Humanality, by Park Jeong-ryeol

It’s a book about people. But, as the saying goes, when you hold a hammer everything looks like a nail… there were many insights about AI architecture in it, so let me scrap the relevant parts.





The recent changes in the environment surrounding us are extraordinary, everyone agrees. Technological progress and the development of super-machines, dressed up in the word “future,” are actually robbing us of the stable, guaranteed present we have, and people are anxious. A new declaration of pessimism is rumbling everywhere — the idea that no matter how hard we try, the future is an area beyond our reach. So a single fruit in your hand right now is more prized than ten fruits over there. The very effort and concern about how robust our roots are ends up being a luxury.
# In the case of cells, research suggests that cancer and infection outcomes are due to the cell’s surrounding environment. For people, too — you become like the company you keep. AI as well, perhaps?!


p.6
“I wasn’t born into this world to become perfect. I just have to become marvelous through my own existence.”
I was born to be awesome, not perfect.
— novelist George Orwell


p.13
It’s about time we connect with ourselves attentively. Try shouting the sentence below out loud!
“Only what is inside me can move me!”



It is about detecting meaningful messages from experience and connecting these messages to create a useful meaning-system that can upgrade yourself and your organization.



p.321
Technical capability: cognitive, functional
Interpretive capability: receptivity (sensing), sense making
Technical capability is again split in two. One is the ability to govern and process abstract concepts — that is, information and knowledge — and the other is the ability to actually implement what you know in real action when needed. The former is called cognitive ability, the latter functional ability.
So technical capability is the ability to combine and apply what you know and use it properly when actually required. Cognitive and functional abilities, well integrated, is what we can call technical capability. This kind of technical capability is directly required to maintain a stable livelihood through a particular profession or job. Because knowledge and skills get updated, the process of recognizing new knowledge and skills and turning them into function must keep being updated as well.
Meanwhile, we also need the capability to construct a meaning-system about ourselves and the world from experience and, through it, respond to change as a subject. That is interpretive capability.
The fact that you have established a desirable relationship with the world through experience is evidence that you can also build constructive relationships with the new things that will appear. The more experience accumulates, the more you can objectify yourself and view things in balance within your relationships with others — meaning you can construct a meaning-system about the world.
And being able to build a meaning-system means you can independently propose a desirable direction for things that didn’t exist before and paths that haven’t been taken before.
This interpretive capability divides into two: receptivity (sensitivity) and sense making.
Receptivity is like a delicate antenna that takes in the complex and varied changes happening in the world.
That is, it is the ability to closely watch surrounding situations and identify and accept the experiences necessary for desirable change. Sense making is like an alchemist who creates and connects meaning even within complex and ambiguous situations. That is, it is the ability to find meaningful messages from experience and accumulate them into a meaning-system. Interpretive capability can be defined as the ability that emerges when receptivity and sense making are well integrated.


p.54
Listening to recent media stories, one gets the impression that the future will consist only of the corporate domains of data, analysis, and prediction. Can a company really exist on those functions alone? Can a digital that has alienated people really have life? Wouldn’t it just be high-tech, literally? The author argues that we are in a situation that requires a so-called “zero-point recalibration” of what we have been valuing. While reading this book, I felt how essentially important it is to balance our capabilities so that the fact (technology) does not become disconnected from the context (interpretation).

p.58
Performance = f(capability × opportunity × conditions)

p.76
The author proposes that the creativity this era demands should be sought, before “creativity,” in “originality.” To come up with something new, you need an individualized engine called authenticity, and that can only be obtained when you stand up as a subject who imparts meaning to the world yourself. Going forward, the work of unearthing and bringing forth a creativity that, in collaboration with AI, can add humanity’s unique value begins with the effort to verify and refine your originality, your own color. If you are blue, creativity is shown when you communicate with the world in blue, not yellow. So the author argues that you must find your own color, and organizations and leaders should not carelessly try to mix blue and yellow.
The moment you open the book, you encounter the meaningful messages the author throws at both individuals and organizations — about why we have been undervalued, and why it has actually been a good thing that we have not been considered “talent” up until now.

