Session 2: The role of Government in Smart Nation
Disruptive change brought about by the exploitation of Infocomm Technologies (ICT) is all around us. For example, Uber, Lyft and Airbnb – and local versions like GrabTaxi – are already challenging the status quo. A whole new type of economy – characterised by collaboration and supported by exponentially growing access to online data – is emerging on the back of such disrupters.
Arguably, such technologies and their applications have been an enormous force for good. And yet, governments do not appear to have fully embraced these technologies. At most they have reached a wary accommodation. And rightly so, because while ICT brings undoubted benefits, they also create risks. There are pernicious uses of ICT, such as cyber-crime, and in the use of social media to promote extremist ideologies and to recruit terrorists, as we saw just last week in Singapore which fuels the globalisation of sectarian conflict.
In recent years, a new wave of emerging technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI), drones, robotics, 3-D printing, big data, data analytics, cloud computing, and the Internet of Things (IoT), have begun to take off. Combined with the earlier wave of infocomm technologies, they promise to be game-changers, giving the individual capabilities and powers that were previously the province of only governments and large organisations. Both societies and economies as we know them are becoming more and more disintermediated.
It is inevitable that these emerging technologies will have a disruptive impact. Advances in robotics mean that jobs that could previously only be done by human workers will in the near future be assigned to robots. The premise that machines cannot replace humans in tasks that require knowledge and judgement is now under assault by advances in AI.
Governments can play it safe and watch from the sidelines. Or they can get some skin in the game now through research, test-bedding and pilots, so that they learn the limitations and potential of such technologies in order to be ready when these technologies take off.
The current state of technology already offers governments all the ingredients of a Smart Nation.
But what is a Smart Nation? At one level, it is about the exploitation of technologies in order to make the lives of people better, by giving them convenient and fast access to information, and to customised services, including those that we cannot even imagine today.
But at another – I would argue more fundamental – level, it is innovation at the systems level – aggregating technologies and combining them with new operating concepts, policies and plans – to solve national problems such as traffic congestion, urban planning, an ageing population, or simply to improve service delivery. At this level, it is about good governance.
A Smart Nation must have a smart government. A smart government accepts that it will always be behind the technology curve, because laws and regulations cannot keep up with the pace of technological change. A smart government also understands that the big strategic decision is not about what technology to adopt, but the deeper question of whether to become a Smart Nation. In a way, that decision has to be an act of faith. It is truly wishful thinking that such a decision is amenable to a proper cost-benefit analysis. The technologies for a Smart Nation, and their applications have trajectories and impacts that cannot be calculated with any precision, and depend on innovations that cannot be predicted ex ante, but which will emerge along the way.
The second order decision is whether the government is ready – or willing – to address two key challenges: first, to deal with the issues arising from embracing technology, such as privacy, security, safety, and jobs. Second, to have the imagination to leverage technology to develop innovative ideas and solutions.
The first of these two challenges is a political challenge. There are many misconceptions about the technologies associated with a Smart Nation. The biggest misconception is that in a 24/7 online world, constantly surrounded by innumerable sensors and smart objects, all connected to the Internet – the Internet of Things – absolute privacy and absolute security can be achieved. As smart objects seek to gather more contextual information on behaviour and actions, the ability for smart devices to analyse people’s lives and discover their identities will challenge traditional notions of privacy. Such information can clearly be misused and abused, compromising privacy and security.
But to overcome these misconceptions a mature discussion is needed, not a polemical one. Governments have a central role to play in shaping this discussion. They will have to persuade their citizens that the benefits outweigh the risks of exploiting these technologies, and then explain how the risks can be managed. They will have to work with the multiple stakeholders – users and generators of data and technology – to identify and agree on what should be kept private at all costs and what should be shared in exchange for benefits.
Governments can then put in place sound policies, protections and standards that address issues of privacy and personal choice, security, confidentiality, intellectual property protection and liability. For example, in the United States, the 2012 Consumer Data Bill of Rights was passed to improve consumer privacy while ensuring that the Internet remains an engine for innovation and economic growth. Its premise is that people should have more control over how their personal data is used on the Internet, while helping businesses to retain consumer trust.
