Korea IT Times August Contributors
We would like to express our gratitude to the July contributors as we celebrate the 20th anniversary of Korea IT Times. We are now excited to publish the new contributor's article for August.
- Prof. Jong-Shik Kim, PhD: Working with AI, Living with AI
- Essays by Layne Hartsell PhD, and Alexander Krabbe, MD: The Echoes of War: The Specter Advances, A Response for the Sake of Sanity
- Byoung min Im, Columnist : The Courage of India's Prime Minister Modi
- Barnaby Page, VP of IR & Cyber Risk at SentinelOne: Cyber Safeguard: The Insurance Industry's Role in Enhancing Digital Security
- Layne Hartsell, PhD and Ashok Kumar Janakiraman, PharmD: Nanotechnology for the Treatment of Dementia
- Tae-il Kwon, PhD, CEO of Bigsun Systems: Next Generation Wireless Network Technology in the Age of AI
- Jinkook Kim, PhD, CEO of Coreline Soft: The role of AI in lung cancer screening
By Jong-Shik Kim, Chair Professor, aSSIST University
We often hear predictions that AI will replace humans. We can easily see that many jobs are already disappearing due to digitalization and automation. So, it makes sense that AI will continue to eliminate jobs. Companies are already noticing that AI can outperform humans in many areas, including software development, marketing, customer care, logistics management, and more.
According to McKinsey, about 30% of jobs will be lost by 2030. Venture capitalist Vinod Khosla believes that as many as 80% of current jobs could be replaced by AI in the next decade. JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon suggests that AI could lead to a future where people work only 3.5 days a week. Despite these macro predictions, the amount of job loss will vary greatly by industry and country due to issues such as a lack of data to utilize AI, concerns about using AI training on sensitive data inside companies, and conflicts with unions to protect jobs.
The actors' strike, which followed the Hollywood Screenwriters Guild strike in 2023, is an organized response to the industry's shift to leveraging AI to increase productivity. Streaming services such as Netflix and Disney are actively using AI to revise scripts and shoot movies in order to reverse declining revenues and profits since the pandemic. Professionals in these fields, threatened with losing their jobs and compensation, have responded by striking.
Conversely, it is possible to predict that AI will create new jobs. New jobs go beyond AI replacement to include long-term opportunities in new AI ecosystems that are hard to imagine. We should remember that during the Industrial Revolution of the 18th century, the steam engine was at the center of the technological revolution, but the big changes in the world came not from the continued development of the steam engine, but from the various industrializations that used it. The construction of railroads fueled by steam-powered trains accelerated urbanization, factories and enterprises enabled mass production, and the motorization and enlargement of ships based on these changes led to major changes in ports and maritime logistics transportation. This ushered in an era of techno-economic hegemony for some European nations, including Great Britain, which competitively established colonies to secure cheap labor and sell mass-produced goods. Just as this global economic restructuring was derived from the technology of the steam engine, it is reasonable to argue that the pervasive application of AI could create tremendous opportunities
While AI has become a very familiar term, the challenge for executives running real-world organizations is to develop specific plans and strategies for what tasks AI should do and what tasks humans should do. It all comes down to the specifics of their business environment. The answer to the question of whether humans and AI can coexist and work together is also not clear. The answer will vary depending on what tasks an organization chooses to delegate to AI.
Generative AI, which is currently at the center of attention, is becoming an embedded application technology used across nearly every sector. Many organizations are investing proactively in AI, with the logic being that repetitive tasks should be left to AI, leaving humans to do more creative, value-added work. However, it's not clear how AI investments will specifically deliver positive outcomes for organizations, meaning the return on investment (ROI) of applying AI is unclear. Beyond the expectation that people will take advantage of the time-saving benefits of AI and use it to do more creative and fun work, there are still limited models or scenarios in which people can work effectively with AI.
As we've seen, the days of focusing on driving and navigating are a thing of the past. With navigation and semi-autonomous software taking over these tasks, people no longer care about driving, orientation, or the driving environment. It could be argued that we are also losing our highly evolved sense of direction and awareness of our surroundings from prehistoric times. So what fun and creative things are drivers doing to save energy on navigating and driving? Is it talking on the phone, listening to music or YouTube? Or are they meditating or relaxing? How can we find value beyond the convenience of not having to worry about directions and driving?
We live in an age of AI, but the ROI of AI is still unclear. That's why I think we need a model for working and living with AI.
About the Author
Dr. Jong-Shik Kim is a Chair Professor at aSSIST University and a visiting professor at Hanyang University. With a deep interest in the startup ecosystem, he serves as an advisor on leadership and decision-making for emerging technology-based ventures. From 2013 to 2023, Dr. Kim operated the Master of Science in Technology Management program of Stony Brook University at aSSIST University. He also demonstrated over 20 years of senior leadership in global corporations, including serving as the CEO of Cummins' business and investments in Korea, China, and Asia, and as the CEO of Tata-Daewoo Commercial Vehicle Ltd., a Korean subsidiary of Tata Group. Dr. Kim earned a Bachelor of Science degree in Mechanical Engineering from Seoul National University (1977), a Master of Science degree in Mechanical Engineering from the Illinois Institute of Technology (1981), and a Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from Purdue University (1986).
