Professor Tan Eng Chye, President, National University of Singapore
Mr Huang Ziwei, 45th President, NUS Student Union
Mr Soh Yi Da, NUS Student Union Alumni President
Distinguished Guests
Ladies and Gentlemen
I'm very honoured. I'm very happy to be back. My wife just reminded me that we met in the NUSSU office almost 40 years ago.
For me, this is personal and it's very hard to say no whenever NUS invites me for some occasion or the other. The emcee has already made the reference to the QR code on your table to contribute towards raising funds. And I'm glad that the NUSSU Alumni Bursary Fund, set up in 2016, now has raised more than half a million dollars.
The other good news is that this year alone, more than $200,000 has been raised even before this dinner. But that doesn't mean we don't donate now.
When I spoke at the 70th anniversary of NUSSU five years ago, I made three points.
First, that young Singaporeans have a strong sense of national identity and a sense of collective destiny. That's a positive.
The second point was that all of us want a real stake in Singapore and a sense of ownership.
The third point was the need for an enduring commitment to social mobility and a sense of equality of opportunity.
This dinner is a worthy cause because it is a reflection of our commitment to social mobility and to giving other young people the opportunities that all of us have benefited from.
I want to share some sobering points tonight.
It has been five years since I last addressed the NUS Alumni. The current NUS Student Union President Huang Ziwei mentioned that he entered NUS during COVID-19.
COVID-19 had a major impact, not only for Singapore, but globally.
We had never had the complete closure of the Causeway. And during our time in NUS, we had many more Malaysians and other foreign students than today. That closure and the fear that it was a global pandemic had enormous psychological, academic and political impact on the world.
It reminded everyone that the old paradigm of organising your supply chains using Just-In-Time strategy to reduce costs, was not good enough.
Politically and globally, this search for resilience has also complicated relations between countries because suddenly, it is not just a matter of friendship or alignment, but whether you are reliable and dependable.
The second thing that happened in the last five years is that the strategic global situation has deteriorated. There is a deep strategic rivalry and the lack of strategic trust between the US and China, who will be the key superpowers for the remainder of our lives. Both believe, rightly or wrongly, that they deserve to be number one and that it is their manifest destiny.
America in its short two-and-a-half centuries of history, and China in its five millennia of history, have never quite dealt with a counterparty with the precise characteristics that face each other today.
Because of the lack of strategic trust and anxiety, and the desire to either get to number one or stay at number one almost at all costs, means that we have arrived at a situation where every measure or countermeasure that is taken by one party, is viewed as a potential threat and requires countervailing precautions which can also be viewed with negative connotations by the other side. You then have a very dangerous escalatory spiral that can be set off.
That's why I have spent a considerable amount of time flying all around the world, including visiting these two countries. In fact, I have met Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi and the US Secretary of State Antony Blinken over the last one week.
For the last 70 years, Singapore has enjoyed the best of both worlds. We've benefitted from Pax Americana, which prevailed after the end of the Second World War- globalisation, free trade, economic integration, global supply chains, and the rise of multinationals. We've also benefitted from the reform and opening of China since 1978.
A lot of our success is also because we positioned, or pre-positioned, ourselves to take advantage of these large, powerful global currents. The problem, however, is that if these two poles diverge, bifurcate, decouple, or de-risk, we can end up with the worst of both worlds, if we are not careful.
There are also hot wars going on in the world right now, for example between Russia and Ukraine. Frankly, there is no imminent end to it.
We've also got the situation between Israel and Hamas, and the risk of a wider conflagration between Israel and Lebanon, Israel and Syria, and Israel and Iran.
If you add up all the states who are lining on opposite sides of the battlefield, in Europe and in the Middle East, you will see it is the same cast of characters opposed to the other cast of characters on these battlefields.
The last time the world ended up in a situation like this, is before the First World War. It's worth reflecting that while we hope history doesn't repeat itself, we would be very foolish to assume that history will not rhyme; these risk factors are clear and present.
Before I came, I was reading a poem by William Butler Yeats. He wrote it in 1919 and it was published in 1920. Let me give you a small snippet of it:
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
The last two lines are eerily scary. Yeats wrote this 100 years ago, in the aftermath of the First World War, and in the midst of the flu pandemic of 1919.
Apart from foreign policy, wars and peace, it's also worth looking internally.
When we look at domestic politics today, my observation is that all over the world, we are witnessing a fracture of societies. The centre cannot hold; there is extremism, polarisation, division, and fractiousness. It's almost as if people are living in alternate universes.
