The era of judging a car by its engine displacement and brand name is over. The contest may now be decided by software and self-driving capability. Tesla's full self-driving (FSD) subscribers reached 1.48 million as of the second quarter of this year, a 56% surge from a year earlier. It is clear evidence that the automobile has evolved into a smartphone on wheels and an artificial intelligence robot on wheels. The technology race does not stop at autonomous driving. On the 15th of this month, Tesla used a prototype of its new Roadster to show the vehicle driving backward up an incline, spinning in the air and landing. It is still far from commercialization, but it shows how far the technology can stretch.
While the global market races ahead at the speed of light, what has our own situation been? Until only recently, Korean companies were held back by personal data protection rules, forced to mask the faces and expressions of every pedestrian one by one as they trained their AI. Can a self-driving algorithm that cannot read a pedestrian's gaze, expression or age guarantee safety and completeness on the global stage? No matter how strong the underlying technology, once outdated institutions and rules block the way, falling behind in the global contest is only a matter of time. With that in mind, I would like to make three policy proposals.
First, leadership in dismantling regulation must be strengthened. Removing regulation cannot be achieved through routine interministerial consultation or administration run on inertia. Strong leadership is essential to coordinate the tangled interests among ministries and to drive preemptive legislation. The president now serves directly as chair of the Regulatory Rationalization Committee, and the decisions made under that arrangement — opening the way for the use of raw video data from autonomous driving, improving guidelines on the use of copyrighted works for AI training and revising the review system for advanced regenerative medicine — were very timely. The passage of a bill exempting proactive administration in advanced fields from audit is also an important turning point that can break bureaucratic inertia. The greater the president's interest in rationalizing regulation, the stronger Korea's industrial competitiveness in advanced fields will become.
Second, the regulatory sandbox needs unified management, and the laws and systems governing field testing need to be updated. Introduced in 2019, the regulatory sandbox is a negative-list system built on the principle of allowing first and assigning responsibility later. It lets people with innovative technologies and ideas test them in actual field conditions, and it is an innovative way of dismantling regulation. But the sandbox is run separately under eight programs across six ministries, which makes it hard to keep pace with the era of the Big Blur, in which innovative technology erases the boundaries between industries. Legal updates after field testing have also been slow, leaving tested ideas short of commercialization. Korea must not miss the timing of global competition, and that means moving quickly to consolidate management of the sandbox and update the relevant laws for the times.
Finally, sweeping regulatory exemptions should be granted to core industries on which the nation's fate rests, including semiconductors, AI and autonomous driving. These industries need package exemptions at the scale of mega-projects, going beyond what individual statutes allow. In particular, the super-wide-area special zones the government is pursuing to drive regionally led growth should come with attractive regulatory exemptions that can draw bold corporate investment into the regions, so that core industries can be nurtured and balanced regional development advanced without delay.
The entire world, including the United States and China, is staking everything on the war for technological supremacy. In a winner-take-all world where second place does not survive, if we do not now break the bars of regulation that block innovation, the golden time to protect this country's fate will never come back.