SINGAPORE — Technology reshaping the world was top of mind among the thousands of people who attended the 15-17 November Singapore FinTech Festival in Changi, including this nation's president, the Harvard-educated Tharman Shanmugaratnam.

In a fireside chat, Tharman fleshed out the often nebulous concepts surrounding two topics, namely, finances and technology, which, taken together, form the portmanteau fintech. AI, or artificial intelligence, in its many emerging forms, no doubt, hogged the attention at SFF 2023.

Before becoming the ninth president of Singapore, Tharman served as Senior Minister, Coordinating Minister for Social Policies, and Chairman of the Monetary Authority. Having played a significant role in past SFF stagings, Tharman was asked what had changed in him since then.

"That's an interesting question because you have got to keep changing through life without changing yourself. And I've always believed, from the time I was young, through all the ups and downs in my life, that you must not try to change what's in you," Tharman said.

"Be yourself… and I think if we all do that, we will also discover the selves in each of us, the strength in each other. So, I don't think very much about philosophy in life, but I don't see myself changing in any fundamental way each time I change a job or take on a new role."

Much of President Tharman's discussion centered on how things like AI and digital assets are paving new directions and pushing the frontiers of the global economy. And with fintech easing cross-border inter-country, business-to-business, and business-to-consumer trade, issues like hacking and other cybersecurity threats have reared their ugly heads.

Financial services, according to Tharman, will be "more impacted or more quickly impacted than other sectors, but this is going to be economy-wide and society-wide." He cited the lightning speed by which ChatGPT got 100 million users in just two months.

A cause for amazement or concern for those who fear AI-powered systems is that they would render many humans jobless in the near future. This may be inevitable to some extent, as the Singaporean official described AI starting as science fiction to become a reality. He pointed to "large language model-powered chatbots" taking in more human characteristics.