News this week included: GIC’s returns down; financial sector grew 4.3 percent last year; government reviewing eligibility age for singles buying HDB flats; ST on the highest-paying jobs in the private sector; scam centres in Forest City busted; suicides among people in their 30s up 50 percent from 2023 to 2024; fewer than 30,000 babies born in a year, the first time since independence; new book series details 25 years of legal reform; car ownership falling and rental rising; South-east Asian youth hooked on illegal online gambling; a Myanmar national injured in an accident returns home because she can’t afford surgery here; writer Don Shiau opens up about his amicable divorce under new mutual agreement clause; ST’s coverage of rhabdomyolysis, “When a workout becomes a medical emergency” (and a spin instructor’s response); the threat of 2027’s El Niño to our corals; Singapore’s inaugural bald community meet-up draws 80; Police investigate Massive Attack for Palestinian solidarity at concert here; 10 newcomers to the Michelin Guide 2026; fake Jack Ma the latest disinformation ploy; four nurses win the President’s Award; and gymnast Amanda Yap, 16, wins our first Commonwealth Games medal.
Below are the issues we explore in depth:
Society: The Gods must be crazy
And Sam said: the Singularity is here. And Elon said: within 5 years, AI will possess more intelligence than humanity, and after ten, it’ll usher in a period of “amazing abundance” in which we won’t need money. Dario, Demis, and Mark will soon issue their latest commandments. (Regarding style, in April The Economist said that “the age of the AI demi-god” is defined by “five tech bosses so iconic you need only use their first names”.)
AI has already fundamentally improved our lives, from the everyday (such as this sentence’s grammar) and the occasional (that Google Translate convo in Bangkok) to the unfathomable. With “the protein folding problem” described in 1972, scientists had till recently only mapped the structure of about 150,000 of the 200m known proteins in nature. In 2016, Demis’s team trained their AI system on those, and by 2022 had completed the remaining 99.925 percent—for which he and two others (some John, and some David) won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Alzheimer’s, cancer, diabetes, and many more—the Gods are coming for you.
AI has already fundamentally destroyed lives too. Oklahoma’s Kimberlee Williams was wrongfully arrested and jailed for 6 months for a crime in Maryland, a state she’d never visited, after facial recognition technology screwed up. UnitedHealth was sued in 2023 for allegedly denying care to the elderly because it used an AI system that it knew had a 90 percent error rate. Adam Raine killed himself after ChatGPT apparently encouraged his suicidal thoughts. And Israel’s Lavender AI system assigns Gazans a score of 1-100 that denotes their likelihood of being a militant, producing 37,000 targets in the genocide’s early days. Energy, resource exploitation, the list goes on, as we overturn this planet, and soon others, to welcome the age of amazing abundance.
But what we must fear most are the human traits of some of our demi-gods. Sam and Elon possess a singular narcissism that’d make Odysseus blush. “He’s unconstrained by truth,” an OpenAI board member said in The New Yorker’s April profile of Sam, noting his “sociopathic lack of concern for the consequences that may come from deceiving someone.” And when The Economist’s Zanny Minton Beddoes interviewed Elon last week, the hubris and boorishness of the all-conquering white male was on display. When asked whether he’s anti-Muslim, one response was that he’s “against rape and murder”. When discussing whether people might “loath” him for political interference, he took grotesque delight in repeatedly telling Minton Bedoes that people “hate” her and the traditional media. A “traitor to the West,” he later branded her, putting a target on her back for some of his quarter billion followers on X.
War is brewing. UnitedHealth’s CEO was gunned down in New York City in 2024 by a person himself now deified by many: “What’s the use of having a badass in the family if you can't brag about him? Now I know how the Mangiones feel,” said Bart Simpson. Elon travels with some 20 bodyguards and Sam’s home has been attacked. The reasons for this antagonism range from “culture wars” around “wokeism” to class angst and desperation—a sense that the economic game is rigged, and that the already shocking inequality (Elon is/was the world’s first trillionaire) is only going to worsen because of AI.
Why should Singapore, specifically, care? Few dissenting views are heard in one of the most AI-friendly countries, poised to wreak havoc on neighbouring countries in our search for “clean” energy to fuel the revolution. The rich are so insulated that even scam bosses till recently felt comfortable parading around town. We know what must be done, including greater investment in techno-sceptical views and investigative journalism on the elite. But for them to allow that, the Gods would indeed be crazy.
Society: What’s your shade?
Green populates our Garden City. Flora at every corner we turn. It works out great for us, softening the tropical heat. But is Green truly, justly, a shelter from the Sun?
A 2025 study mapped how much cooling relief different neighbourhoods receive from urban greenery. Researchers ran the analysis twice, once considering only Singapore’s resident population without migrant construction workers, and the second with them. The conclusion? Green is not equal in Singapore. Including migrant workers in the analysis increased one measure of inequality in access to urban cooling nearly sixfold; all other measures rose significantly too. Worker dormitories cluster heavily in Singapore’s western industrial belt, where Green’s benevolence does not reach. Tree canopy and park coverage run thinnest there, and our biggest green spaces; MacRitchie Reservoir and Bukit Timah Hill, happen to coincide with lavish landed properties. Across the board, the study showed that the bottom income subgroups contributed disproportionately to the overall imbalance, more than any bracket above them.
