to keep these relationships going. What makes business sense for you, we want to enable it to be done in Singapore – that’s what it’s about. So I’m very happy with what’s happening in our relationship with IBM.

The shift into the digital economy

The second point has to do with why we are embracing technologies that are usually positioned as “disruptive”. That’s what the talk is all about. Indeed, many incumbent players will be disrupted. Some jobs too will become redundant. But at the same time, there is something profoundly enabling about these technologies. Whether it’s blockchain, or digital commerce, or even artificial intelligence, it’s going to be profoundly enabling for a broad range of enterprises, as well as for us as human beings.

We know that there’s going to be a disruption, but the reason why we are embracing disruption in a whole range of technologies is because we also want to maximise their enabling potential, for enterprises and people. The new technologies and digital platforms that we are talking about will allow small players to participate on a level playing field with the big. And we want to make that possible as quickly and efficiently as possible.

To help that happen, we are promoting collaboration. Big companies don’t often collaborate with other big companies, especially if they are their competitors, but they collaborate quite naturally with smaller players in the same supply chain and cluster.

We want to maximise that collaboration within the cluster. This Watson Centre itself aims to do that. It’s about partnerships and co-creation of solutions between suppliers, between firms and customers, between big and small.

So there’s this very interesting space to be exploited. Collaboration between enterprises, all competitive players, but seeing merit and advantage in collaborating with partners. We want to maximise that enabling feature of these new technologies for small enterprises especially.

The second thing that is enabling about these technologies is how they enable and enhance human potential. Some jobs will be disrupted. If you are talking about healthcare – there will be less need for radiographers as AI takes over, and less need for some other jobs. But overall, it’s going to be about developing human capabilities through interaction with computers and artificial intelligence.

We are at the cusp of quite a profound change in healthcare, for example. Artificial intelligence will not displace most humans in healthcare but lead instead to ‘augmented intelligence’ – with human-computer interactions enabling better and more customised care for each individual.

Healthcare is therefore going to be transformed, from a focus on diseases to a focus on each individual. We will be able to collect and make sense of far more information about a person, including information about themselves that they didn’t know about. A lot of it is unstructured data. It is information from many sources – the electronic health records, diagnostic imaging, the prescriptions they had, whether they have taken their drugs or not, their genomic profiles, and the information streamed from their wearable devices – it’s a whole new set of information. Not possible for even the most capable doctor to analyse this data, quickly and accurately. So it is this combining of artificial intelligence with professional capabilities, this augmented intelligence, that will deliver targeted, better quality healthcare for individuals, or deeply personalised healthcare. This is a huge opportunity, and we are only at the cusp of what is to come.

I’ve talked about healthcare, but we could say the same about a range of other industries. It’s about developing the human potential, in a whole range of jobs. Doctors and nurses, a whole range of jobs. Some jobs displaced, other jobs enabled and enhanced. That’s our job in Singapore. We’re a small country, we don’t have that many people, but we can have everyone employed, with better quality jobs, through this interaction with technology. Some jobs disrupted, but new jobs arising and enhanced, to give satisfaction to those working in these jobs, and ultimately to deliver a better service to the customer.

So let’s focus on enabling these futures, even as we restructure, and work together to maximise our human potential. If you leave it to the market, it might eventually happen, but it may not happen in Singapore. It may happen somewhere else. But if we work together actively, we can make things happen here in Singapore. It will be for the better of everyone.

Conclusion 

I want to thank IBM once again for this very rich partnership that we are developing, and I’m excited like you are for its potential.