PM Lee Hsien Loong at the Singapore Tech Forum 2020

Karen Tay (Moderator): Prime Minister, thank you for joining us. I would like to ask you on a more personal level, I noticed that you are very involved in pushing the technology agenda for the government, as well as for the broader Singapore. What makes this such an area of passion for you, PM?

PM Lee Hsien Loong: Well, first of all, I did tech at university. I did mathematics and computer science a very long time ago, it was before the Internet. It was at the time when people talk vaguely about something called the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET), which was on the other side of the Atlantic in the US, but it gave me a sense of the challenge, excitement, and the potential of IT. I have not kept current as an engineer, but I have kept an interest in it over the years. I have watched how it has transformed beyond recognition in one lifetime and is continuing to transform very rapidly every year. It is an enormous advantage for a society which is able to take full advantage of this to maximise its capabilities, and to be competitive in the new world. 

In Singapore particularly, it is an area where we have a natural strength if we put our minds to it because we are small, we have the technical infrastructure, we have the education, our people can absorb this. If we can get it in to our systems, not just individual apps and programs, but get it fully into our government, into the private sector, and into the way we operate and live, then it can be an enduring advantage for Singapore. That is why I have been pushing it quite hard over these last few years, building up within the government, but also encouraging it nationally, with the Smart Nation initiative.

Moderator: There has been more scepticism about smart cities globally and I recently came across an article in The Economist on how the UK government’s digital services was criticised on their bureaucratic resistance and the lack of tech talent in the senior levels, as well as the cohesive strategy. You have mentioned several times that we are not moving fast enough to your vision that you laid in 2014. Are we facing similar challenges as the UK?

PM Lee: We have some of the similar challenges, I read The Economist’s article too, it rang a bell, it is a challenge when you are trying to move a whole society and the whole very big government organisation with many legacy systems and many settled ways of doing things, and to transform that and to do it differently. It is very challenging. You need the determination, you need the engineering capabilities, and you need the talent in order to make it work. In the case of Singapore, in the civil service and in the public sector, the senior management is fully sold that this is an essential thing to do – that we must make full use of tech, that we have to reinvent, and it is not just making use of tech, but also changing the way we do things, so as to be able to capitalise on the new efficiencies, shortcuts and ways of operating which we were totally unable to do before. The will is there but talent is an issue, and the fact that you have a lot of legacy systems which are settled, built over many years and are very complicated – when you are keeping a live operation going, and then trying to change the parts and update it without dropping the ball, is not easy to do at all. Watching it happen, you feel a sense of impatience and may ask why this was not done yesterday. I can understand the intellectual reason why, but I still wish we could go faster. 

If you just have the engineers but the government is still operating in a non-digitalised way, the engineers will get frustrated. They will not be able to make full use of what technology is now capable of, unless the government changes its way of working. We are trying to do this and re-engineer our processes, so that you can make full use of IT. At the front-end, which the user sees – the app or interface, it is just the surface of it. Behind that front-end to make the back-end work seamlessly and all the different pieces truly to be integrated together, rather than just a front-end and behind that you have got somebody shuffling Excel spreadsheets. That takes a lot of work and that is what we are struggling to do and making progress gradually.

Moderator: Yes, so it is definitely as much as the human organisational problem as it is a tech problem.

PM Lee: It is a tech problem too. Well, outside the government too. I mean we have been trying to push digitalisation – to do things online, shop online, use cashless transactions –  it moves, but not so quickly. With COVID-19, it has moved faster. That is the one good thing which has come out of this enormous pandemic. People have found that they are able to make use of tech and it is not so hard to learn, even the old people have learnt to use tech, either to watch YouTube videos, to communicate with their grandchildren, or to order food. Once you have done it, you will keep on doing it I am sure, even after COVID-19 is gone. It is a social process. That means we have to look at the human part of it, and if you are talking about inclusivity, that especially is another human aspect because you want to carry everybody along and you do not want some segments of the society to feel that they are not up to speed and they have not been cut out of this. We are making a big effort on that.

Moderator: That is the unique role that the government can play in making sure that tech develops inclusively, as a society.

PM Lee: Yes, we pay a lot of attention to that. We have got tech ambassadors who go out and teach hawkers how to use apps, teach seniors how to log on to their SingPass mobile and teach people to be comfortable with it – that you do not have to code, but to use the thing and not to be afraid of it.

Moderator: PM, I would like to switch gears a little because we are talking to a global talent community. I want to jump in to our talent strategy. You know with more economies turning inwards, especially in the US, for example with the US-China bifurcation in technology, I noticed that talent has been thinking harder about where they should settle and build their careers. You mentioned that Singapore is open, we have the new Tech.Pass, but maybe I want to talk about value proposition.

