Last week, South Korea’s presidential chief of staff for policy, Kim Yong-beom, shared a 2.5K-word Facebook message arguing that the massive AI-era windfall flowing to Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix should be “structurally returned” to the public as a “national dividend,” writing that “The fruits of the AI infrastructure era are not the result of certain corporations alone…They come from an industrial foundation that the entire people have built together over half a century.” The Kospi fell as much as 5.1% the next day, with foreign investors pulling 5.6 trillion won from the exchange in a single session amid fears that profits at Samsung and SK Hynix would be redirected from shareholders.
South Korea’s president, Lee Jae Myung, later clarified that the post was meant as “a review of a plan to distribute the national excess tax revenue generated from excess profits in the AI sector to the public as a citizen’s dividend,” not a hardened plan. This conversation comes as Samsung union workers have threatened to strike to increase their share of AI-related profits. The scale of the potential windfall is staggering, with the two firms’ combined operating profits projected to reach 600 trillion won this year, roughly a quarter of South Korean GDP. Comparisons to Norway’s sovereign wealth fund and proposals for a windfall tax or a UBI trial have already faced criticism on the grounds that they might alienate engineering talent or investment.
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