Hanoi (VNA) - Singaporean Prime Minister Lawrence Wong on May 13 called for a balance between safety and innovation in regulating artificial intelligence (AI), cautioning that the pace of technological advancement is outstripping the ability of legal frameworks to keep up.
Speaking at SGLaw200 Youth Forum, Wong said societies were already facing the consequences of AI misuse through sophisticated scams, deepfakes and misinformation, noting that these are no longer hypothetical but real and growing.
The PM cautioned that deeper integration of AI into sectors such as healthcare and autonomous vehicles could pose greater challenges, including wrong medical diagnoses and fatal self-driving car incidents, raising critical questions over liability for AI-related failures.
He said existing legal frameworks were not designed for a world where machines can make consequential decisions, and governments need to rethink issues surrounding responsibility, liability and accountability. Acting too slowly could leave citizens exposed to harm, while moving too quickly risks stifling innovation, he noted.
Wong emphasised the need for governments to strike a proper balance between control and progress, adding that despite rapid technological advances, justice and fairness must ultimately remain matters of human judgment rather than algorithms./.
Singapore deploys AI to combat financial scams
In its statement, the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) said as part of broader efforts to harness AI/ML for industry-wide use cases, it is conducting a Proof-of-Value (POV) to explore AI/ML techniques for pre-emptive scam detection.
