‘I shouldn’t have told the joke’: David Neo on his quip in Parliament during Dear You exchange

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Qns:

1. ‘Humour is essential for an individual’s well-being.’ Discuss. (Cam. 2024)

2. Can humour ever be serious? (Cam. 2012)

AI-specific notifications mandatory for firms using personal data to train AI models: PDPC

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Qn: To what extent should governments regulate the development and use of artificial intelligence? (VJC 2026 J2 MYE)

The men embracing facelifts to get sculpted looks

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As South Korean Buddhism woos Gen Z, how hip is too hip?

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From wiggly toys to wellness bags: Meet the children turning creativity into cash

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build confidence and soft skills outside the classroom....By pricing products, speaking to customers and experiencing the realities of selling, children begin to understand the value of money and the effort behind earning it....the experience also instils crucial life skills like communication, adaptability and resilience

‘They don’t need people’: The workers left behind by China’s robot drive

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For issues on AI...

More builders look to robots to tackle Singapore’s construction labour crunch

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could ease Singapore’s reliance on foreign labour, which has been becoming more difficult to recruit and retain.

a lack of interest from locals to join the industry...The younger generation isn’t interested in this line because it is dirty, hard work. But if work is playing with robots, it might be something that attracts them

 use of robotics also reduces workers’ exposure to potentially hazardous environments...deployed drilling robots and remote-controlled robots that break concrete structures, keeping workers away from dust and vibration

robots have been able to achieve a level of precision and quality that workers cannot

the end goal is to eventually replace human beings on site, robots have to be as versatile and as agile as workers. “If I design a robot for one specific task, that is it. It may do that task extremely well, but chances are, I am not going to be able to get that robot to do something else

Qn: To what extent is artificial intelligence replacing the role of humans? (Cam. 2019)

Why AI summaries pose a danger to learning

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They take a question and swiftly return an answer, compressing what used to be a meandering journey through the internet into an immediate arrival at your destination. The explorative phase of searches – clicking through links, stumbling onto unexpected pages, following a reference that leads to somewhere unplanned – is disappearing.

By shortening the time between asking a question and getting an answer, these tools are actually undermining curiosity – and paradoxically threatening our ability to understand the world.

curiosity puts the entire brain into a mode of heightened receptivity – not just for the specific thing you want to know, but also for everything around it. Curiosity opens a window, and while the window is open, learning deepens across the board. But the window stays open only as long as the question remains unanswered. When an AI tool answers your search query in three seconds, the window closes before curiosity can deepen. You got what you came for, but you also lost what would have turned curiosity into learning: the adjacent article you might have read, the resulting tangent you might have followed, the connection between two ideas with no obvious relationship.

Scientific breakthroughs, artistic leaps, technological innovation – these rarely emerge from efficient retrieval of known information. They emerge from periods of undirected exploration, when people follow questions further than they need to and find things they weren’t expecting

Our technology is increasingly treating the territory between the query and the answer as dead space to be eliminated, when that territory is where most of the learning actually happens. 

Qns:

1. 'Our use of technology has narrowed, rather than broadened, what we experience.' Discuss. (DHS Prelim 2025)

2. ‘The most important aim of a scientist is to satisfy human curiosity about the world.’ Evaluate this view. (Cam. 2025)

As AI gets more human-like, China grapples with the cost of virtual intimacy

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For issues on AI....

Would you let AI Michael Caine read you The Odyssey in a new audiobook?

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It is not just actors, but also people who lend their voice, who are at risk of losing jobs to AI. 

But Caine is not really telling the story. Instead, he licensed his voice to ElevenLabs, a company that produces audiobooks and other content voiced by artificial intelligence, which used an AI clone of his voice for the project.

may question whether such a rendition can capture the emotional and dramatic scope of Homer’s tale.

fearing a future where publishers and audiobook production companies can cut out human narrators entirely by ordering up faster, cheaper AI narrations featuring facsimiles of famous voices.

synthetic voices cannot recreate the emotional nuances of the text. ....With a human narrator, “the voice and the thinking behind the character can emerge over the course of the performance”..... “It’s hard to see how AI can really do that

Qn: To what extent is artificial intelligence replacing the role of humans? (Cam. 2019)