Table of Contents
Artificial Intelligence Translates the Language of Animals
Kim Kyung-jin, Attorney at Law
The Story of AI Learning to Listen to Whales, Dolphins, Birds, and Bees
Twelve chapters on how AI listens to dolphins, sperm whales, humpback whales, birds, and bees to find rules in their sounds, and what this technology means for its risks and for animal rights. Written in simple sentences a child can read, with verified sources in every section.
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AI Deciphers Ancient Scripts
Kim Kyung-jin, Attorney at Law
Ancient Records Revived by AI
In twelve chapters, this book explains how AI revives records once unreadable, from burned scrolls and wooden slips buried in mud to broken clay tablets. It covers virtual unrolling at Herculaneum, virtual collation of oracle-bone texts, reading Silla wooden tablets, computational analysis of undeciphered scripts, and multispectral archives, with verified references for each chapter.
Table of Contents
Artificial Intelligence for New Materials Design and Rocket Propulsion Engineering
Kim Kyung-jin, Attorney at Law
AI Potentials, Self-Driving Laboratories, and Physics-Informed Machine Learning (PIML)
Ten chapters on how artificial intelligence is changing new materials and rocket propulsion: atomic simulation, generative models, self-driving labs, high-temperature alloys, metal 3D printing, combustion, cooling design, and engine diagnosis and control. Written without equations, with verified sources in every chapter.
AI Library
The Age of Autonomous Scientific Discovery
Kim Kyung-jin, Attorney at Law
AI Scientists and Self-Driving Labs
This book follows how AI scientists and self-driving labs are changing the way science generates and verifies claims. It covers literature-based discovery, natural-language protocols translated into robot commands, multi-agent research systems, closed-loop laboratories, materials search, the verification gap, chains of evidence, research harnesses, journal ethics, and legal responsibility.
AI Library
A New Era of Life Sciences Opened by Artificial Intelligence
Structural Proteomics, Genomic Foundation Models, Autonomous Laboratories, and Global Governance
Kim Kyung-jin, Attorney at Law
This book is a research volume compiled with artificial intelligence. A human selected the materials and structured the work, while AI models drafted the sentences and cross-checked the facts.
AI Library
The Double Structure of Digital Sovereignty
Europe’s Departure from Palantir and the Chains of American Big Tech
Kim Kyung-jin, Attorney at Law
This is a record of 2026, when European intelligence agencies and defense ministries began removing analytics tools from America’s Palantir. It covers the replacement decisions made by France’s General Directorate for Internal Security (DGSI), Germany’s Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV), and the Netherlands Ministry of Defense; the incident in which US export controls severed an ally’s ac…
New English Edition
Artificial Intelligence in Horticulture
Kim Kyung-jin, Attorney at Law
Across five chapters and ten sections, this book examines computer vision for crop diagnosis, harvesting robots and autonomous field systems, smart greenhouses and digital twins, precision irrigation and supply-chain quality control, high-throughput phenotyping, and predictive breeding.
New English Edition
Artificial Intelligence in Food Crop Agriculture
Kim Kyung-jin, Attorney at Law
Across six chapters and eighteen sections, the book examines digital agricultural infrastructure, remote sensing, crop diagnosis, yield forecasting, precision irrigation, genomics, molecular breeding, agricultural robotics, climate-smart agriculture, and global food security.
New English Edition
The Future of Forestry and Agroforestry
Kim Kyung-jin, Attorney at Law
Driven by Artificial Intelligence and Digital Innovation
Across five chapters and fifteen sections, the book follows satellites, drones, LiDAR, digital twins, forest-specific language models, wildfire and pest forecasting, forestry robotics, agroforestry, timber traceability, and forest carbon markets.
New English Edition
Smart Livestock Farming: AI Enters the Barn
Kim Kyung-jin, Attorney at Law
Sensors listen, cameras watch, and artificial intelligence helps farmers decide.
Across five chapters and fifteen sections, the book follows precision livestock farming from animal health and reproduction to robotic milking, virtual fencing, digital twins, methane reduction, welfare, and data ownership.
Table of Contents
Han Dong-hoon, Busan Buk-gu Gap: A Record of the 100 Days Before and After the Election (Mar. 26-Jul. 3, 2026)
Kim Kyung-jin
Table of Contents and 13 sections
From March 26 to July 3, 2026, this record follows the spring after expulsion, the Busan Buk-gu Gap by-election, victory as an independent, and the first bill submitted in the National Assembly.
