Rise of AI to change traditional hierarchy of jobs as ‘better’ cognitive roles get impacted: President Tharman

SINGAPORE: The rise of artificial intelligence (AI) will cause a “positive” shift in the traditional hierarchy of jobs, President Tharman Shanmugaratnam said on Wednesday (Nov 15).

“What you regard as a better job and a job that deserves better pay might shift considerably in the years to come. The way we value IQ over EQ might change,” he said during a fireside chat on the first day of this year’s Singapore FinTech Festival (SFF).

There is a range of jobs which require intelligence quotient, or IQ, that can actually be taken over by large language models (LLMs) and AI, and performed even more efficiently and better, said Mr Tharman at the Singapore Expo.

“We will then have to think hard about the jobs we really value (such as) the jobs that require teamwork, the jobs that require collective imagination (and) the care jobs, and we'll have to value them accordingly,” he said.

The three-day SFF brings together policy, finance and technology players from around the world to discuss cutting-edge financial solutions, evolving regulatory landscapes and the latest technological innovations.

FUNDAMENTAL CHANGE IN JOBS

In a session which lasted around 30 minutes, Mr Tharman added that while financial services may be more quickly impacted by technological advancements than other sectors, the impact will still be felt across the wider economy and society.

While machines and chatbots can gradually take on more human characteristics and become smarter or equivalent to the human brain, it does not mean people will lose their jobs, he said.

“But their jobs are going to change in a fundamental way,” said Mr Tharman, adding that in 10 to 15 years, the ongoing technological revolution will have a more profound effect on the workforce and society than any previous ones.

There will also be a distributive effect, as cognitive jobs, not just repetitive and routine jobs, are affected, he said.

“The earlier waves of technology, automation – factory automation, logistics automation and the like – essentially replaced what we call repetitive jobs,” he explained, adding that LLMs and AI take over cognitive tasks.

These are typically done by those with better education and better incomes, said Mr Tharman.

“That’s a welcome change, if you like. It’s finally reached home to the segment of the population that does the thinking and the pontificating that technological disruption is disruptive.”

FLOURISHING WITH TECH

AI can be a huge enabler, but its use requires coordination and some rules of the game, said Mr Tharman.

In healthcare, for instance, human judgment and decision-making is still needed in matters of life and death, but AI can be used as a tool in diagnosis and treatment.

“You need some form of regulation within countries and internationally to contain the role of AI in healthcare. Contain doesn’t mean hold it down,” he said.

“But you’ve got to make sure the decisions are ethical, in the interest of that particular patient, and that we are minded by human flourishing.”

When it comes to national security and global security, AI has the potential of leading to unintended catastrophic outcomes which are not in anyone’s interest, even between contending parties, said Mr Tharman.

In financial services, AI is a “phenomenal tool” for speeding up analysis and providing a lot more customised advice for people, he said.

A human element and ethical rules, however, are still needed to ensure that the right advice is given, especially when it is an ordinary person’s life savings at stake, said Mr Tharman.

GOVERNANCE OF AI

When it comes to governing the use of AI, he said “we are very early in the game of even thinking of how we can regulate this”.

“My cast of mind is not to be too all-encompassing (and) not to be too comprehensive. You can do a lot of academic work (and) a lot of thinking about it, but focus on the tasks that involve avoiding the worst,” he said.

Citing health, security and financial savings as risk areas, Mr Tharman said addressing them requires “focused attention”.

The effort to regulate AI must involve an international coalition of countries, and not just the most advanced countries, he said. 

“We have to think about a challenge that we're all going to face in the years to come … which is about politics, the ways in which views are shaped in a democracy and how AI again can be potentially very damaging to democracies,” said Mr Tharman.

He said the use of deepfakes and sophisticated fake information, combined with the algorithms of social media platforms, can systematically lead to polarisation.

“It’s not as if you have a marketplace of ideas and then you become more open-minded as you listen to different ideas. In practice, what happens is you become reinforced in your views, and sometimes your emotions.”

SHIFT IN TECH TALENT TRENDS

With AI expected to take over a large number of programming jobs, it will be easier for labour-short societies like Singapore, which lacks professionals in that domain, to compete amid a global tech talent crunch, said Mr Tharman

“More worryingly, it might make it more difficult for developing countries to catch up by getting into the BPO (business process outsourcing) business and the programming business and exporting ICT (information and communications technology) services, because a large swath of those tasks are going to be taken over by AI,” he said.

The shift would mean having to provide alternative job opportunities for a large band of white-collar workers performing the middle and upper-middle cognitive skills tasks across every sector, he added.

Societies that have coordination between the public sector, private sector and labour unions are going to be well placed to address this challenge, said Mr Tharman, citing the examples of Germany, the Scandinavian countries and Singapore itself.

“You can’t just leave it to individual firms and individual workers. You’ve got to have a collective approach because it does require organisation,” he said.

“We’ve got to provide them alternatives, either the same job but doing it differently and better, enabled by new tools, or moving on to other jobs. It’s a collective task, and we need to organise ourselves as a social organisation to address this.”