There are three things generally that talent look for in finding a job. The first is the breadth of opportunities in the ecosystem. Second is on liveability. In Singapore we do quite well with that, but now with the shift to remote work, we generally see a trend away from high cost cities. The final one is the culture of the city as well as the company they work in. 

On that front, people have said that Singapore is very different from some of the major tech hubs. For example, our socio-political culture, our approach to LGBTQ for example, or our workplace culture, the hierarchical management culture. PM, what would you say is Singapore's total package value proposition to the tech talents here with us today?

PM Lee: Opportunities are growing. If you are looking for hairy-scary challenges, working on the government systems, and trying to bring them up to speed and into the next generation, these are amongst the most difficult things you can imagine doing, because it is not just engineering, but it is also organisational, and also social. If you are looking at the tech side of it, the range is growing because the tech companies are in Singapore and they are doing engineering work and increasingly so. The constraint is really a chicken-and-egg problem. If there is more talent, then they will be able to do more of this engineering work. But they are looking to do it in Singapore and are looking for the talent to come to do it in Singapore. If you want to be in charge of hyperscale systems, systems like the FAANGs have, servers with hundreds of thousands of machines, managing the whole network or a global database. 

For now, if it is not going to be headquartered out of Singapore, but one day, as Southeast Asia grows and as the infrastructure in the region develops, there will be a need, and some of it can be done in our part of the world, which is what has happened in other engineering companies. If you look at energy companies, for example, quite often they have some of their functions out of Singapore, and these are global functions – and tech can over time, develop in that direction. On work culture, it depends on the organisation. It may not be so easy to change the culture in existing organisations. They try hard. Sometimes they set up a surgeon outfit within the organisation and that operates as a kind of skunkworks. GovTech does that. Within GovTech, they have the Hive and they have their own Open Government Products (OGP). Another skunkworks within skunkworks.

You can do these things and develop different cultures in a piece of the organisation. But you also want to develop new organisations with fresh cultures, and be a new generation, as we have done 10 to 20 years ago, and they have become established and will transform themselves. Meanwhile, new ones will grow. Those sorts of things we will do and we will have some success. We are already beginning to see some results. On other cultural aspects, you used to have people saying that Singapore is a cultural desert, now if you come to Singapore, it is actually quite a vibrant place to be. Whether you are looking for entertainment, edification, culture, arts, music, dance, theatre –  it is a lively scene. 

One other question which you picked up on LGBTQ, well here in Singapore, our social norms are not the same as San Francisco which is extremely liberal. But even in America, if you go to Chicago, it is not quite like San Francisco, or if you go to North Carolina, in Durham, I do not think it will be like San Francisco either. There is a range. But we have LGBTQ people in Singapore, they live their lives and are valued members of society. We welcome them and we greatly appreciate their contributions and there is no reason why if you are a member of this community, you should not fit in in Singapore.

We are in Southeast Asia. It is a multi-racial, multi-religious society. Issues like homosexuality will be sensitive for a long time. Attitudes are not fixed in stone. Social attitudes change – if you look at our young people, their attitudes are more liberal than older ones, and in fact, more liberal than the attitudes of the young people five to ten years ago. These things shift, but we have to give them time to shift and it would be unwise to force it, because there will be a pushback and we will end up with polarisation and be in a worse place than we are. I know that we are welcoming people to come, and please come. The careers are there, and you can ask your friends. You can live a very satisfied and happy life in Singapore.

Moderator: I am going to jump straight into some of the additional questions that people have been posting on the channel now. You mentioned that Singapore is open with the Tech.Pass, but at the same time you are not really immune to some of the underlying polarisation which brought about this protectionism, such as concerns about opportunities for locals and students. What is that trajectory of Singapore’s openness for global talent and how will you address the political pressures that work against Singapore staying open?

PM Lee: The key thing is that we must be able to show that staying open is beneficial to Singaporeans. It has been so for many years. This is because we welcome in multinationals, and they brought in their management – sometimes a few Americans, and sometimes a whole cohort of Japanese management because the Japanese operate differently. But we welcome them and therefore they created many jobs for Singaporeans within the company and Singaporeans accepted that.

Now in a downturn, Singaporeans are more anxious about that, and we have to explain and show that by allowing this diversity – by welcoming these people from all over the world, who bring with them cultures and experiences, and know-how, which we do not have – we are able to create jobs for Singaporeans and make Singapore a more vibrant and more prosperous place. We can do that. We have to watch the mix, because if you have a lot of concentration, you have a problem. It is not easy because you may think that we are in Singapore – Chinese, Indians, Malays –  and so if you have Chinese and Indians from outside the country who come in to Singapore, there will not be a problem. 