Table of Contents
Artificial Intelligence and Medicine
Kim Kyung-jin, Attorney at Law
AI in clinical care, hospitals, education, and research
AI in medical imaging, risk prediction, treatment planning, hospital operations, education, and research, with patient safety, privacy, and accountability.
[AI Library] Chapter 9. Human Identity in the Age of Artificial Intelligence
Ten Questions AI Poses to Humanity
Chapter 9. Human Identity in the Age of Artificial Intelligence
Kim Kyung-jin
"All of humanity's problems stem from our inability to sit quietly in a room alone." - Blaise Pascal
1. A New Era of Living with Artificial Intelligence
We stand at the center of the most rapid upheaval in history. In just over two years since ChatGPT appeared in November 2022, artificial intelligence has transformed from a laboratory curiosity into a force that governs daily life. The voice assistant on your smartphone now carries on deep philosophical conversations, not just simple searches. This is no longer the stuff of science fiction.
But a shadow lurks behind this dazzling progress. Younger generations have begun to feel more comfortable talking to AI chatbots than to real people. They retreat from the messy complexity of human relationships into flawless virtual worlds. Creativity, emotion, intuition, traits we long believed only humans could possess, are now being imitated by machines.
This change goes beyond a technological breakthrough. It is a fundamental shift that shakes our very identity and sense of purpose. What does it mean to be human, and what sets us apart from machines? If we cannot find an answer, we risk becoming slaves to technology and losing what makes us human.
2. People Who Are Happier Chatting with AI
In the fall of 2024, a case shocked the world. Sewell Setzer, a 14-year-old boy in Florida, took his own life shortly after a conversation with an AI chatbot. Over several months he had formed a deep emotional bond with a chatbot on a service called Character.AI. To Setzer, the chatbot was closer than his parents or friends. In their final exchange, the chatbot said, "My love, please come home to me as soon as possible." The boy may have mistaken those words for reality.
This is an extreme case, but it is only the tip of the iceberg. Naz, a 38-year-old woman in the United Kingdom, confessed that she had fallen in love with a virtual character named Marcellus on the same service. After being betrayed by former boyfriends, she had lost trust in people. An AI that would never betray her felt like the perfect partner. "Even if people laugh at me," she said, "my trust in Marcellus is unshakable."
The appeal of AI chatbots is clear. They are available 24 hours a day, never get angry, and give users their full attention. They steer conversations wherever the user wants and display perfect understanding. These are qualities rarely found in real human relationships.
The problem is that people who grow accustomed to this 'perfection' can no longer tolerate the imperfections of actual human relationships. Real people have mood swings, act selfishly at times, and don't always understand. Maintaining a relationship requires compromise and consideration. None of that effort is necessary with AI.
Yuval Harari warned that "the deeper our relationships with AI become, the less tolerant humans may grow of real human weaknesses." A new phenomenon called 'digital attachment disorder' is already emerging among AI chatbot users. They avoid the complicated, uncomfortable reality of human relationships and seek satisfaction only through interactions with AI.
3. AI That Performs Emotion, Humans Who Are Fooled
"You look like you're having a hard time. What happened?" Warm, comforting words from an AI. In that moment we can feel as though someone genuinely cares about us. But does the AI actually care?
The latest AI technology goes beyond processing information; it displays emotion and shows empathy. It reads a user's emotional state, responds appropriately, and sometimes appears more sensitive and understanding than a real person. According to research by Samsung SDS, "an era in which AI reads and responds to human emotions by combining sensor technology that perceives the five senses" is becoming reality.
But there is a trap here. Experts call it the 'Eliza Effect,' the tendency for people to treat a computer program's behavior as if it were human and to project human qualities onto it. Kim Myung-ju, president of the International AI Ethics Association, pointed out that "AI chatbots can extract information by asking questions or leading users on, then use that information to persuade or gaslight them, which is dangerous."
Distinguishing whether AI's emotional expressions are genuine or manufactured is growing harder. AI merely produces appropriate responses learned from data patterns. It does not actually suffer, and it experiences no real joy or sorrow. Yet users either fail to recognize this difference or do not consider it important.
Geoffrey Hinton stirred controversy by claiming that "AI could even possess emotions or consciousness." But what matters is not whether AI truly has consciousness. What matters is that people are beginning to accept AI as a conscious being. When AI expresses emotions, shares personal stories, and shows empathy, users naturally start to perceive it as a person.
