There are always these little Korean things that both delight and mildly terrify me, the kind of quotidian oddities that make you feel like you’re living inside a simulation that’s been coded by someone who is definitely on the spectrum. Of course on paper the country looks familiar enough: there’s the pop music, subways, hamburgers, coffee chains, partisan politics, nightclubs, and an alarming number of teenagers pounding cans of Monster.
But then there are the things that make it wonderfully weird. The people walking up the hill behind the apartment decked out as if they’re climbing Everest. The fact that shops and stores leave expensive goods outside unattended as if theft were just an outdated Western superstition. Cars parked across each other with the handbrakes off so strangers have to move them around in an urban ballet of inconvenience.
And then there’s the almost erotic national fascination with AI. Not just among students trying to get through boring assignments or journalists and artists outsourcing their integrity to meet deadlines and pay rent, but at the institutional level.
The two universities I work at frequently send me invitations to panels, conferences, and symposiums about how to better utilize AI to make my lectures better. One advertised that it was “Designing Active Learning Using AI to Engage Student Participation” while another promised “Using GPT for Teaching Methods to Enhance Learning Effectiveness in Global Classrooms.” I can’t help but feel these are for teachers, professors, and academics who are bad at their jobs. I’m half-expecting the next email to read: “Let the Machine Teach for You: Take a Nap.” And wouldn’t most people love that?
This is the part that feels both inevitable and faintly dystopian: institutions encouraging staff to use AI because they believe it will make us perform better. As if productivity itself were the highest moral virtue. Outrageous, really, when you stop to think about it.
And it’s only going to get worse. South Korea is setting its national strategy like some kind of fitness plans with goals to achieve high AI adoption rates in industry (70%) and the public sector (95%) by 2030. The percentage of people already using AI at work is almost twice that of the United States. And guess who’s using it? Graduate students, professors, academics, and other white-collar workers. The statistics tell us that licensed professionals, such as doctors and lawyers were the most active users of AI, with their usage rate at 69.2 percent.
When I appear on Arirang TV, it’s usually right after a virtual anchor mispronounces half the entertainment headlines in a voice that sounds like Siri with a hangover. The kicker? The script she’s reading was also written by AI. Korea doesn’t do irony, it industrializes it at scale as a national money-making method.
Part of it, sure, is necessity. No oil, no gas, not many cows. The country’s biggest export is its own cleverness. There’s also the dream of tech sovereignty: Naver instead of Google, Kakao instead of Apple, the local robots serving the local race.
Korea is also mad trend heavy. The metaverse! NFTs! Whole buildings wrapped in LED optimism before anyone had the faintest clue what the metaverse even was. The national mood is permanently FOMO-adjacent. It’s terrified of missing the next big thing and, at the same time, equally terrified of being crushed under it like a Nokia 3310. Maybe it’s that old shrimp-among-whales instinct, the reflex to thrash wildly before the next wave rolls in and flattens you anyway.
This sounds nice in theory. The conferences, the strategies, the government roadmaps. All of it. The laptop class (my class) sits in ergonomic chairs, sipping matcha lattes, pretending content generation is labor. We type words about efficiency while other people’s backs do the actual computation. The professors get smarter. The professionals get faster. Meanwhile, the laborers get thinner, colder, wetter.
How about AI that keeps the Coupang drivers from working fourteen-hour shifts? How about AI that lets them sleep before sunrise instead of freezing in a van behind some officetel?
You want to see progress? Go to the loading dock at 3 a.m. Watch a man in a puffer jacket eat cold ramen on top of a stack of packages. That’s the real “machine learning.” His body is learning what pain can do. His back is an algorithm.
AI is wonderful for people who use computers. But the world doesn’t run on computers yet. Not the real world. The real world still needs people to pour coffee, scrub toilets, fry eggs, hand you the thing you ordered because you couldn’t be bothered to stand up. Still needs someone to deliver your noodles at 10 p.m. because you decided you deserved it after a hard day of emails.
We keep saying the future is coming, as if it’s not already here, driving a scooter through the rain at midnight so someone can get a new mouse-mat before breakfast.
AI is the fantasy that convenience is moral. It’s the story we tell ourselves so we don’t feel guilty for being the people who never get their hands dirty.
AI is lazy, cheap and dumb. So you ask why its popular? It isn’t replacing work, it’s hiding it. Burying it under layers of code and comfort so we don’t have to see who’s bleeding to keep the engines running.
