Minister for Health calls for a 'humanistic, practical' approach to AI adoption
Singapore's Minister for Health Ong Ye Kung has called on governments and industry to take a deliberate, humanistic stance on artificial intelligence, warning that commercial momentum alone should not dictate how the technology is adopted across critical sectors.
Speaking at NCS Impact 2026, Ong said society is at a pivotal moment in its relationship with AI, one that demands careful judgement rather than wholesale adoption.
"We must be wiser and more humanistic and practical," Ong said. "We must decide deliberately where to embrace AI, where to rein it in, and where human judgement and effort must prevail."
Debate on AI's impact on jobs
Ong argued that the debate around AI's impact on jobs and industries has been too general, and urged more specific analysis of how the technology affects different sectors.
He outlined three broad categories: industries that will grow regardless of AI, such as finance, energy, and healthcare; sectors where jobs will hold but productivity can improve; and roles where routine tasks face genuine displacement.
"The impact of AI therefore depends on the industry, how demand and market forces evolve, the behaviour of companies, consumer tastes, the exact nature of jobs, and also the action of the individual worker," he said.
He was particularly firm on the question of human oversight in safety-critical and trust-dependent environments.
"In safety-critical systems, human oversight remains essential," Ong said. "In sectors where human trust and empathy are paramount, work will still need to be primarily carried out by humans."
AI in healthcare
In healthcare specifically, the minister said AI should support rather than supplant clinicians.
For mammogram scans, MOH had decided AI could substitute one of two human readers, but not both.
"AI diagnostics should also not fully replace radiologists," he said, citing the need to maintain clinical skills and ensure human judgement remains part of patient care.
Ong also pushed back against the notion that AI should drive its own adoption.
"AI in healthcare should never be like the proverbial hammer looking for nails. A solution looking for problems," he said, adding that MOH takes a use-case approach, identifying specific problems before determining whether AI can help solve them.
He cited the Singapore Medical Foundation AI Model (SIMFONI) as an example of contextualised AI development.
The programme, under the Consortium for Clinical Research and Innovation, Singapore (CRIS), aims to build clinical AI companions trained on local data and Singapore's clinical practice guidelines.
"Such models already exist, but they were trained using patient data and medical guidelines in other countries," Ong said. "In other words, they have not gone to our local medical school. SIMFONI would have gone to our local medical school."
Ong warned of the risks of allowing AI to advance unchecked as systems grow more autonomous.
"We cannot charge ahead, driven solely by commercial considerations, even as recursive AI systems gain self-reinforcing intelligence, agency, and influence," he said. "Otherwise, I can't help but feel the machines just seem wiser than their makers."
Ong's remarks come against a backdrop of uneven AI adoption across Singapore's economy. An inaugural report from the Ministry of Manpower (MOM) revealed that 71.5% of firms in Singapore have yet to adopt AI, and among those that have, only 3.8% have integrated the technology into core processes.
On job displacement, MOM found that only 6.2% of firms reduced headcount after adopting AI, with most instead redesigning roles or creating new AI-related positions.
