Singapore and the Air-Conditioned City
The moment you step out of Changi, the air closes around you. Not a breeze, not a warm day. A physical thing you walk into, 30 °C and humidity so high that the difference between inside and outside is the difference between breathing and swimming.
I was in Singapore for a workshop, but the climate comes first, because it reorganizes everything else. It sits between 28 and 32 °C the whole time, and the number undersells it. The humidity is the part that gets you. The air is so saturated that sweat has nowhere to evaporate to, so you stay damp even standing still in the shade. It is more manageable than that sounds. We walked three-plus hours a day and it was fine, given breaks inside and enough water.
The water mattered more than I expected. On plain tap water I stayed sluggish no matter how much I drank. Add electrolytes and the difference was obvious: energized about fifteen minutes after drinking. In that climate you are not just losing water, you are losing salt, and topping up only the water leaves you half-fixed.
And then every building saves you. Everything is air-conditioned: malls, offices, the metro, the little shop selling phone cases. It is rarely cold, which surprised me. Coming from Germany, I expected the American thing where you walk into a mall and need a jacket. Instead, it is just enough: you step in still sweaty, and the room returns you to human. The whole city runs on this rhythm of dashing between cooled boxes, and after a day you stop noticing.
The food was the easy highlight. The Asian vegetarian and vegan cooking is everywhere and treated as normal, not as a concession, and the spicing has a depth I rarely find at home. I ate better, and more cheaply, than I do on most trips, and I never once had to hunt for a meatless option.
The Workshop
I was there for the International Workshop on AI and the Future of Crisis Management and Conflict Analysis in a Fragmented World, co-organized by Fraunhofer Singapore, the Peace Research Institute Frankfurt (PRIF), and the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, with the German Embassy supporting. A long title for a room of around 40 people with a good mix: technical folks, policy people, and the diplomats who live with whatever the first two build. PRIF sponsored my travel, the difference between reading about a workshop and being in the room for it.
I came to present where our project stands and what it produces when you point it at real, public information rather than a tidy benchmark. I covered the data pipeline, which is built by Markus Bayer and myself; Patrick Schramowski and Marlon May took the AI integration. That last part is the tension. It is easy to show a system working on curated data. It is harder, and more honest, to discuss what comes out when the input is the messy, open, public record that early-warning and conflict-analysis work has to run on. The value of the room was that nobody let the demo-friendly version stand. Policy people ask and then what in a way that researchers can forget to.
The liveliest stretch was about international law and trust: when you can trust a system, and whether trust is even possible at a given level. That pulled me to Ken Thompson's Reflections on Trusting Trust and, from there, to how cleanly his forty-year-old argument maps onto AI. That tangent got long enough to deserve its own post, which I am writing up separately.
This is the same lesson I keep relearning. At RSAC in San Francisco it was CTI analysts doing the recalibrating; here it was people who think about escalation and diplomacy. Different room, same correction: the problem you are solving only matters as much as it survives contact with the people who would have to use it.
The Inverse of San Francisco
I keep comparing it to San Francisco, because I walked that city a couple of months ago and Singapore reads like its mirror image. Both are huge, rich, developed. Everything else is flipped.
The climate is the obvious one, but it shows up in the green. San Francisco green is a dry, grassy green, the green of a place that has to ration water. Singapore green is dark and dense and dripping, the green of a place where it rains constantly and plants treat every wall as an opportunity. You can see the rainfall in the vegetation before you ever feel it.
The architecture flips too. San Francisco wears its old core proudly: the Victorians, the cable cars, the bones of a 19th-century city still very much in use. Singapore feels like anything old has already been rebuilt into something newer, or is scheduled to be. The default is modern, not a layer on top of history but a continuous replacement of it. The MRT is the cleanest expression of this. San Francisco's transit has charm, and the cable cars are fun, but Singapore's is excellent: clean, fast, frequent, so well-run you stop thinking about it, which is the highest compliment a transit system can earn.
And then the part that actually stayed with me. San Francisco does not let you look away from its contrasts. I wrote about the walk past the Tenderloin to a billion-dollar conference venue, the open suffering a block from the open wealth. Singapore felt uniformly richer on average, and I never got the sense that the kind of visible collapse you see around parts of SF would be tolerated there. You feel that order, but you also feel how it is kept. In San Francisco you see police. In Singapore you see cameras: everywhere, quietly, on every corner. You do the math on what that trade buys and what it costs. I do not have a clean verdict. One city makes its contradictions impossible to ignore; the other makes them very hard to see. I am not sure which is more honest.
Going Back Out
By the end I had the rhythm down: cooled box, humid dash, cooled box. You acclimate to the heat the way you acclimate to a city's logic, not by understanding it but by no longer fighting it. I left Singapore impressed and slightly unsettled, which is usually the sign a place was worth the trip.