When an MIT Technology Review journalist landed in Seoul after a 12-hour flight from San Francisco, the first thing she encountered wasn't a customs agent — it was an unmanned immigration checkpoint where a machine scanned her face and waved her through. The moment set the tone for a deeper question her reporting sets out to answer: why has South Korea embraced artificial intelligence so visibly and enthusiastically compared to much of the rest of the world?
The story, published by MIT Technology Review and originally appearing in its weekly AI newsletter The Algorithm, frames South Korea not merely as an early adopter but as something closer to a stress test for AI integration in everyday civic and consumer life. Automated immigration is just one data point — the broader argument is that the country functions as an unusually useful benchmark for how societies can absorb AI technologies at scale.
According to MIT Technology Review, the piece draws on firsthand reporting from Seoul to examine the cultural, institutional, and practical factors that may explain South Korea's outsized appetite for AI tools and infrastructure.
Why it matters: as governments and companies worldwide debate the pace and shape of AI deployment, South Korea's real-world experience offers rare, observable evidence of what broad AI adoption actually looks like in practice.