SEOUL, November 03 (AJP) - Students who want to get the most out of artificial intelligence need a solid grounding in basic knowledge first, because that knowledge decides how good their questions to AI will be, the head of a government-funded science policy institute told Kookmin University students on Oct. 29.
Yoon Ji-woong, president of the Science and Technology Policy Institute (STEPI), also said that as AI spreads, human qualities such as consideration, communication and trust would grow more valuable, not less.
He made the case at Kookmin's 674th Thursday Special Lecture, a weekly talk series at the Seoul university, in a session on the kind of talent the AI era demands.
Yoon said AI was already changing how work gets done and how industries are organized. He pointed to the rise of AI-based companies, autonomous robots entering industrial sites and the public sector's growing use of the technology.
Because AI is advancing so quickly, the jobs and skills that draw attention keep shifting as well, he said. For that reason, he argued, the ideal AI-era worker should not be fixed to a single definition but rethought as the technology changes.
To ask AI the right questions and make good use of its answers, a person needs a basic understanding of the field in question, Yoon said. He described an exercise in which participants write questions from several perspectives instead of looking for the correct answer, and said the quality of a question ultimately comes from the foundational skills a person has built.
He also urged students to develop the resilience and agility to handle change that is hard to predict. AI, he said, should be treated as a partner in solving problems rather than as a simple tool.
Even as people spend more time dealing with AI, cooperation and trust between people would remain core skills, Yoon said. He added that society may eventually need to think about how AI systems communicate with one another, not only how humans communicate with AI, and that protecting human dignity and free communication matters as much as technological progress.
He told students that if they built questioning, problem-solving and communication skills on a foundation of humanity and resilience, they could work effectively with AI and grow into people their colleagues want to work with.
Yoon, a former public administration professor at Kyung Hee University, has led STEPI since October 2024. Founded in 1987, the institute took its current form as a government-funded research body in 1999 and studies science, technology and innovation policy.
According to Kookmin, the Thursday Special Lecture is the first and longest-running regular course at a South Korean university built on weekly talks by outside speakers. Over the past 30 years, about 680 speakers from politics, religion, science, culture and the arts have taken its podium, among them the late President Roh Moo-hyun, the late Cardinal Kim Sou-hwan, writer Yoo Si-min, film director Park Chan-wook, former National Assembly Speaker Chung Sye-kyun and former U.S. Ambassador to South Korea Mark Lippert.
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