But actually it is not so simple, because Singaporean Chinese, Indians and Malays have become Singaporean and have shared certain values, expectations, made accommodations and know how to get along with one another. When you come in from abroad, you may be the same ethnic group, but it is not quite the same culture. There can be clashing of views, and we have to be able to manage that. But it is so everywhere. If you go to London, you get a push back. In America, it is a very big issue, and it is one of the reasons why Donald Trump has had such strong support.

Moderator: A question from our audience from Singapore. The rapid digitalisation of work and life has had a tremendous amount of value and opportunity, but also a dark side in the form of increased cybersecurity risks. What is Singapore's national cybersecurity strategy to cope with the increased risk, particularly for the private sector because there is a perception that they may not take it as seriously as the government given the minor consequences.

PM Lee: We take it very seriously in the government. I mean we have watched it for some time but what caused us to trigger, was one occasion when Anonymous tried to do a Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack on us on a big scale. I cannot remember now, it was about four to six years ago. That was when we decided that we had to take this very seriously, and we needed to get the private sector to take it very seriously. We set up the Cyber Security Agency (CSA). We identified critical national IT systems, which needed to be properly protected, not just the government systems but also systems in the private sector, finance, banking, infrastructure systems, utilities, health care, and we established standards and channels to track what the entities within those organisations were doing, and to set standards and make sure that they met those standards.

Banks for example, used to have standards, but sometimes when they outsource the job to service providers, their service providers are not up to scratch. For example, one bank outsourced the printing of statements to a service provider and his computer got hacked, and those statements got leaked which is a problem. We have put standards in place and we are still working at it, but we are taking it very seriously. Within the government, definitely we have done major steps. We have had intrusions from time to time, we have had to tighten up. We have imposed Internet separation and have deprived tens of thousands of civil servants of the convenience of accessing the Internet from their working desktop, or at least browsing the web on their on their working desktop or laptop. It was a nuisance, but it was necessary. Now we found a way to do safe browsing, so we will roll that out for more civil servants, but there are technical solutions to go ahead. 

None of them are permanent and foolproof, but we have to keep on doing it, and we have to educate our people, our officers, the public, not to be taken in and most of the weaknesses are just human weakness. You get phished. It happens to all of us, in one moment of weakness. You have all the visual cues and social cues and then you look at the document, and you fail to notice there is an extension that says Visual Basic Script (VBScript), and you click on it, and you are sunked. There is a whole dark team, some of them are very well-resourced, determined and knowledgeable, and we have to take it that this is an unending struggle, but it cannot stop us from using tech.

Moderator: PM, how can Singapore establish homegrown technology to be giants in overseas markets?

PM Lee: We create the conditions, we train the people, we enable companies to start-up, prosper and compete, and we hope that the talent will develop – our own, or somebody else coming to Singapore – and one day will either grow a unicorn or strike a homerun. We have about one or two unicorns, but you cannot set out to breed them. You can only make the pre-conditions and talented people may sometimes make it happen. Short of a FAANG-sized company, we have a fair number of companies which have done quite well and have been bought up along the way. There is talent, and we just have to keep on doing it. My objective is not to develop one big company and declare success. My objective is to have a vibrant industry, to have many opportunities, to have people doing good work in Singapore for our own companies as well as for multinational companies. That creates not just jobs for Singaporeans, but also a certain buzz which puts us on the map and connects us to other centres where there is buzz and excitement in the world. We can offer that quality of life, those horizons, those possibilities which you would not have if you were out of the loop.

Moderator: In this sense, Singapore has quite an interesting place in the midst of the geopolitical decoupling between the US and China. A question from our audience in San Francisco – geopolitical competition in the US and China has spilled over to technological competition in areas like Artificial Intelligence (AI), Fifth Generation Technology (5G), semi-conductors, and both sides seem to be disentangling from the supply chain and technology stack. However, Singapore seems to continue to attract people and companies like Tencent, Alibaba, ByteDance, Google, Amazon, Facebook, all in Singapore. What are some of your personal thoughts on this? Will you be forced to choose a side for tech talent, deciding between China and the US?

PM Lee: It will depend on how the China-US relationship goes with the next President Biden. We will have to see how he manages that relationship. The contradictions between the US and China are deep seated once, not caused by the Trump administration, but during the last four years, steps have been taken which have ratcheted up the contradictions and which will be not so easy to dial down. While the tensions exist, we try our best to keep our links to both sides as open and to do business with both sides, with Tencent, Alibaba, ByteDance on one side, and FAANGs on the other side. I think for now it is possible.

