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When I landed in Seoul after a grueling 12-hour flight from San Francisco, I walked through an unmanned immigration checkpoint, where a machine scanned my face and passport. On the subway home, people were glued to their phones (powered by flawless 5G even underground), as we raced past platforms lined with LED screens of ads celebrating K-pop idols’ birthdays. When I got off the station in Gangnam, a cartoon-eyed robot on wheels was waiting patiently at a crosswalk to deliver someone’s dinner. Internet cafés dotted the sidewalks, crammed with teenagers playing computer games, maybe hoping to become the next legendary pro gamer.

I stood at a bus stop with interactive touch screens showing real-time bus schedule updates. It will soon become an “AI bus stop,” the Gangnam district announced in June, with a kiosk that answers riders’ questions in multiple languages. The news didn’t surprise me. Having grown up in the city, I’ve watched Seoul transform from a scrappy boomtown into the gleaming tech capital it is today.

South Korea loves AI.

While a public backlash against AI is brewing across the US, South Koreans are optimistic. Only 16% say they are more concerned than excited about AI—the lowest of any of the 25 countries surveyed by the Pew Research Center—while 50% of Americans were more worried than excited. A majority of Koreans use AI every day, either as a sort of personal assistant or to do tasks at work, according to surveys by the Ministry of Culture, Sports, and Tourism and Korea Chamber of Commerce and Industry.

One of the most wired countries in the world, South Korea loves to street-test every new technology on the block—AI webcomics, virtual K-pop idols, and humanoid monks. And the appetite for experimentation doesn’t stop with ordinary citizens. Government agencies are early adopters too, deploying AI textbooks in schools and AI eldercare robots in welfare centers. South Koreans share a deep conviction that embracing technology is integral to modernizing the country and cementing its place in the global order. Their fascination with AI is just the latest incarnation of that ethos—and it’s making them anxious to stay ahead.

Engineered enthusiasm

All this techno-optimism has largely been engineered by South Korea’s national agenda to make AI a motor of economic growth. “The South Korean government has designated an AI-powered Fourth Industrial Revolution as the country’s path forward and aggressively promoted and invested in it,” says Chihyung Jeon, a professor of science and technology policy at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology. “South Koreans have consistently and relentlessly been told by the government about AI’s potential to create a better future.”

As South Korea rose from the ashes of the Korean War, technology lifted the nation from poverty into an economic powerhouse. In the 1970s, South Korea manufactured steel and ships, then semiconductors in the 1980s, broadband in the 1990s, and smartphones in the 2000s. Today, Samsung and SK Hynix supply most of the world’s high-bandwidth memory chips, which power the cutting-edge Nvidia hardware used to train AI models. South Korea’s economy now orbits these two semiconductor giants: The country’s main equity index, Kospi, surged to record highs in 2026, powered by the soaring share prices of both companies, each valued above $1 trillion.

Lee Jae-myung, president of South Korea, has pledged to vault the country into the ranks of the “top three AI powers” alongside the US and China. After taking office in 2025, he launched the Presidential Council on National AI Strategy to help buy massive amounts of computing power and a sovereign AI foundation model project that funds Korean companies to develop homegrown AI models. The government has also supported semiconductor titans, including Samsung and SK Hynix, through generous tax credits and low-interest financing. 

South Korea’s policy posture also prioritizes accelerating AI development over safety considerations. In 2024, South Korea’s legislature passed the AI Basic Act, one of the world’s first comprehensive AI laws, to promote AI development and establish light-touch regulatory guardrails. Seventy percent of South Koreans say advancing science and medicine through AI innovation is a bigger priority than protecting industries through regulation, according to the 2026 Stanford AI Index.

All of that effort might be paying off. The same index ranked South Korea as having the third largest number of notable AI models in the world, based on criteria such as state-of-the-art advancements or high citation rates. For many small countries like South Korea, AI is a chance to punch above their weight.

The blind spots

But that single-mindedness can crowd out critical reflection on AI’s broader societal impacts. “Because the national agenda on AI prioritizes economic development,” says Jeon, the professor of science and technology policy, “there isn’t much reflection on the social, political, ethical dimensions of the technology.” In 2025, the South Korean government faced a fierce backlash for rolling out AI textbooks riddled with factual inaccuracies and data privacy risks without testing them first in a pilot program to evaluate how they affect student learning.

And despite their optimism, South Koreans are still worried that AI could displace them from their jobs. After Hyundai announced in January that it will deploy Atlas humanoid robots across its car factories, the Hyundai Motor Group union protested vehemently. “Without labor-management agreement, not a single robot using new technology will be allowed to enter the workplace,” the union said. Sixty-four percent of South Koreans fear AI could displace human labor and exacerbate inequality, although 52% believe it could also increase productivity. 

On a recent Friday night in the Seoul Central Market, I went out with my cousins to a pocha, a late-night restaurant that serves fish cakes stacked in neat pyramids. As we clinked our cups of soju cut with beer—the scrappy staple cocktail of every Korean night out—one cousin asked me if I’d asked ChatGPT about my saju, a traditional Korean fortune-telling practice. A 29-year-old insurance agent in Seoul praying for a new job and a boyfriend, she said asking ChatGPT about work and dating was her favorite pastime. She pulled up her phone and punched my birth date into the chatbot. 

Addicted to their screens, trapped between unemployment and dead-end jobs, and priced out of marriage and homeownership, 46% of South Koreans in their 20s have used a chatbot to read their fortunes, according to a survey by Korea Gallup. 

My cousin said she also asks ChatGPT for tips on trading stocks, dreaming big about making bank on her investment accounts into which she’s been pouring her salary. ChatGPT, she believes, is her portal out of reality into a better future.

Despite how fond she is of the chatbot as her shaman and financial advisor, she fears losing her job to AI. She still uses ChatGPT feverishly at work, as all her coworkers do, afraid of falling behind. 

“I sometimes fear AI, but for now, it’s just so useful,” she said.