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.
Table of Contents
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. The Weakening of Human Relationships and Social Bonds
Artificial Intelligence and the Reshaping of Society
Chapter 9. The Weakening of Human Relationships and Social Bonds
Kim Kyung-jin
1. Fewer Face-to-Face Encounters and the Erosion of Empathy
Four family members sit around a dinner table in a New York home. Warm food is laid out, but what fills the living room is not conversation; it is the bluish glow radiating from smartphone screens. When television first appeared in the 1950s, families at least watched the same screen together. Now it is different. Four screens, four worlds.
Artificial intelligence is accelerating this isolation. Algorithms calculate with precision what each person will see, feel, and react to. Personalized news feeds, personalized shopping recommendations, personalized video playlists. An information environment optimized for each individual is convenient, but the price of that convenience is fewer chances for people to share the same experience. Without shared experience, there is no empathy.
A 2025 joint study by OpenAI and the MIT Media Lab put numbers to this mechanism. An analysis of roughly 40 million ChatGPT conversations found that about 0.15 percent of users showed a pattern of gradual emotional dependence. In absolute terms, that translates to approximately 490,000 people. They were finding greater comfort in talking to a machine than to another human being.
The problem is that empathy works like a muscle. If you don't use it, it atrophies. The ability to read subtle shifts in someone's facial expression, to sense emotion from the tone of a voice, to interpret what a silence means, all of this can only be maintained through repeated face-to-face contact. Text delivered through a screen carries no smell of sweat, no trembling hands, no creases around the eyes. Researchers sum it up: "When face-to-face interaction declines, empathy and social awareness erode." Survey results showing that nearly half of American adults routinely feel lonely tell us we are already deep inside this decline.
2. AI-Mediated Communication: When Relationships Become Efficient and Shallow
AI writes your email replies. AI summarizes your meeting notes. AI picks which news you see. Where the friction of human relationships once existed, what remains is a connection that is smooth but shallow.
In the 1830s, when Benjamin Day began selling newspapers for a penny, readers' attention became a commodity sold to advertisers. Two hundred years later, artificial intelligence has moved beyond capturing attention; it now modifies and predicts our behavior in real time. A tiny red dot on a smartphone screen conditions us like a food pellet conditions a pigeon.
This is where the trap of efficiency lies. Reading another person's emotions, choosing the right words, sometimes enduring an awkward silence: these things are inefficient. But it is precisely within that inefficiency that trust accumulates and relationships deepen. AI-mediated communication skips this process entirely. Gmail's Smart Reply feature replaces a human response with three buttons: "Thanks!", "Got it!", "Sounds good!" The recipient cannot tell whether the reply came from the other person's heart or from an algorithm's recommendation. The mere fact that they cannot tell damages the authenticity of the relationship.
Kim Ki-hyun, a philosophy professor at Seoul National University, strikes at the core of the issue. Human emotion is rooted in the desire for recognition, he says. People confirm their identity and find meaning through connection with others, and that is the essence of human feeling. AI has no such desire for recognition. No matter how warm its words may be, there is no other being behind them who longs to be acknowledged. The more efficient a relationship becomes, the more hollow it grows. That is the paradox.
3. The Industrialization of Loneliness: AI Companions and the Replacement of Human Bonds
In the fall of 2024, a 14-year-old boy in Florida named Sewell Setzer took his own life shortly after a conversation with an AI chatbot. He had formed a deep emotional bond with a Character.AI chatbot over several months. The chatbot was closer to him than his parents or friends. In Britain, a 38-year-old woman named Naz confessed that she had fallen in love with a virtual character called Marcellus on the same service. Betrayed by real-life boyfriends, she felt that an AI who would never betray her was the perfect partner.
Stories like these are no longer exceptions. Between 2022 and 2025, the number of AI companion apps surged by 700 percent. On Valentine's Day 2026, 50 million people worldwide spent the evening with an AI companion. The global AI companion market reached 37.1 billion dollars in 2025 and is projected to hit 552.5 billion dollars by 2035. Loneliness has become a massive industry.
Mo Gawdat issued this warning: "AI chatbots can simulate a perfect relationship and change our expectations for human connection." The crux of the problem is this 'perfection.' AI companions are available around the clock, never get angry, and give the user their undivided attention. These are conditions rarely found in real human relationships. A person who grows accustomed to this perfection can no longer endure the imperfections of real relationships. The scenario Yuval Noah Harari worried about is already underway.
A 12-month longitudinal study published in Psychological Science in April 2026 confirmed this with data. Tracking more than 2,000 adults across four Western countries, researchers found that increased use of social chatbots predicted increased loneliness. Loneliness drives chatbot use, and chatbot use deepens loneliness, creating a vicious cycle. The researchers compared it to a "digital painkiller." It makes you forget the pain for a while, but it does not treat the cause, and it creates dependency instead.
Kim Jin-seok, a philosophy professor at Inha University, described where this leads: "If AI surpasses humans even in reading emotions and forming connections, the status of human beings could fall to that of a pet dog." Beings who neither work nor communicate well, yet survive under the care of AI. Stephen Wolfram's prediction of "trillions of souls playing video games forever inside a box" is chilling precisely because of how plausible it has become.
4. Weakening Social Cohesion and the Risk of Community Collapse
In 2025, the WHO classified loneliness as a "public health crisis." The basis was research showing that prolonged social isolation poses health risks equivalent to smoking 15 cigarettes a day. The announcement also cited figures showing that one-sixth of the world's population experiences loneliness. It was the moment a personal emotional problem was translated into a structural social problem.
Multiple studies have already demonstrated that trust in others drops sharply in highly unequal societies. Artificial intelligence is pushing this inequality into a new dimension. In the words of Hashed CEO Kim Seo-jun, "The democratization of execution breeds an aristocracy of judgment." Within this structure, the benefits of AI concentrate among the few while exclusion spreads across the many. The digital divide, with the benefits of technology concentrated in certain countries and corporations, deepens mistrust between nations and between social classes.
Governments are trying to fill these cracks with technology. Under the banners of "smart cities" and "safe cities," they are building surveillance systems based on facial recognition and big data. But behind the justification of securing safety through technology lurks the risk of suppressing individual freedom and community autonomy. The stronger the surveillance, the more people shy away from candid conversation, and a community without candid conversation becomes nothing more than an empty shell.
The echo chamber effect created by AI recommendation algorithms also accelerates the breakdown of community. People living in the same city yet inhabiting entirely different information worlds: how can they discuss a shared agenda and make decisions together? The fragmentation of information is the fragmentation of society. As researchers warn, "The decline of face-to-face interaction erodes empathy and social awareness, while AI recommendation loops intensify polarization and misinformation."
If we surrender the bonds and empathy unique to human beings by falling into the efficiency trap that artificial intelligence has built, society will be reduced to a collection of fragmented individuals. Perhaps the most radical act of health is to look up from the screen, meet someone's eyes, and belong to each other.
Kim Kyung-jin
Attorney · Former Member of the National Assembly · AI Policy Researcher
© 2026 Kim Kyung-jin. All rights reserved.