Korea is unusually well placed to benefit from artificial intelligence (AI). It has world-class digital infrastructure, highly educated workers, globally competitive technology companies and a culture that places enormous value on educational achievement. But those same strengths create a distinctive risk: AI can raise visible performance faster than it develops the underlying capability that performance is supposed to represent. Generative AI can already help students produce polished essays, young employees prepare sophisticated analyses and managers generate professional presentations in minutes. These gains are real. Yet the quality of an output and the capability of the person producing it are not the same thing. A student can submit an excellent answer without having fully constructed the argument. A junior analyst can deliver a persuasive report without having wrestled with the evidence. A young professional can appear to perform at a senior level while remaining dependent on a system whose reasoning he or she cannot independently reproduce or challenge. I call the emerging inequ