South Korea Shows Why East Asia’s AI Ethics Problem Is Structural, Not Confucian

When governments and scholars search for an East Asian approach to artificial intelligence ethics, they usually reach for the same shelf: Confucian harmony, Buddhist middle paths, and other indigenous moral traditions that might temper the technology’s excesses. A new paper in AI & Society argues that this entire framing misses the point. Wha-Chul Son of Handong Global University contends that the region’s apparent indifference to AI ethics has little to do with a shortage of local moral resources and everything to do with the historically formed patterns of techno-modernity that have driven East Asia’s spectacular technological rise. Using South Korea as his paradigmatic case, Son identifies four structural tendencies that have accelerated development while quietly starving normative deliberation of the space it needs to grow.

The analytical engine behind the argument is the concept of sociotechnical imaginaries, developed by science and technology studies scholars Sheila Jasanoff and Sang-Hyun Kim. These imaginaries are collectively held visions of desirable futures that a society pursues through science and technology, and they do more than reflect values; they actively shape which questions get asked and which get deferred. In East Asia, Son argues, the dominant imaginary has been one of catch-up and national ascent, a narrative in which technology functions primarily as the vehicle for escaping historical subordination and achieving prosperity. Within such an imaginary, ethical scrutiny of technology itself can appear not merely unnecessary but almost disloyal, a brake on the national project at precisely the moment acceleration matters most.

The first structural tendency Son names is importer’s pragmatism. For decades, East Asian economies consumed technologies designed, standardized, and philosophically pre-digested elsewhere. When the artifacts arrive ready-made, the ethical debates that accompanied their creation arrive, if at all, as afterthoughts or foreign imports. The philosophical labor of asking what a technology should be, rather than merely how well it works, was performed in other languages, other institutions, and other societies. Importing nations became extraordinarily skilled at adoption, refinement, and deployment, but the muscle of first-principles normative inquiry atrophied. The result is a policy culture fluent in technical specifications and market strategy but comparatively silent on the deeper questions of what these systems do to human relationships, labor, and dignity.

The second tendency, pursuer’s competitiveness, compounds the first. Nations that perceive themselves as chasing the technological frontier organize their entire innovation ecosystems around speed. Son points to South Korea’s recent drive to be among the world’s top three AI powers, including the selection of elite teams to build a sovereign AI model, as a contemporary expression of this logic. In a race, the metric is velocity, and ethical deliberation is structurally coded as friction. Frameworks such as the country’s new comprehensive AI law, enacted as the first of its kind, attempt to attach safety and trust requirements to development, but Son’s analysis suggests that legislation alone cannot counteract an imaginary in which national prestige is staked on being first. The competition of speed, he argues, must become a competition of direction.

The third tendency is the collectivist narrative of progress. Where technological advancement is framed as a collective national achievement, individual harms can be reframed as acceptable sacrifices on the road to shared glory. Son traces this pattern through a sobering catalogue of Korean disasters: the Seongsu Bridge collapse, the Sampoong Department Store collapse, and the Wenzhou train collision, alongside the Hwang Woo-suk stem cell fraud scandal. Each episode, in his reading, illustrates how the imperative of progress can suppress dissenting voices, marginalize whistleblowers, and delay accountability until catastrophe forces reckoning. Applied to AI, the same collectivist logic surfaces in policies like the rapid rollout of AI textbooks in schools, where documented confusion among students and teachers and concerns over digital overuse were subordinated to the national narrative of educational transformation.

The fourth tendency is perhaps the most culturally distinctive: the limited centrality of what Son calls the Frankenstein complex. In Western societies, Mary Shelley’s creature and its descendants have seeded a deep cultural anxiety about creations that turn on their creators, an anxiety that fuels public resistance, precautionary regulation, and a rich literary and philosophical tradition of technological self-doubt. Thinkers from Jacques Ellul to Hans Jonas built ethics on this wariness. East Asian societies, by contrast, have largely absorbed technology without an equivalent mythic register of rebellion and retribution. The absence of this cultural brake has eased acceptance and accelerated diffusion, but it has also removed a natural trigger for public deliberation. When nothing in the collective imagination insists that new powers demand new humility, normative debate must be built deliberately rather than inherited.

Son’s case study of Korean AI adoption shows how these four tendencies converge in the present. The country has positioned itself as an attractive test bed for global AI companies, a role that brings investment and visibility but also imports the industry’s well-documented externalities, from the exploitation of low-paid data workers abroad to embedded gender bias in generative systems. Domestic civil society groups, such as the Institute for Digital Rights, have produced reports on AI’s human rights implications, yet the policy mainstream remains oriented toward development targets. Even labor conflict carries the pattern: when Hyundai’s union battled the rollout of Atlas robots, the dispute was framed primarily as an industrial relations problem rather than an occasion for society-wide reflection on automation’s direction. The structural tendencies do not prevent ethical debate, but they consistently narrow its scope and blunt its force.

The paper’s constructive proposal is deliberately not a call for culturally distinctive principles. Son explicitly declines to argue that Confucian benevolence or Buddhist non-attachment should be grafted onto AI governance as a regional signature. Such an approach, he suggests, misidentifies the problem as one of content when it is actually one of structure. Instead, he outlines a fourfold redirection of East Asian techno-modernity: from passive importer to responsible developer, meaning that nations must now own the full normative consequences of the systems they build and deploy; from competition of speed to competition of direction, rewarding societies that choose better trajectories rather than merely faster ones; from national collectivism to expanded responsibility, extending the circle of moral concern beyond the nation to workers, users, and communities elsewhere who bear the costs of AI supply chains; and from faith in progress to strategies of survival and human flourishing, a shift in the underlying imaginary itself.

The implications reach well beyond Korea. As AI development globalizes, the assumption that ethical frameworks can simply be exported from the societies that built the technology is increasingly untenable, and the temptation to answer with a menu of regional principles grows. Son’s analysis offers a sharper diagnostic: the question is not which tradition supplies the right maxims, but which structures allow any maxims to matter. A society whose imaginaries celebrate acceleration, whose institutions reward catching up, and whose culture lacks inherited scripts of technological suspicion will neutralize even the most elegant ethical principles. Conversely, restructuring those imaginaries, through democratized technology governance of the kind theorists like Langdon Winner and Andrew Feenberg have long advocated, could make deliberation constitutive rather than ornamental.

What makes the argument resonate now is the timing. East Asia is no longer merely importing AI; Korea has enacted the world’s first comprehensive AI safety law, launched national committees to claim a place among the top three AI powers, and embedded AI into classrooms. The region has crossed the threshold from pursuer to potential leader, and with that transition comes the loss of the importer’s alibi. If Son is right, the next chapter of East Asian AI will be judged not by how faithfully it applies ancient wisdom to modern machines, but by whether societies forged in the crucible of catch-up development can invent a new imaginary, one in which asking where technology should go is as prestigious as asking how fast it can get there.

Subject of Research: Structural analysis of East Asian AI ethics and techno-modernity using South Korea as a case study

Article Title: Do we need an East Asian AI ethics?: South Korea as a paradigmatic case

Article References: Son, W.-C. (2026). Do we need an East Asian AI ethics?: South Korea as a paradigmatic case. AI & SOCIETY. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-026-03336-8

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s00146-026-03336-8

Keywords: AI ethics, East Asia, South Korea, techno-modernity, sociotechnical imaginaries, Confucianism, Frankenstein complex, AI governance, AI policy, philosophy of technology, national competitiveness, responsible innovation