▲ Ministry of Science and ICT
The government is significantly expanding the scale and regions of autonomous driving demonstrations, which began in the demonstration city of Gwangju, to simultaneously pursue the development of autonomous driving artificial intelligence (AI) and the commercialization of related services.
The Ministry of Science and ICT announced today (August 24) that it held the 12th Science and Technology Ministers' Meeting in writing and deliberated and voted behind closed doors on the "Roadmap for Autonomous Driving AI Demonstration and Commercialization," which contains these measures.
The roadmap includes plans to secure large-scale and diverse driving data by expanding demonstration scales and regions, thereby enhancing the performance and versatility of domestically developed autonomous driving AI.
In addition, the government decided to establish a profit-sharing-based win-win model involving the transportation industry, labor unions, autonomous driving companies, and platform industries.
It also plans to foster an ecosystem where front- and back-end industries—such as insurance, fleet management, vehicle maintenance, and servicing—grow together, while establishing an on-site response system to ensure safe operations and prompt accident responses in demonstration areas.
The Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport, which announced the agenda, agreed to cooperate with the Ministry of Science and ICT, the Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy, and the Korean National Police Agency to comprehensively promote autonomous driving technology development, demonstrations, and legal and institutional improvements, while building a pan-governmental cooperative governance structure through the National AI Strategy Committee.
During the meeting, the "Deep-Tech Startup Promotion Strategy," prepared as a follow-up measure to the 7 SEED briefing, was also deliberated and voted on in private.
According to the strategy, the government will build a system to select excellent research and development (R&D) achievements and link them to startup support, while establishing a Deep-Tech Demonstration Comprehensive Support Center to connect the outcomes generated from the 7 SEED program to commercialization.
It will provide researchers with AI agents to support the startup process and expand a deep-tech startup and networking model where the assets of predecessors are passed down to successors.
The government will also drastically expand the deep-tech startup capability enhancement program (Tech-Score) and pursue institutional improvements to transform universities and government-funded research institutes into startup-friendly organizations.
As venture capital for patient risk-taking, the government will implement a pilot investment-type R&D project, create ultra-long-term funds specialized in deep tech, and establish public-private joint-venture special purpose companies (SPCs) in hyper-gap technology fields.
Efforts will also be made to strengthen the ecosystem by fostering top-tier universities, government-funded research institutes, private accelerators (ACs), and venture capitals (VCs) into deep-tech investment and incubation specialized firms.
In addition, the meeting deliberated and voted on the "Republic of Korea AI Ethics Principles," which contain three core values and seven principles to establish autonomous AI norms.
(Photo provided by the Ministry of Science and ICT, Yonhap News)
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