"Who Will Survive in the AI Era?" Chey Tae-won Proposes a Three-Stage AI Evolution and a '3S' National Strategy

\r[Financial News]"In the age of artificial intelligence (AI), the definition of talent will change. The gap in ability between individuals who can use AI will disappear, and when it comes to redesigning society, generalists will have an advantage over specialists."Chey Tae-won, chairman of SK Group and chairman of KCCI, took the stage as a speaker on the episode of KBS1 TV's "Documentary Insight: Talent War 2 - Choi Tae-won's Answer," which aired on the 28th. He outlined a three-stage AI development path, from the reasoning AI era to the agentic AI era and then to a human-level AGI era. He also offered a detailed look at how individuals can survive and how the nation should prepare its talent strategy. His concerns about talent are rooted in the belief that the AI era will unfold faster than expected and trigger sweeping changes across companies and countries. After the broadcast, related videos on YouTube and elsewhere drew comments such as, "As expected of a conglomerate chairman, the quality of the lecture is clearly different," "There are almost no conglomerate chairmen these days who speak so openly about their own views," and "I am looking forward to the next three episodes."
\r\r\rChey said, "We are now moving beyond the era of 'reasoning AI,' where humans ask questions and AI provides answers, and entering the era of 'agentic AI,' where AI makes decisions on its own and acts when instructed." He added, "In this period, the ability gap between people who actively use AI and those who do not could become much wider than it is now." He explained that polarization could deepen not only among individuals, but also among companies and countries, depending on how quickly and effectively they adopt AI.
Chey assessed that once society moves beyond the so-called "polarization of capability" in the agentic AI era, the next stage will be a human-level "Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) era," in which the gap in knowledge and productivity between individuals will actually narrow. He illustrated this by saying that if two people today have capability levels of 10 and 100, a 10-fold difference, then in the AGI era both could be boosted by a baseline level of 1,000, becoming 1,010 and 1,100, which would significantly reduce the relative gap.
He said the importance of generalist talent, capable of moving across different fields and designing new systems and societies in which humans and AI coexist, will grow even further. As AI takes over many tasks, he added, the "one person, one job" formula may collapse, giving way to an era of multiple jobs per person. Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google DeepMind and often called the "father of AlphaGo," recently said during a visit to Korea that the AGI era could arrive within five years and that its impact would be 10 times greater than the Industrial Revolution, while unfolding 10 times faster.
\r\r\rChey presented the so-called "four muscles" — thinking, adaptation, empathy and body skill — as the core competencies talent will need in the AI era, and stressed that school education must also change.
He first said, "Training to absorb knowledge quickly and do well on tests will now be replaced by AI," adding that "the ability to ask why something is happening and think through the essence of a problem on one's own is what matters." He continued, "In the AI era, the pace of change is so fast that today's choice can change at any time," and emphasized that adaptability and resilience — the ability to adapt again and keep making new choices even after failure — are also important. He also pointed to empathy, a uniquely human value, and the value created through physical activities such as music, art and sports.
\r\r\rIn response to a question from the audience about whether Korea's preference for medical school, in the face of China's technological rise driven by massive capital and manpower, would create a gap in future national competitiveness, Chey said, "Once the AGI era arrives, it will actually become possible to fight back against China, as technology and information are shared through AI." He added, "What matters is not just that our perception of medical school is wrong, but that schools and society need to more actively explain and persuade people that the College of Engineering and Science and Technology fields can also be sufficiently attractive and valuable options."
Chey also proposed the so-called "3S" — Speed, Scale and Safety — as Korea's national AI strategy. He discussed AI in many ways, saying that experts should be given autonomy rather than waiting for a perfect system, that an environment is needed where agentic AI can be used in everyday areas such as education, administration and healthcare, and that an "AI City," a large-scale AI testbed, should also be introduced proactively.
Meanwhile, SK Group said that next week it will release additional content through KBS YouTube under the title "Five Strategies for Building an AI Nation by Chey Tae-won," focusing on material that could not be aired in the main broadcast due to time constraints.
ehcho@fnnews.com Jo Eun-hyo Reporter