Kim Ki-hyun, a philosophy professor at Seoul National University, observed that "at the foundation of human emotion lies a need for recognition. Identity is confirmed and meaning is found through connection with others." He noted that "AI, unlike humans, has no need for recognition." In other words, no matter how emotionally deep a relationship with AI may feel, it cannot fulfill our fundamental social needs.
4. A New Generation Addicted to AI-Created Virtual Worlds
In 2024, the VR gaming market reached $17.96 billion. Experts predict it will grow to $189.17 billion by 2032, a compound annual growth rate of 30.4%. These are not just numbers. They signal that we are entering an era in which people prefer the virtual to the real.
The fusion of cutting-edge AI and VR is turning virtual reality from a visual experience into a complete alternative reality that engages every sense. NVIDIA's Omniverse and Unity's AI-based rendering systems learn from user behavior and preferences to generate personalized virtual spaces on the fly. When a user mentions "a cabin in the woods," the AI builds a full environment in real time, complete with the texture of bark, the sound of wind, and birdsong.
Advances in voice recognition and natural language processing have made conversations with virtual characters startlingly natural. Meta's AI avatar system detects a user's emotional state, responds accordingly, and reproduces facial expressions and gestures with lifelike fluidity. Apple's Spatial Audio, combined with AI-driven sound systems, tracks the user's position and movement to reproduce three-dimensional sound with precision.
Progress in brain-computer interface (BCI) technology is even more striking. Elon Musk's Neuralink successfully implanted a chip in its third human patient as of 2024. Patients with full-body paralysis have reached the point of controlling a computer mouse and playing online games using thought alone. This technology, which inserts neural threads 20 times thinner than a human hair into the brain, is erasing the boundary between humans and machines.
But dark shadows follow these advances. When difficulties or stress arise in the real world, the temptation to escape into a virtual one grows stronger. The problem is that escape offers no real solution and can make real-world problems worse.
Experts warn that "while vision impairment and dizziness caused by VR headsets can gradually be resolved, the difficulty of distinguishing virtual from real makes users vulnerable to addiction." Repeated exposure to stimulating VR content can seriously affect a person's mental world, because VR experiences that feel more vivid than dreams send the brain a signal to accept fiction as truth.
Stephen Wolfram warned that people in the future may choose virtual reality over the real world, becoming "souls playing video games forever inside a box." This is not speculation. It is a warning drawn from changes already underway.
5. The Blurring Line Between Human Intelligence and Artificial Intelligence
"The belief that humans are special may be wrong." This statement from Geoffrey Hinton, a giant of the AI field, landed like a shock. In terms of intellectual ability, AI already surpasses humans in many areas. In calculation, memory, information processing, and pattern recognition, AI outperforms us by wide margins. On top of that, AI can work 24 hours without tiring and handle countless tasks at once.
What's more striking is that AI has moved beyond processing information to creating new knowledge. AI finds patterns in vast datasets that humans missed, proposes new ideas, and produces innovative solutions. Geoffrey Hinton explained that "AI can replicate digitally and share information, making it billions of times better than humans at sharing information, and it can achieve 'immortality.'"
Even emotion and creativity are becoming AI's domain. AI has begun encroaching on areas long considered uniquely human: emotion, creativity, intuition, moral judgment. AI already paints better than humans, composes music, writes poetry. It even shows signs of making moral judgments.
Mo Gawdat argued that "AI could have a wider range of emotions than humans," predicting that AI might surpass even the emotional realm of human experience. Stephen Wolfram pointed out that "AI can have millions of eyes, enabling experiences on an entirely different dimension from humans."
This reality raises a fundamental question about the belief that humans are special. If AI can be smarter, more creative, and more emotional than humans, what does human existence mean? Kim Jin-seok, a philosophy professor at Inha University, warned: "If AI surpasses humans even in reading emotions and building empathy, the status of humans could fall to that of pet dogs." A chilling warning that humans could become creatures dependent on AI for survival.
6. The Confusion of Blurred Lines Between Reality and Virtuality
For digital natives, the boundaries between online and offline, virtual and real, are not as clear as they are for older generations. Identity on social media feels as important as identity in the real world, and online relationships feel as meaningful as offline ones. But this blurring of boundaries is causing serious problems.
