Singapore’s workers brace for AI disruption: ‘it’s inevitable’

When Joshua Tan turned up to Chinese New Year dinner last month, he hadn’t expected to spend the evening defending his career.He was 27 and freshly employed as a junior software engineer in Singapore. The questions from relatives were pointed: is your job safe? Can’t the computer just do it?It was an awkward conversation, equal parts interrogation and familial concern. But Tan knew the anxiety behind the questions was real.Not so long ago, he and his classmates had been so sought-after by employers that many juggled two internships at once. Now, the question that hangs over every conversation in the industry is simple: what happens when the code writes itself?At the moment, Artificial Intelligence was being used “more like a steroid booster”, Tan said. It handled the grunt work, helping engineers avoid putting in too much overtime.But in future, Tan predicts that the headcount at his company will go down as AI gets better at the tasks more junior employees used to do. “Like any tool, it’s inevitable,” he told This Week in Asia.That sense of inevitability is becoming harder to ignore.