After painful reform and restructuring of post-1997 financial crisis, many scholars equated South Korea’s ‘post-developmental state’ with neo-liberal state. However, in doing so, they ignored South Korea’s lasting legacy of interventionist ‘developmental state’ that led nation’s miraculous transformation from a poor agrarian society to a prosperous industrial economy. This article stresses that South Korea indeed tried to adopt some of the policy prescriptions suggested by neo-liberal ideas but moving beyond the dictates of neo-liberalism it also strengthened state capacity to augment non-market mechanisms. The article argues that South Korea’s post-developmental state moved into two non-market spheres; First, by tilting towards becoming a ‘techno-scientific state’ and second, it attempted to reimaging South Korea by leaning to develop into a ‘Brand state’. Both non-market initiatives moved South Korea ‘beyond neo-liberalism’ and invoked its ‘statist developmental’ past guided by Keynesian economics. South Korea’s reach to incorporate market and non-market dictates has invited terms such as ‘liberal developmentalism’, a hybrid system where state used its enhanced capacity to improve the efficiency of market system.

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As artificial intelligence (AI) outpaces the human brain, it is invoking wide-spread fear that men and machines are moving into a conflicting zone. Some even suspect that AI machines may one day consider human beings as slow and sloppy, and thus worthy of subordination or elimination. A growing challenge to mitigate the looming crisis requires science to expand its artificially augmented intelligence by incorporating elements from the ethical–spiritual and human universe. Our endeavor to bridge the prevailing gap between science and spirituality focuses on Buddhism, which stands out in its ability to achieve a rare fusion between natural, spiritual and human worlds. This unique synthesis is specifically mediated by Buddhist ‘causality’, where one aspect explains reality based on a scientifically proven cause and effect paradigm, but the other aspect interprets it by compassionate humanism. It argues that the missing human–spiritual dimension in artificial intelligence can be remedied by the Buddhist concept of ‘causally’ linked to the idea of ‘self-enlightenment’. Being an integral part of Buddhist heritage and a leading player in cutting-edge science, Korea demonstrates abilities to emerge as a new balancer to incorporate the best of science, spiritually and humanism to build next-generation AI machines with distinct human qualities.

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