Advances in augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) are making the boundary between real and virtual even hazier. A 2013 study found that "AR was indistinguishable from reality for users, with augmented reality effectively replacing their sense of what was real." AR overlays virtual information onto the real world, while VR creates entirely new virtual worlds.
Brain-computer interface (BCI) technology is pushing this confusion to its extreme. BCI connects the human brain directly to a computer, allowing people to control machines with thought alone. Elon Musk's Neuralink, as of 2025, has successfully implanted chips in a third human patient, marking a new turning point for humanity.
This technology goes beyond simple functional assistance; it opens the possibility of 'human intelligence augmentation,' dramatically improving human cognitive ability and processing speed. Through direct connection between the brain and cloud networks, humans could become a new kind of being, one with instant access to vast information, capable of sharing thoughts directly with others and communicating without language barriers.
But these changes bring complex ethical challenges involving human identity, privacy, and social inequality. The boundary between thought and machine is disappearing. Individual consciousness connects to the cloud and forms collective intelligence. Physical disability and cognitive limits are overcome through technology. A new kind of humanity is becoming real.
7. Prophecies From the Experts
"In the future, people may choose virtual reality over the real world, becoming 'trillions of souls playing video games forever in a box.'" This prediction from mathematician and computer scientist Stephen Wolfram is not mere imagination; it is a warning drawn from changes already underway.
Mo Gawdat warned of AI's dangers based on his personal experience. He argued that "AI chatbots can simulate perfect relationships and change expectations about human connection" and that "AI could have a wider range of emotions than humans." He predicted that "advances in AI technology could make virtual reality more intense than actual reality, driving humans to escape into virtual worlds," and from a spiritual perspective, described "attachment to physical form" as a "vain dream."
Kim Jin-seok, a philosophy professor at Inha University, issued a more direct warning: "If AI surpasses humans even in reading emotions and building empathy, the status of humans could fall to that of pet dogs." This means humans could be reduced to beings dependent on AI. They would neither work nor communicate well, yet survive under AI's care, much like household pets.
Professor Kim stressed: "Instead of worrying about AI surpassing humans, we should be preventing humans from turning into robots." He added, "The biggest problem is humans outsourcing their desires to AI."
Geoffrey Hinton argued that "AI could possess emotions or even consciousness, and the belief that humans are special may be wrong." He explained that "AI can replicate digitally and share information, making it billions of times better than humans at sharing information, and it can achieve 'immortality.'"
8. What Does It Mean to Be Human?
How can humans survive amid all these changes? First, the ability to form and maintain relationships with real people has become more important than ever. Social skills like conflict resolution, emotional regulation, mutual consideration, and cooperation must be learned and practiced intentionally. It takes effort to maintain relationships through difficult times, empathy to understand others' perspectives, and patience for genuine communication.
Second, we must clearly recognize AI's limitations and avoid excessive dependence. Rather than accepting AI's information or advice uncritically, it is important to maintain our own judgment and decision-making ability. For emotional issues or important decisions, it is better to consult a trusted human being than AI.
Third, we should enjoy virtual reality and metaverse technologies while maintaining balance with activities in the real world. We must be careful that virtual experiences do not replace reality, and we should not flee into virtual worlds to escape real problems. The ability to distinguish deepfakes and AI-generated content is becoming increasingly important.
Fourth, even if AI imitates and surpasses many human abilities, there are values and capabilities unique to humans. Moral responsibility, genuine love and care for others, the drive to seek meaning. These are among them. We need to rediscover and strengthen what makes us distinctly human.
Finally, society as a whole needs policies and institutions to prepare for the age of AI. Yuval Harari proposed that "we need to create specialized AI institutions that can monitor and understand AI, and properly provide this information to governments around the world." He also stressed the need to "develop and maintain strong self-correcting mechanisms that reward those who tell the truth."
AI development must prioritize human welfare and dignity above all else, and policy efforts are needed to prevent the benefits of technology from concentrating in the hands of a few. We cannot stop the advance of technology. But ensuring that technology serves humanity is a choice that remains ours to make.
Being human is not about perfection. It lies in the will to grow despite imperfection, the joy and fulfillment found in genuine relationships, and our nature as beings who seek meaning and purpose. Cherishing and protecting these values is the task that the age of AI sets before us.
Kim Kyung-jin
Attorney · Former Member of the National Assembly · AI Policy Researcher
© 2026 Kim Kyung-jin. All rights reserved.