A recent interview with former Foreign Minister George Yeo got me thinking about happiness, although perhaps not quite in the way the interviewer intended. During The Mishal Husain Show Live from Singapore, host Mishal Husain raised the apparent contrast between Singapore's economic success and its less impressive showing on happiness rankings. In response, Yeo recalled Lee Kuan Yew's view that governments could provide economic development, infrastructure and education, but should “never...

Imagine an analytics proposal landing on your desk for approval. The idea sounds good. Perhaps the team wants to build a model to predict which customers are likely to leave, create a predictive-maintenance solution for expensive equipment, or develop an AI assistant to help employees find information more quickly. The technology appears capable, the team is enthusiastic, and someone may already have put together an impressive demonstration. Now the proposal is asking for something more...

In 2016, OpenAI trained an AI agent to play a boat-racing game called CoastRunners. To a human player, the objective seemed obvious: navigate the course, beat the other boats and finish the race. The AI discovered a rather different way to succeed. Around the course were targets that players could hit to earn points. OpenAI's researchers had assumed that a high score would be a reasonable measure of good racing because, under normal play, collecting points and completing the course tended to...