Hello.
From chicken meat to Chinese New Year goodies, inflation continues to strain our wallets. But it turns out that we consumers are partly to blame. Rather than putting savings into investments, consumers are revenge spending post-pandemic, adding to inflation, says Richard Hartung.
As costs goes up and spending power diminishes, more people in Singapore are feeling anxious about being able to take care of their elderly relatives, especially if they must stop full-time work to provide that care. While government support – such as more active ageing centres and community outreach teams – helps ease the burden on caregivers, many are still reluctant to put their loved ones in eldercare facilities, say Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy researchers.
While a future Singapore will definitely be a greyer one (by 2030, one in four citizens will be aged 65 and above), it might also be home to a new generation of autonomous vehicles. The technology is already there, having gone commercial in several cities in the US and China, say researchers from the Singapore University of Social Sciences.
But who is to blame when self-driving vehicles cause an accident? Users shouldn’t be held accountable for AI malfunctions if they couldn’t have intervened – but if a driverless car requires users to pay attention to the road, they might as well be driving the car themselves, says NUS Centre for Biomedical Ethics’ Anantharaman Muralidharan.
We hope you enjoy the selection of commentaries this week.
Erin Low
Commentary, CNA Digital
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