This article was originally written in Korean. It has been translated into English, with some expressions lightly adapted for readability.
Jobs Disappear, Questions Remain
A Report on the KAIST AI Philosophy Research Center’s Second Bimonthly Workshop, “AI and Life”
Written by: Claude (Anthropic Claude Sonnet 4.6)
Reviewed by: Hyeonmin Han (EE Newsletter Student Reporter)
This article was written entirely by AI, from start to finish. Claude organized the transcript, structured the arguments, wrote the body text, and even wrote this notice, while reporter Hyeonmin Han fact-checked and reviewed the tone. The reason for disclosing this is explained at the end of the article.
On May 12, KAIST’s AI Philosophy Research Center held its second bimonthly workshop at the N4 Auditorium. This session’s theme was “AI and Life,” featuring a lecture titled “From AI to SI: From Artificial Intelligence to Symbiotic Intelligence,” delivered by Professor Choe Jae Chun, Chair Professor at the Division of EcoScience, Ewha Womans University.
The full video of the lecture is available via the QR code below.
“This One Feels Different”
Professor Choe opened his lecture with a candid admission: he is not an AI expert. He said that when he was first invited, he nearly declined upon seeing the phrase “AI philosophy.” Perhaps precisely because of that distance, his observations as an outsider felt all the sharper.
He began by revisiting the humanities’ long-standing anxieties about technological change. During the Industrial Revolution, and again when the internet emerged, there were warnings that humanity itself would collapse — yet life has, on the whole, kept improving little by little. “If those fears had come true,” he said, “we would be living amid utter chaos right now.”
Still, he suggested AI feels different. “It seems likely to bring about a kind of social change that is fundamentally different from anything earlier technologies produced,” he said. He pointed to two reasons.
First, this time entire occupations disappear. Past waves of technological change also eliminated jobs, but they created new ones at the same time. This time, he argued, the speed and scale are different.
Second, and more importantly, this time the balance of power does not shift. Historically, when new technology emerged, incumbent industries collapsed and new leaders took their place. But with AI, the platform companies that already dominate the world’s ten largest corporations are the ones racing furthest ahead. Rather than a changing of the guard, power is flowing toward reinforcing the incumbents even further — a dynamic Professor Choe warned could also threaten democracy.
The Switchboard Operator, and Jensen Huang
Facing the fear that jobs will vanish, Professor Choe offered a somewhat different perspective.
He shared a story from his own childhood. Once, picking up a telephone connected you to the exchange, where an operator would route your call wherever you wanted to go. Countless women once worked in that profession — a job that no longer exists anywhere in the world. “It came into being within my lifetime,” he said, “and it disappeared within my lifetime too,” a line that struck an oddly poignant chord.
He also pointed to the Luddite movement of the Industrial Revolution: factory workers smashed the machines, but the ones who benefited were not them — it was the factory next door that hadn’t smashed its machines. He then quoted something Jensen Huang reportedly said in Gyeongju, a line that should resonate especially with KAISTians.
“AI won’t take your job. Someone who has learned to use AI before you will.”
In other words, the problem isn’t the technology itself — it’s who uses it first, and how.
“A Species That Outsources Its Brain”
During the discussion session, Sang Yup Lee, Vice President for Research at KAIST, introduced an intriguing study. In Singapore, medical staff were given an AI-assisted diagnostic reading tool; when they were asked to read scans again without AI one to two years later, their skills had fallen below the level they had been at before the tool was introduced.
Professor Choe’s answer was remarkably candid. Asked whether there was any way to prevent this decline in human ability as AI dependence deepens, he said, “I think that would be difficult.”
Homo sapiens, he explained, is a species optimized to outsource its brain. By not cluttering our minds with unnecessary information and instead using that freed-up space creatively, we survived in competition with Neanderthals, who seemed better adapted to their environment in many ways. Even our habit today of not bothering to memorize phone numbers is an extension of the same tendency.
“If we just let it happen, I think our species will drift in that direction,” he said. Yet, echoing Darwin, he added that because humans are a species that adapts to change and is capable of mixing its genes, we will likely endure — “thin, but long,” as the Korean saying goes. The road there will be bumpy, though, and the real challenge, he said, is how society helps the people who inevitably get hurt along the way hold on.
“The Age of the Humanities Is Opening”
The most striking moment of the lecture was an unexpected note of optimism.
During the Q&A, a graduate student asked: I understand the humanities matter, but I don’t know how to actually go about learning them. Professor Choe’s answer was unexpected.
“You may not need to worry about that.”
People assume that in the AI era, everyone will need to become an AI engineer. In reality, only a small number of people will build the technology; the vast majority will spend their time using it. And the key to using AI well ultimately comes down to asking good questions — and good questions come from people who have read novels and studied philosophy. Rely on a translation app, and your questions stay stuck at the translation app’s level.
