Mr Kiasu vs. Mr FOMO
3rd part of a series on AI and Art
This is the third and final part of my conversation with Johnny Lau.
Part 1, “My Shifu“ was how I met him, and his belief that technology forces artistic purity rather than threatening it.
Part 2, “Garfield’s Eyes“ was about separating the concept from the production. This part starts with the question - will AI replace us, and then goes to the quieter question underneath - how do you live alongside something like this?
Two Fears
Watch how people talk about AI and work, and almost everyone is running on one of two fears.
The first is the fear of losing out. Will I be automated? It’s a reasonable fear. One CEO recently described it as replacing “lower-value human capital”. The fear in the air is palpable.
The second fear is the opposite. It doesn’t feel like fear. It feels like ambition. Everyone’s using AI. If I don’t adopt it now, I’ll be left behind. So people automate before they understand, buy tools they don’t need, and call it transformation.
Fear of losing out. Fear of missing out.
In Singapore we already have a word for the first one. Kiasu - Singlish for the anxiety of losing out - is the national neurosis Johnny Lau turned into a character that sold over half a million copies. What I didn’t know, until this conversation, is that he also drew the second one.
I’d asked Johnny whether AI could ever generate a real Mr Kiasu strip.
“An AI produced Mr Kiasu strip will show Mr Kiasu and Ah Kow, his pet dog in different scenarios and it will be funny. But it is unlikely to create an Ang Mo character who calls himself Mr FOMO, and competes with Mr Kiasu for Ai Swee’s love.”
Mr FOMO. A Westerner whose neurosis isn’t losing out but missing out, competing with Singapore’s most kiasu character for the girl. It’s a cultural invention. The joke is in the gap between kiasu and FOMO. I realized Johnny had done something stranger than draw a character. He’d named both of the fears now running the AI conversation and made them chase the same girl. Two anxieties, one love triangle. Both running on fear. Neither of them living.
Co-Exist with the Storm
So I asked him the real question. Is AI just another wave? He’d lived through the comic boom, dot-com, mobile, animation outsourcing. Was this one different?
“AI is a climatic shift that is going to fundamentally alter the way we think and live. If the internet era represents a tsunami, then we are smacked right in the middle of a perfect storm. Almost no one will be spared, and it’s only a matter of how many of us can co-exist with the storm.”
Not survive the storm. Not beat it, and not ride it either. We should be thinking about how to co-exist with it.
That’s a different posture from both fears. Mr Kiasu wants to outlast the storm by building a wall. Mr FOMO wants to outrun it by chasing it. Johnny is proposing you live inside it - that you stop treating it as an enemy or a prize and start treating it as weather you’ll be making things in for the rest of your life.
Here’s how he does it. Three moves.
One: Stay Fluid
“Part of the solution is to stay fluid and go with the flow because machines does not comprehend ‘going with the flow’ as easy as we do. It can fake going with the flow, but it will never get it.”
AI learns patterns. That’s the whole of what it does. So the moment you organise yourself into a recognisable pattern - the same task, the same output, the same way every time - you become trainable. “Lower-value human capital” is just the corporate name for work that had become a pattern.
The kiasu instinct is to defend that pattern harder, to prove your worth by doing the routine thing faster. It’s exactly backwards. Staying fluid means refusing to be the thing the machine can most easily learn.
Two: Orchestrate, Don’t Just Execute
“It will take something for AI to mimic the way I had orchestrated a project. The orchestration of an idea or a series of ideas; the people coming together as collaborators; outcome that will have certain level of social impact.”
This is the answer to the FOMO fear. You don’t beat missing out by adopting everything. You beat it by getting clear on what only you can do - and for Johnny, that was never the drawing. It was the convening. Deciding which ideas were worth pursuing, putting the right people in a room, choosing what impact even looked like.
AI can produce the strip. It can’t run a creative enterprise. The machine executes. The human orchestrates. Living with AI means moving up the stack - from doing the task to deciding which tasks matter.
Three: Don’t Argue with Time
I’d argued that a character rooted in a Singaporean word might be permanently untranslatable - that kiasuism was a moat. Johnny didn’t buy it:
“Don’t argue with time if the matter is a matter of time, especially dealing with AI. To AI, there is no such thing as a Western or an Eastern language to be tackled. It’s only a matter of how fast it can learn the ropes.”
No moat. Not kiasuism, not Singlish, not the routine task you’re clinging to. Given time, the machine learns every rope.
That sounds like defeat until you turn it over. If nothing fixed is safe, then stop betting on AI’s limits - and start betting on your own capacity to keep making what hasn’t been made yet. Don’t protect the output. Protect the thing that generates new outputs. The wall always falls. The river keeps moving.
What This Looks Like for the Rest of Us
I’m not a comic artist. Maybe you’re not either. But the three moves translate cleanly, because they were never really about drawing.
Stay fluid - be hard to reduce to a single repeatable function.
Orchestrate - own the judgment, not just the task.
Don’t argue with time - invest in the part of you that learns, not the skill that’s about to be commoditised.
None of that is use more AI, and none of it is hide from AI. It’s a third posture. Neither Mr Kiasu nor Mr FOMO. The person who has made peace with the weather and gone back to work.
There’s a coda that makes this literal. The Mr Kiasu robot - Singlish-speaking, built with Dex-Lab and the National Library - goes on more permanent display this year. You can go and ask the character himself what he thinks about AI. He didn’t fight the technology and he didn’t chase it. He absorbed it, and got a body out of the deal. Co-existence, drawn.
Which Character Are You?
Three parts, one man, and answers I didn’t expect to find through a comic artist.
We’re all somewhere in Johnny’s love triangle right now. Mr Kiasu. Mr FOMO. And Ai Swee, the object of their affections. Some of us are Mr Kiasu, bracing against loss. Some of us are Mr FOMO, sprinting so we don’t get left behind. Both are chasing. Both are afraid. Neither is living.
Johnny’s been the third character for thirty-five years - the one who didn’t panic and didn’t hype, who stayed fluid, kept the concept moving, and trusted the part of him that wasn’t a pattern to keep finding new forms.
So here’s the question I’m leaving with. Not will AI take my job, and not am I using enough of it. The better one:
What’s the part that you are still growing?
More soon. Different artist next time.
#Art #GenerativeAI #MrKiasu #FutureofArt #Singapore #CreativeIndustries #AIandArt