Time & Perspective Quote by Tharman Shanmugaratnam

Tharman’s line is a quiet rebuke to the default setting of contemporary tech governance: letting product roadmaps and venture incentives become destiny, then asking regulators to clean up the spill. By insisting ambition “has to start” with imagining a desired future, he flips the typical causal chain. Innovation isn’t framed as an unstoppable force that policy must merely accommodate; it’s a choice architecture, and democratic institutions have a right to set the target before the engineers start shipping.

The phrase “public policy around tech” is doing a lot of work. It signals that tech is no longer a sector to be managed but an environment we live inside: labor markets, education, media, security, even civic trust. “Around” also hints at the current inadequacy of regulation that circles platforms without fully shaping them. Tharman’s insistence on “especially the public good” foregrounds a tension governments often dodge: the benefits of digitization are routinely privatized while the costs (disinformation, surveillance, precarious work, carbon, mental health fallout) are socialized.

Context matters. Coming from a head of state associated with technocratic competence and social cohesion, this reads less like Silicon Valley boosterism and more like a mandate for legitimacy. It’s an argument that societies can’t outsource moral imagination to markets or to a narrow class of builders. The subtext is political: if governments don’t articulate a shared end goal for AI and platforms, someone else will - and it will look suspiciously like engagement metrics, monopoly rents, and geopolitical advantage dressed up as progress.