If you watch cable TV, depending on which channel you watch, they can describe the same event but in a completely different way. The political centre has been eroded.
People cannot agree on a single set of facts, much less opinion. In domestic politics, you get more heat than light generated by debate. You get inability to form consensus, to embark on collective action, and to focus on long-term collective action to deal with the challenges of the future.
And there are big, significant challenges of the future. We've got climate change. We've just gone through a global pandemic, but let me tell you as a doctor, that the COVID-19 is not the worst pandemic that has befallen the world. And it is quite easy to imagine an even more contagious and even more fatal pandemic waiting for us in the imminent future.
And if that's not enough, we've had the advent of global internet, social media, and now AI.
We are also on the verge of unlocking biotechnology, with our ability now to edit genomes. If you can edit a genome of a bacteria, a virus, a plant, or an animal, there's nothing that says that same technology cannot or will not be applied to human genomes.
So, we are standing on the cusp of a true revolution in multiple interlocking spheres. And anyone who says we can continue business as usual is not being honest with you.
Where does that leave Singapore? First, I believe Singapore needs to remain open.
In 1965, we were cast out into an unlikely independence that no one foresaw or predicted, and we lost our natural hinterland. Because we lost our natural hinterland, we were forced to globalise, even before the word globalisation became popularised.
We had to welcome investment from overseas, including our ex-colonial masters. There was no time to engage in xenophobia or colonial hangovers. We welcomed investments, capital, as well as talent from around the world to bring in technology and expertise.
We invested in first-world infrastructure and connectivity- at that time, it was ports and airports. Today, that means digital connectivity.
My submission is that, given the state of the world, we need to be even more open. We cannot fool ourselves that we can somehow put a great wall around Singapore and insulate ourselves from competition, global trends, or from the technological revolution.
The second point is that, even as we remain open, we still need to maintain our identity, our unity and our cohesion.
There must be some value, pride, a shared experience, shared overlapping values, perspective, identity and bonds. You can't just be an open city but have no identity, no belonging, no collective accountability, and no common collective sense of a future.
We can't take this for granted.
Our greatest challenge to the conduct of foreign policy and having the space to make long-term decisions will be entirely constrained by domestic politics.
In Singapore, our population is diverse, and I don't just mean in race, language, religion, but in perspectives, in worldviews, in expectations. And we have to find a way to get people to understand that we can have diverse views, but we should not let that divide us, or fracture our ability to keep Singapore going in a dangerous, volatile world. It should not destroy and erode the social capital that we have. And most important of all, we should not let diversity and the divergence of views be a recipe, or an excuse, or justification for violence. So that's why we as a government, and I say this with no apology, we have legislation like the Protection from Online Falsehoods and Manipulation Act (POFMA), the Foreign Interference (Countermeasures) Act (FICA), and Protection from Harassment Act (POHA). And if we need to do other things, we will have to, because we need to protect the unity, cohesion, coherence, and the good functioning of Singapore society. That's my second point, maintaining unity.
My third and final point is a bit more difficult. All that is in the news nowadays is about how ChatGPT, large-language models, and AI is going to transform our lives.
If you imagine a world now where all knowledge is available on tap, you also assume a world in which computer systems now have developed pattern recognition.
Look at it from a biological sense. The reason why the biological brain has got layers of neurons is because that just happens mathematically to be the optimal way, within limited compute and energy constraints, to do pattern recognition. It is pattern recognition that allows us to see, to hear, to listen, to speak, to translate. It is pattern recognition that even allows us to formulate a speech that hopefully connects with the audience.
We're now in a world where even pattern recognition is being commoditised. It's being taken out of the human monopoly.
The question then is, if facts are a given, and pattern recognition is also a given, what does that leave for the educated man of today? I think there is still a role for human beings. If you want a good answer from ChatGPT, you need to guide it, you need to know how to phrase your prompt, you need to understand what the context window is, and what specific, implicit, or tacit information you need to feed into the system, and then phrase your question correctly, in order to get an answer which is useful, relevant, and actionable.
It is about the question and not the answer. It is about the application, and not just the esoteric, intellectual stimulation. I think this must permeate university education, in a larger sense of the word.
In conclusion, we've all been blessed to be alumni of NUS. We've all had, especially the older ones in this room, a very good run in life because we've benefited from independence and success in Singapore, and global developments in the last 17 to 18 years.
But we now live in a more dangerous world, but also a more exciting, revolutionary world. And in that kind of world, my reminder to everyone is, we need to remain open, we need to remain cohesive, and we need to ask the right questions.
Thank you all very much.
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