I was recently asked at a talk what I would say would be the worst thing that could happen to the young generation today, and my reply was that it’s not that they will be invaded or become poor, it’s that all of them as a cohort will sleepwalk through life: comfortable, not really aware of what’s really happening, not passionate about anything, then one day, they wake up and say, “What did I really do? Did I waste my life?” I don’t want to accuse them, because it’s completely unfair to them as young people who’ve grown up in affluent Singapore. We, in our generation, created the environment for them to live in an affluent context. It’s not hardly their fault. The consequence of this, though, is that they can be less aware of things, and so sleepwalk. When you look at young people in China, Indonesia, Burma, you see how hungry they are by necessity. We are not hungry anymore and neither should we be – but we must be hungry for something and this is the challenge for Singapore. It’s much easier to be hungry for something physical and then achieve it; it’s much more difficult to be hungry for something more amorphous, more social, hungry for a more purposeful life. My whole point to young people is: find a purpose.

But there’s a deeper thing here, which is: Technology doesn’t solve humanity’s problems. It was always naïve to think so. Technology is an enabler, but humanity has to deal with humanity’s problems. I think we’re both over-reliant on technology as a way to solve things and probably, at this moment, over-indexing on technology as a source of all problems, too.