Venue
Singapore University of Technology and Design, Lecture Theatre 5, Building 2 Level 5
8 Somapah Road 487372
Date
28 July 2025 @ 10:00 am - 11:30 am
Category
Seminars
 
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Synopsis

Discussions on AI veer from comfort in its promises of abundance for all human lives, to discomfort that we will abandon all that makes us human.

In this talk, we unpack this polarisation. We start with the humanistic ideas from a 1970s book – and acclaimed BBC series – Ascent of Man by Jacob Bronowski, on how human society has shaped and been shaped by its understanding and application of science and technology through the ages. We fan out from there on an ideas romp. Weaving past and present media side by side, we thread ideas drawn from evolution, ecology, economics, history, culture, and beyond, along three lines of exploration :

– From Serengeti to SkillsFuture

– From Seeing in Art to Art of Seeing

– From Drive for Power to Power to Drive

By travelling along these trajectories, we will unpack whether this moment in AI is unique, how we could consider our comfort and discomfort (spoiler alert: you have to decide on a combo), and what all this has to do with the future of work and innovation. We will also uncover the lineage of these ideas to what we are doing in SUTD with the pivot to be the world’s first Design AI university.

Speaker

Mr Poon King Wang is the Chief Strategy and Design AI Officer at SUTD, and concurrently the Director of Lee Kuan Yew Centre for Innovative Cities. His teams’ work has been cited by and integrated into the National AI Strategy 1.0; Shanghai Institute of Science for Science’s AI Governance reports; Singapore’s first human-centered and industry-agnostic A Job Redesign Guide in the Age of AI; and SkillsFuture’s Skills Demand for the Future Economy Report 2025.

King Wang received the Public Administration Medal (Silver) in 2021.

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