A brave new Korea

Everyone's favorite zainichi*, Norimitsu Onishi of the New York Times, has an article on how robots will be integrated members of society in South Korea:

South Korea, the world's most wired country, is rushing to turn what sounds like science fiction into everyday life. The government, which succeeded in getting broadband Internet into 72 percent of all households in the last half decade, has marshaled an army of scientists and business leaders to make robots full members of society.

By 2007, networked robots that, say, relay messages to parents, teach children English and sing and dance for them when they are bored, are scheduled to enter mass production. Outside the home, they are expected to guide customers at post offices or patrol public areas, searching for intruders and transmitting images to monitoring centers.

If all goes according to plan, robots will be in every South Korean household between 2015 and 2020. That is the prediction, at least, of the Ministry of Information and Communication, which has grouped more than 30 companies, as well as 1,000 scientists from universities and research institutes, under its wing. Some want to move even faster.

I know a lot of people take government predictions with a grain of salt, but back in the 1990s, fresh out of college, I was involved with a similar effort that made wild predictions of Korea's future mass connectedness to the then little used "Internet."

The article alludes to my group's efforts when Onishi says that, "Reeling from the Asian financial crisis of 1997, South Korea decided that becoming a high-tech nation was the only way to secure its future." When I had joined up, things had been moving full force since about 1989 or 1990, with effots to get remote farming and fishing villages, called 농어촌 [農漁村], connected to the forerunners of the Internet in Korea so they could more cheaply and efficiently bring goods to market. Onishi describes some of these post-1997 efforts:

The government deregulated the telecommunications and Internet service industries and made investments as companies laid out cables in cities and into the countryside. The government offered information technology courses to homemakers, subsidized computers for low-income families and made the country the first in the world to have high-speed Internet in every primary, junior and high school.

Brings back memories. John Milburn, the founder (?) of Kexpat, a forerunner of the Korea blogosphere, was responsible for laying out much of the hardware in those heady days. Gosh, I sound like an old timer now, but I was a very early twenty-something kid back when I worked there.

Onishi goes on to describe the high-tech state of Korea today:

South Koreans use futuristic technologies that are years away in the United States; companies like Microsoft and Motorola test products here before introducing them in the United States.

Since January, Koreans have been able to watch television broadcasts on cellphones, free, thanks to government-subsidized technology. In April, South Korea will introduce the first nationwide superfast wireless Internet service, called WiBro, eventually making it possible for Koreans to remain online on the go — at 10 megabits per second, faster than most conventional broadband connections.

Onishi also addresses some of the side effects all this sudden "informatization" has wrought. In addition to a mention of "the dog poop girl," he says this:

Chang Duk Jin, a sociologist at Seoul National University who has studied the effects of technology on society, said it had profoundly influenced domestic politics. Two years ago, after the opposition-led National Assembly impeached President Roh Moo Hyun, a consensus began forming on the Internet that the move was politically motivated — two hours after the vote took place, Mr. Chang said.

Yeah. Three people with a high-speed connection, dozens of alternate on-line IDs, and really, really fast fingers.

For the people who got a chill from movies like, "I, Robot," the article might give them pause. Onishi writes that, "while other countries have focused on developing military, industrial or humanoid robots, he said, South Korea decided three years ago to develop service robots that, instead of operating independently, derive their intelligence from being part of a network."

* I'm being saracastic here. I have no idea if this is true, but the Korea-bashing peanut gallery seems to like to say this a lot: if there's an apparent ethnic Japanese who likes Korea or who has criticism of something in Japan, he/she must be a zainichi (a non-Japanese Japanese, particularly an ethnic Korean or ethnic Chinese who is a Japanese citizen).