There is another issue of trust – a fear, perhaps irrational in some countries, and rational in others – that governments will exploit these technologies to intrude into the private lives of citizens or to create an Orwellian system of mass state surveillance. Fundamentally, it is an issue of trust between the people and their government. This is clearly in the realm of politics, and the onus must be on the political leadership to convince the people that such fears are misplaced.
The big challenges facing governments today are all wicked problems – highly complex, cross-cutting in nature, with multiple stakeholders, and no straightforward or obvious solutions. Urban planning, relieving traffic congestion, and managing an ageing population, are all wicked problems. To even begin to understand the complexity of such problems requires multiple sources of data for effective analysis. Prompt and efficient delivery of public services also depends on access to data.
The data is all there. The Internet of Things generates enormous amounts of data – big data – from an ever-increasing network of interconnected sensors that also interface with and impact the real world. Combined with cloud computing and increasingly powerful data analytics, planners and policy-makers in government can know where bottlenecks in the transportation system are, where best to locate institutions like hospitals, libraries, clinics, police stations, and so on.
But accessing data is itself a wicked problem. Agencies often want to protect data, and people worry about loss of privacy if their personal data is freely shared. On the other hand, data is needed by planners and policy-makers to analyse complex environments. This is the Gordian Knot of data. To cut this Gordian Knot, we can draw inspiration from how some governments have dealt with the issue.
These are examples of what I like to call a ‘dare-to-share’ mindset that I believe is central to creating a Smart Nation. With open data, fresh insights and disruptive ideas can emerge from novel re-combinations of data and platforms. If we restrict access to this asset, we will miss out on the opportunity for communities to interact and search for solutions from the bottom up. It should be a shared resource, through which the biggest benefits are likely to emerge from fresh data intersections that we do not yet know about.
A Smart Nation is, in a sense, only limited by our imagination. We can only begin to imagine the endless possible futures. Imagine waking up to the start of your day and having a ‘smart concierge’ telling you your schedule for the day and advising you on the traffic condition. Go to work in a shared driverless vehicle or hop onto the public transportation system that provides accessibility and convenience, without the woes of traffic congestion. In our future ‘smart’ homes, we can look forward to informing occupants on their energy usage and usage patterns through sensors and smart devices, so that they can monitor and modify their usage to save costs.
However, most governments are not structured to reach this level of imagination and boldness of vision. Maybe it is not even their business. Innovation at this level is perhaps better achieved by the private sector, and by individual start-ups with the daring and the ideas. Instead, the role of government should be to facilitate such innovation by funding incentives and arrangements, and through flexible – rather than restrictive – regulations. Governments also have a key role in connecting these innovations to their societal environments by encouraging and organising test-bedding and pilots of Smart Nation technologies in real-life settings, and perhaps even by insuring the risk of some of these experiments.
Singapore is about to launch a pilot programme in the use of autonomous vehicles within a small precinct. If the pilot is successful, then the programme may be expanded beyond this precinct into the larger national transport system, relieving road congestion and getting people to their destinations faster and hopefully more safely. Such experiments are essential to creating a Smart Nation, because the development of these technologies and their applications need to be test-bedded in real environments.
ePlanner is a game-changing project launched by a group of like-minded Singapore government agencies that believed it would be possible to develop a geospatial planning data analytics portal for urban planners using off-the-shelf technology. ePlanner integrates big data from various sources – including government agencies, and open data – to perform geospatial data fusion and analytics for strategic and operational urban planning and decision-making.
ePlanner’s significance to Smart Nation is that is was not the result of top-down direction, but instead was a bottom-up initiative. It did not require cutting-edge technology, but merely the imagination of a small group of people believing that they could leverage on off-the-shelf technology to do things better.
In a Smart Nation, empowerment is key. A smart government should allow thousands of such flowers to bloom. Too much top-down control will kill the spirit of innovation that is central to Smart Nation.
A Smart Nation is system-level innovation, but its realisation is the sum of many innovations, big and small. Its ambition should be big, but its implementation is in hundreds and thousands of projects, both large and little. It is about technology, but it is also about application and melding them for use in government and by the people.
A smart government is the enabler and facilitator of a Smart Nation. A smart government starts off imagining a world in which the technology is deployed in new and wonderful ways to create a better society. A smart government is prepared to set aside tried and tested solutions that have worked well in the past, and instead to try untested solutions in order to find out what works and what does not work, to manage the risk, and then to build the Smart Nation together with the people.