Letter: Efficiency isn't enough. Public service needs humanity too

Dear reader, 

I’m one month into my new job as a reporter at GovInsider, and I’ve had to start getting my nose deep into what’s latest in public sector innovation. 

What I’ve realised is that what’s “latest” has also been with us for some time. The news continually returns to artificial intelligence (AI) and digitalisation.  

Amid the constant stream of new project launches and national strategies, I find myself thinking about what they mean for the public officers expected to put them into practice. 

AI promises to remove labour from their work. What I find more important is what we leave for public officers to do, and whether the jobs that remain continue to feel meaningful. 

The top stories for August gave me some reasons for optimism: 

In Singapore’s public healthcare system, Synapxe has introduced a platform that allows healthcare professionals to build their own AI agents, even without coding experience.  

The aim is not simply to automate more work, but to give care teams more time for patients, collaboration and the areas where their expertise matters most. 

A similar principle shaped four AI tools developed by pharmacists at the National University Health System. Instead of having IT hand down ready-made tools, a team of pharmacists identified the most important workflow problems and drove the requirements. 

This is what human-centred innovation looks like. The technology is shaped by the people closest to the work and designed to give them more time for situations requiring human judgement. 

For those building public sector technology, this also means looking beyond impressive but impractical projects.  

In an interview with GovInsider, Open Government Products’ Director Li Hongyi argued that governments should run many small experiments, learn quickly and scale only what works.  

Sometimes, the most valuable solution may be a simple one. What matters is whether it improves people’s lives and creates room for public officers to do more meaningful work. 

Technology can also help us strengthen distinctly human abilities. A new extended reality laboratory for healthcare training will allow practitioners and students to rehearse situations that are difficult or risky to recreate with real patients. 

Here, technology is not replacing human skills. It is creating a safer space in which people can practise and develop them. 

An AI red-teaming exercise found that chatbot safeguards that worked in English could fail when prompts were entered in regional languages, where differences in syntax, tone and cultural context could change how the systems responded. 

People familiar with the languages and communities in which these systems operate are still needed to test them, question their behaviour and identify risks that English-language evaluations may miss. 

In August, I visited an exhibition by Singaporean designer Pann Lim, The Life and Death of the Human Soul of Design, which confronted an uncomfortable question facing creatives today: why remain a designer when AI can produce an image in seconds? 

Lim identified 11 dimensions of the “human soul of design”: curiosity, creativity, critical thinking, cultural resonance, taste, intuition, emotional intelligence, presence, ethical integrity, passion and guts.  

His conclusion was not that designers should reject AI, but that their value lies in those dimensions, derived from lived experience, which machines cannot possess. 

A guest columnist, Yeo Yong Kiat, argued that organisations must actively protect skills such as judgement, creativity, consultation and storytelling, rather than assume they will survive unchanged as AI becomes embedded in everyday work. 

Public service is ultimately about people serving people. As governments pursue greater efficiency, they should also consider whether their reforms give public officers a stronger sense of purpose and connection to those they serve. 

Automation, ironically, could make the work that remains, more human. 

Zenith Wong 

Reporter 

GovInsider