Publications: Sejin Kim

Building factories is not the same as achieving lasting industrial strength. Korea should design its “Three Megaprojects” as reference factories that give suppliers the testing, qualification, and commercial track records needed to win customers around the world.

Korea should use its AI-memory windfall to finance the shared capabilities, research infrastructure, and commercialization pathways needed to create the next boom. The Future Response Fund should address enduring commercialization gaps, not create permanent spending commitments.

Korean and industry reports suggest China’s ChangXin Memory Technologies (CXMT) is moving faster in high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips than many in Seoul expected. Korea still leads. But the margin is narrowing, and that should change how Seoul thinks about its AI goals.

The right goal for Korea is not an AI tax, but an AI diffusion strategy paired with sound tax reform. The government should help firms adopt AI, help workers transition, and make sure productivity gains are broadly shared, without making the use of AI itself more expensive.

South Korea produces large numbers of STEM graduates, but too many are attracted to medicine, and too few go into engineering. Korea should rebalance its education financing and university incentives to ensure that enough engineers are ready to work in advanced industries.

In the AI economy, competitive advantage will depend less on memorizing information and more on the ability to question intelligent systems, identify errors, and refine outputs. Korea’s education system should adapt to prepare students for workplaces where managing AI-generated mistakes is more valuable than speed of recall.

As Korea moves toward its goal of commercializing Level 4 autonomous driving by 2027, the central constraint may not be technological readiness but whether the government reforms the mobility market in advance. Without regulatory changes, Korea risks deploying advanced autonomous vehicles within a closed, taxi-centered system.

As Korea’s labor debate moves into digital policy, unions risk harming workers in the next generation of industries by prioritizing protections for existing jobs over preparing workers for technological transition.

Korea is unlocking high-quality data for AI but undermining that goal with a domestic server requirement that cuts developers off from global infrastructure. Targeted safeguards would do the job without the competitive cost.

Seventy percent of young Koreans hold university degrees. Only 14 percent of jobs are in large firms. The most immediate concern is not jobs disappearing due to AI, but that there are too few high-quality jobs in the first place.