In 1992, the internet had not yet really come to Singapore. And nowhere in the world did anybody imagine Facebook or Youtube or how these gizmos and new fangled things will impact societies, impact our lives. And today, Singapore is one of the most wired countries in the world. So just think back those 20 years and ask yourself how you can imagine what 20 years from now will be like. Not just the technology, but what the technology has done to our lives. I’ll just give you a few examples of things you can see now, which I think would be big in the next 20 years; a lot of it to do with IT, with computers with robots.
The first one is this mysterious thing. This unidentified flying object was seen at a passing out parade on the floating platform recently. Recruit passing out parade. It circulated buzz on the internet. People ask if it's a secret spy project belonging to MINDEF. So I ask MINDEF, is this is a secret spy project. MINDEF told me, after investigating the matter carefully; they said no, it has nothing to do with them. This is a UAV, an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAVs). No pilot but it's nice, it's smart. Who does it belong to? Jack Neo filming his latest movie, Ah Boys to Men.
It's just one of many uses UAV will have, in the future, the military use them, reconnaissance targeting, communications. Civilians use them, you can use them for crowd control, you can use them for civil defense purposes, you can use them to manage crops, to keep track what's happening on rural areas. So many countries are interested in this. The US defense research agency, DARPA ran a competition recently, on the internet, for people to design UAVs. Crowd sourcing.
There was an NTU team which participated in this competition, it was called UAV forge dot net. And the NTU team submitted a UAV, participated in this and the entry was called Extractor X. There were 140 teams which competed in this competition from all over the world. Extractor X from Singapore got into the final 10 and eventually ranked 6, out of these 140. And I should tell you, amongst the people that they came ahead of, one was the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MIT and the other one was a Japanese ministry of defense. So I think that, we did well.
(This is an excerpt from Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong’s National Day Rally speech on August 26, 2012 at University Cultural Centre)
