​Smart nation, unwise citizens

The Straits Times, page A39

As we move towards being a smarter nation, numbers will become increasingly important. These numbers may be in the form of a grade in an examination, a score in a personality test, or a rating in an algorithm. There will be a strong tendency to rely on them all the time even when common sense may shout otherwise, wrote NTU media law and policy professor Ang Peng Hwa in a commentary, but we should not let smart technologies dumb us down.