NEW YORK — I recently spent several days scrambling after being told that the automatic payment for my child's public kindergarten fees had failed. A temporary spike in spending, including business travel costs, had pushed my credit card past its limit. The matter was settled only after I manually restored the card limit on a website, bought a paper check at a bank branch, wrote in the amount with a ballpoint pen and handed it directly to a district education office employee.
In the U.S., paper checks still change hands routinely when people pay rent or buy a car, and many do not use devices such as digital door locks or dashboard cameras.
Although the U.S. leads the artificial intelligence revolution, tasks that would take seconds on a single app in Korea are routinely handled in such analog fashion here. The country is even less receptive when it comes to AI education for future generations.
A prime example is the Next Generation Technology project, an AI-focused public high school that had been scheduled to open in Manhattan's financial district this September before being scrapped in late April. The school was designed to teach 450 students computer science, robotics and advanced mathematics, as well as how to become "ethical AI users."
But New York City parents sent a petition to Mayor Zohran Mamdani arguing that education reliant on AI could stifle creativity, and the city's education department ultimately withdrew the project. Asked whether AI education might resume, the department said only that it "takes community feedback seriously." Los Angeles, the second-largest school district in the U.S. after New York, also blocked the use of generative AI in late August across all grades, from 2-year-olds through high school students.
American wariness toward AI is also evident in the wave of data center regulation that is shaking the midterm elections. Data center construction has met opposition from both parties in nearly every major hub of the AI industry, including New York, New Jersey, Maine and Texas.
Jang Sung-kwan, head of U.S. strategy at the American political consulting firm D&A Advisory, said at a recent briefing that U.S. citizens "didn't even know what AI and data centers were as of last year, so there was no public opinion either way, but starting this year they are linking even the issue of unmanned surveillance cameras to AI."
Debates in the U.S. often cite reasons such as AI imitating God and encroaching on domains unique to humans, along with invasion of privacy, the erosion of family life and interference with children's natural physical activity. Cultural and religious concerns unfamiliar to Koreans are tangled up in the argument. Even the warnings of human extinction raised recently by Big Tech researchers echo the eschatology of the Abrahamic religions.
Korea, where closed-circuit cameras are installed everywhere and all manner of administrative services are handled by mobile phone, has a far more favorable foundation than the U.S. for cultivating AI talent in terms of openness to new technology. A history of channeling national resources into education for nearly 1,000 years, since the civil service examination system was introduced in the Goryeo Dynasty, is also a cultural asset that sets the country apart from the West. Nvidia Chief Executive Jensen Huang stressed repeatedly at the Van Fleet Award ceremony on Sept. 28 that Korea has "a tremendous strength in embracing new technology enthusiastically and spreading it quickly across society as a whole," adding that "with AI, it can punch above its weight."
Korea should treat the current turmoil among advanced economies over AI education as an opportunity. It is time to minimize the downsides while making full use of the country's strengths to set a new global standard for AI education. That is why praise for Korean technological optimism from Huang, an East Asian American chief executive, does not sound like empty flattery.