Whether, going ahead, it is still possible, that depends on how badly or how well the US-China relationship goes. It possible to de-escalate, or at least to manage the tensions. that if I do not fully trust you, and you do not fully trust me, but we do have to get along together and we do have to do business together, because we both live in the same world, and we both face the same global warming and the same healthcare, COVID-19 type of challenges. Then, there is a path forward for Singapore and other countries. But if the tensions continue to escalate, then it is a very serious matter.

Henry Kissinger talking at the Bloomberg New Economy Forum just this morning says that it worries him that it may have an unintended escalation –  about two big powers for the first time, the US confronting another country the same size as it, and you may end up in a confrontation like the First World War. Those are very grave words, but it is true that it is the first time the US is meeting such an opponent. The Chinese on their side know that it is a major challenge to deal with the US relationship. I hope that sober realisation will help both sides to come to a reasonable landing point or workable relationship.

Moderator: There is that perception that in the past, it is a good thing to work for many different companies with different backgrounds. But now, maybe if you walk through one door, other doors will close behind you, and there is that sense at the very micro level among talent, where should I choose? Where should I live?

PM Lee: Indeed, and it will be a loss for them and it will be a loss for all of us as well because it needs means, less cross-fertilisation, less sharing of ideas, and less progress.

Moderator: The next few questions are on health care and green and climate tech. What are we doing to use the national health records to improve health care?

PM Lee: We are working at it, we have not got there yet. We were going to have a national medical record system, we are developing it, but we have not implemented it because we decided to pause and review to make sure that the privacy and security issues have been adequately tackled. But we do want to move forward. It is not straightforward, if you talk to the FAANGs for example, they will tell you to pull all these patient data together and be able to find out many things about them. Unfortunately, you cannot just do that because it belongs to different people, the patients may or may not consent and you do not just have to work around that, but you have to grapple with that. But we do want to do it, and we have a good chance of doing in Singapore because we are a small enough system. With one level of government, you can pull the different hospitals and institutions together and make it work. But it is going to be a very interesting engineering challenge to make it work.

Moderator: Many from our audience would like to ask about the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) that you signed last week. How will this affect the tech scene in Singapore? How will our IP protection be enforced? What is the opportunity for market access for start-ups, given that Singapore is actually such a small market?

PM Lee: The RCEP is a major step forward for economic cooperation in Asia. It brings together all the 10 ASEAN countries, plus three countries in Northeast Asia, which is China, South Korea and Japan, as well as Australia and New Zealand. 15 countries all together, and it enables these countries to reduce their trade barriers, reduce their tariffs, to improve the rules on investments, improve the rules on services, and for companies set up in one place to do business more freely in the other places. You have to look at the detailed rules to figure out exactly what intellectual property protections you have and what the protections for investments will be, but basically it is a significant improvement on what already pertains.

In the case of Singapore, we used to have agreements with each one of them, we already have agreements with all of each one of these other countries, but what we did not have was a system which covered all of them, so that you could accumulate the activities you do in all of the different countries, and therefore on that basis, get the benefits of the agreement. That is a plus, not just for the IT companies, but also for manufacturing and for services, and also for other aspects of the whole range of trade as well.

If you are looking for a place to go in Asia, to set up and hope to do business in more than one country in Asia, Singapore is not a bad place to be because we are connected to everybody else. You can travel there and you can link there. Certainly you can ping them very quickly because Internet connections are good, and you can also actually connect because our relationships with them are amicable, and they welcome Singaporeans to go and work and do business there, whether it is Australia, Japan, China, Malaysia or Indonesia, you can do it out of Singapore and people from all these places can come to Singapore and set up a team, and be comfortable. This is not so easy to do in a less cosmopolitan and more homogenous society. 

Moderator: PM, I would like to invite you to make closing remarks. What would you like to tell our audience tuning in today and those that will watch your livestream later?

PM Lee: Thank you for spending time with us and for listening to us. We have a story to tell in Singapore, but we have work to do in Singapore. We are trying to build a society which is different, where opportunities abound, where we make full use of tech, and yet the human spirit will flourish. That requires the energies of Singaporeans and talents of Singaporeans, but also we welcome talent from around the world to come and join us and help us to build this society, and help us to make this a vibrant red dot.

One which will be able to do business with, and be friends with many other cities, many other countries in the world, and make a contribution to humanity in a modest way. I hope that you will take me seriously. Come and take a look at what we are doing. Think about it, give it a try and I think you will conclude that what we are doing is worth doing, and I hope that you will also decide that you would like to be part of this. So, welcome to Singapore. Thank you.