Special Issue of Ethos: “…For the public good, we want AI to help unlock and drive transformative impact, in areas where there is significant potential for breakthroughs, such as cancer research, material sciences or climate change. But we also want to raise the level of generalised adoption. For the user base in the public sector, we want to learn how best to use this new tool in ways that can allow us to not only do things better, but do better things.
This is not to suggest that AI is always the best solution: it is one of many tools in the digital toolkit. Sometimes, simpler computational methods will suffice. That said, AI represents new, untapped potential for the Public Service to enhance our daily work and deliver better outcomes that ultimately benefit Singapore and Singaporeans….
To promote general adoption, we made available AI tools, such as Pair, 1 SmartCompose, 2 and AIBots. 3 They are useful to a wide range of public officers for many general tasks. Other common tools of this nature may include chatbots to support customer-facing and service delivery needs, translation, summarisation, and so on. Much of what public officers do involves words and language, which is an area that LLM-based AI technology can now help with.
Beyond improving the productivity of the Public Service, the real value lies in AI’s broader ability to transform our business and operating models to deliver greater impact. In driving adoption, we want to encourage public officers to experiment with different approaches to figure out where we can create new value by doing things differently, rather than just settle for incremental value from doing things the same old ways using new tools.
For example, we have seen how AI and automation have transformed language translation, software engineering, identity verification and border clearance. This is just the beginning and much more is possible in many other domains…(More)”.