Traveling AI-essentialism and national AI strategies: A comparison between South Korea and France

In this paper, I investigate what common discourses National AI Strategies (NAISs) share and how they have unfolded differently in diverging national contexts. For this purpose, I compare the South Korean and French cases by relying on the notions of sociotechnical imaginary and future essentialism. I analyze (1) the emergence of the common discourses, which I call AI-essentialism, over the past decade; (2) the development of imaginaries around IT in Korea and France in the twentieth century, namely technological developmentalism and the American challenge, respectively; and (3) the integration of the traveling AI-essentialism and nationally embedded imaginaries of IT into each country's NAISs. The analysis indicates that: (1) AI-essentialism incorporated discursive strategies, enabling political and industrial leaders to naturalize AI development, hence justifying increased investments in the field; (2) two countries' imaginaries of IT diverged due to the successes and failures throughout the second half of the twentieth century; and (3) while two countries' NAISs share AI-essentialism's discursive instruments, their specific measures and unfolding have varied in relation to each case's existing imaginaries of IT.