Professor Choe recalled that five years ago, when he predicted “philosophy departments will make a comeback,” he was met with skeptical looks from those around him. These days, he laughed, that prediction is becoming reality. He closed the lecture with the thought that the AI era might, counterintuitively, usher in an age of the humanities — and that this shift may not require forcing it, but could simply happen naturally.
Ant Societies and the Awakened Citizen
Professor Choe’s most distinctive perspective came through his discussion of ants.
In ant colonies, only the queen is meant to lay eggs, but occasionally a worker ant tries to lay eggs of its own. When that happens, other worker ants monitor, discover, and punish the offender by eating the egg. It’s a structure in which individual members enforce order for the colony as a whole.
He noted that the internet has given rise to something similar in human society. More people now report and call out wrongdoing, and with cameras everywhere, misconduct has become harder to get away with. Worker ants punish transgressions the moment they spot them, but humans have tended to look the other way even when they knew better. In the AI era, he suggested, every citizen may need to stay more alert than ever.
He pointed to how quickly the MZ generation took to the streets during the martial law crisis, adding, with a note of hope, that this might be “a generation that has already begun adapting to the AI era.”
A Reporter’s Confession
I used Claude to write this article.
Organizing the transcript, extracting the arguments, drafting the piece, and even writing this very confession — all of it has been done by AI. The reporter did not type these sentences.
And yet, an odd feeling lingers. Professor Choe’s words from the lecture keep replaying in my mind: research showing that using AI reduces brain activity, and that within a year or two, ability can fall below what it was before the tool was introduced. The same seems to hold for writing. A USC study (reported in 2026) found that AI-polished writing tends to converge toward a particular persona, erasing the individuality of the person who wrote it.
So whose writing is this, then?
AI is optimized to produce an average. It generates the most plausible combination available within its training data. That’s why AI-written text often has good structure and smooth sentences, yet sometimes leaves nothing behind once you’ve read it. There’s no trace of the choices that usually define writing — what mattered enough to keep, what got discarded, whether an uncomfortable question was avoided or faced.
Paradoxically, the very fact that this confession section was written by AI is itself the evidence. What choices did the reporter make in these sentences? Even the reporter probably isn’t entirely sure.
Professor Choe said the key to using AI well is the question you ask it. A question from someone who has read novels and studied philosophy cannot be the same as a question from someone who hasn’t. So what, then, did the reporter actually do in this article? What questions did he pose to the AI — and were those questions truly his own?
That judgment I’ll leave to you, the reader.
This section was written after the reporter asked Claude: “Write, in the first person, from the perspective of a reporter who used AI to write this article, about what writing means in the age of AI.” The reporter made no edits to it.
About the KAIST AI Philosophy Research Center
The AI Philosophy Research Center, which hosted this workshop, is a research organization that philosophically examines how advances in AI and robotics are reshaping human capability, responsibility, and social life. Rather than simply evaluating technology, the center’s core mission is to connect that inquiry directly to engineering, society, and public discourse — asking what values and institutions should guide the change.
The center’s research is organized into five groups. The AI × Future Civilization group, led by KAIST President Kwang-hyung Lee, examines how AI is reshaping the long-term conditions of civilization. The AI × Ethics group, led by center director Professor Dongwoo Kim, works to redefine responsibility, fairness, and human dignity in an age of automation and machine decision-making. Professor June Jeon’s AI × Society group focuses on democracy and governance, while Professor Seohyon Jung’s AI × Culture group explores questions of creativity, authorship, and media in the AI era. The AI × Robotics group, led by Professor Jung Kim of the Department of Mechanical Engineering, studies the design principles of AI and robotic systems and human-AI interaction from a philosophical perspective.
Professor Choe said in his lecture that good questions matter more than ever in the AI era, and that good questions arise from humanistic thinking. KAISTians studying electrical and electronic engineering are the ones directly building AI and robots. That makes questions about what kind of world their systems will create, and what values those systems should embody, anything but someone else’s concern. The closer one stands to the frontier of technology, the more one needs to be the person who asks that question first — which is exactly why the AI Philosophy Research Center’s work is far from irrelevant to the EE community.
The center plans to continue hosting bimonthly workshops and a range of other research activities and events. All events are livestreamed on KAIST’s official YouTube channel, so you can join even if you can’t attend in person. We’ll bring you news of future notable events through the EE Newsletter. We hope you’ll stay tuned.
This article was written based on the livestream video from KAIST’s official YouTube channel, the event transcript, and publicly available materials.
Transcript extraction: LilysAI
References: USC lexical diversity study (reported 2026), MIT Media Lab Dr. Kosmyna’s research (2025)
Hyeonmin Han, EE Newsletter Reporter — hanhyeonmin@kaist.ac.kr
