President Tharman on AI and jobs: Singapore FinTech Festival 2023

At the Singapore FinTech Festival, President Tharman Shanmugaratnam says financial services will feel AI faster than most sectors, but the change is economy- and society-wide. ChatGPT crossed 100 million users in two months. Singularity will not arrive in a single morning, but task displacement will outpace any previous technology.

Citing a US study, he notes 80% of jobs see about 10% of work tasks easily replaced by LLMs — manageable. But for a quarter of jobs, around half the tasks become replaceable, which means roles change fundamentally. Within 10 to 15 years he expects deeper workforce and social impact than any prior technological revolution.

Earlier waves of automation hit repetitive physical work. LLMs hit cognitive tasks done by better-educated and higher-paid workers, which changes the distributional politics. Tharman argues this could upend the hierarchy that pays IQ above EQ, and societies will need to revalue jobs requiring teamwork, collective imagination and care.

Caption language: en · Fetched: 2026-05-02

financial services will be more impacted or more quickly impacted than other sectors but this is going to be economy wide and Society wide the chart which chrisina showed on the uh speed with which new technologies have acquired 100 million users 100 million users was quite instructive so for CH GT is got 100 million users within 2 months right we always knew it started off with sci-fi and then it became very serious thinking and then now it's becoming reality we always knew that machines what we call Lang large language models in particular now and the large language model powered chat BS are going to take on more human characteristics and we were always wondering whether you reach that point of singularity where the machine becomes equivalent or smarter to the human brain there's no intrinsic reason why it can't happen I don't think this is going to happen suddenly when you wake up one day and you find you have Singularity but I think it's going to happen progressively and I think it will happen for certain human tasks much faster than previous technology set up there was a recent study that found that quite a good study actually in the US that found that um 80% of jobs will be affected by 10% in other words within 80% of jobs about 10% of the work and the tasks can be quite easily replaced by llms and in general by Ai and AI you to remember is really part of a Continuum of digital the digital Revolution so that that's not very alarming but for a quarter of jobs one out of every four people it'll be about 50% of their tasks that are quite easily replaceable and that again seems to me to be not fundamentally alarming it may not mean that they lose their jobs but their jobs are going to change in a fundamental way if I have to guess I would say it's going to be faster than previous technology in replacing human tasks and enabling humans at the same time there will be not dramatic change within 3 or 4 years but I think in 10 to 15 years this technological Revolution is going to have a more profound effect on Workforce and Society than any previous technological Revolution but that's one part of it and I think the basic attitude we have to take is how do we use technology to have humans flourish that's what technologies have always enabled is the key driver for human flourishing but the very important issue is to Think Through the distributional consequences and try to address those distributional consequences the earlier waves of Technology automation Factory automation Logistics Automation and the like essentially replaced what we call repetitive jobs routine and repetitive work what's interesting about llms and AI is that it takes over cognitive tasks it takes over tasks that are done by people with better education and in fact better incomes that's a welcome change if you like it's uh it's finally reached home to the segment of the population that is the thinking and the pontificating that technological disruption is disruptive it's disruptive and it's becoming very real one of the reasons I can't help thinking one of the reasons why almost every day you read an article about Ai and its disruptive effects is because the people writing are part of the cognitive class but there may be something equalizing in that because the third point I make you know the first point I'm making is that look this is a form of uplifting human potential that's what this technology does the second point is that it's got distributional consequences and it's going to have very different distributional consequences but there's a third point that I think is to my mind positive which is that it might upend the traditional hierarchy of jobs what you regard as a better job and a better pay a job that deserves better pay might be might shift considerably in the years to come the way we value IQ over EQ might change because there's a whole range of jobs that we think require IQ that can be taken over quite quickly and that can be done in fact I would say more efficiently and better using llms and using a and we'll then have to think hard about the jobs we really value the EQ the jobs that require team work the jobs that require Collective imagination the care jobs and we have to Value them accordingly