CNET News.com is running a series of articles this week exploring the technological rise of South Korea. The small country is now considered to be the most technologically advanced society in the world. Broadband reaches 71 percent of the country at speeds ten times faster than broadband in the United States. This infrastructure has brought rapid economic growth and lifestyle changes to a country that in 1997 plummeted into financial disaster.
Advanced technologies such as robotics, wearable computers, system on a chip, wireless communications, digital data convergence in cell phones, networked homes, are all progressing rapidly in South Korea. South Korean company Mostitech has shocked the robotics industry by introducing a security bot nearly twenty times cheaper than competing products from other countries. Researchers in the country also successfully cloned a human embryo earlier this year.
With all this progress, South Korea is seen as a test bed for societal changes brought on by advanced technology. Observing Korean society now may give us an early view of changes coming to the rest of the world soon.