p.104

Technology is becoming smarter, but conversely there is a darkness hanging over us — that humans may be reduced to foolish humans. As the 4th Industrial Revolution and AI technology become active, the materials, information and knowledge that humans have accumulated through their intelligence are being replaced by AI in an instant.
Knowledge built on intelligence is no longer the human edge. We must now bid farewell to the era of issuing instructions with knowledge and open the era of conducting with wisdom. Because while artificial intelligence is possible, artificial wisdom is not.
To lead this kind of change, we need to develop the unique human abilities that cutting-edge technology and artificial intelligence cannot do, and reimagine the model of talent that will lead this turbulent era. With diverse experiential insights and a warm but sharp gaze on the world, the author exposes the limits and harms of dangerous techno-determinism that crosses the line. Rather than judging the world with the conceptual knowledge learned at a desk, he reveals the truth from the reality met with the body in the field, and seeks the new future our society should open in people.
There is one ability that artificial intelligence will never surpass humans in. It is the imagination, infinitely manifested through curiosity-based questioning. For this kind of imagination to manifest, the “receptivity” and “sense making” the author talks about are absolutely essential. Only when imagination is exercised on the basis of receptivity and sense making does it not fall into fantasy, illusion, delusion, or daydream. The two-horse carriage of receptivity — reading the world’s changes with a warm heart — and sense making — finding new meaning and capturing the direction of change with cool reason — is the lamp that will light the future of our society. When the road ahead feels unstable and what you do feels uncertain, don’t get caught by worry — pick up this book. It will pull our future, drifting in the vast ocean, toward a beautiful one.


p.140
The era of the 4th Industrial Revolution, represented by AI and data, has somehow become the present. Now, what should be the North Star for the direction of human-resources development? The concept of talent the author presents in the book throws a huge question mark over the talent-cultivation that companies, organizations, and schools have been carrying out. The environment and the targets have changed — have the cultivation direction and strategy changed accordingly?
Greater individualization and diversity, and the pursuit of meaning, learning, and growth are changes that can no longer be overlooked, and they have become the essential traits of the future talent pool. They are even digital natives. They can access high-quality information, knowledge, and even skill sets anytime, anywhere. The era when companies and organizations could decide what knowledge and skills were needed and provide them in programs tailored to their own taste is gone. Because no matter what everyone says, if meaning is not assigned by themselves, they don’t move. That is the essential reason we agree with the author’s point that autonomy, relatedness, and competence are what give us meaning. People to whom meaning has been assigned learn on their own and seek growth. They don’t avoid change but face it and willingly digest it. As that accumulates, the meaning-system the author talks about begins to take shape.
The very perspective on talent in this book is innovative. Based on “an essential understanding of people and organizations,” it reflects on the limits of the existing concept of talent. Let’s follow the author’s perspective. It will become much clearer what we should do first, in our families, schools, companies, and organizations, to help our children, students, and employees grow the seeds of talent.

p.141
The virtual self in social media has begun to wield a stronger presence than the real self, and the world where the hierarchy of the real and the virtual has been overturned has gone beyond science-fiction material to become reality. AI’s algorithms play go, compose music, and draw pictures with skills surpassing humans. As if mocking the precarious category of humanity that we have vaguely held in mind. While in the traditional world, copies imitated originals and the virtual reflected the real, now originals imitate copies and the real reflects the virtual. In this gloomy scenario, which sounds at a glance like the prologue of a dystopia, the existence of an individual is easily reduced to a substanceless shadow.
In the chaos where the existing worldview is being completely twisted and rearranged, this book examines how individuals can establish their own direction. The author’s analysis of the changing world is sharp and cool, but the solution he proposes is forward-leaning, and the advice he offers the reader is suffused with warmth and sincerity. He doesn’t miss the message of hope that, if you can question, interpret, and pioneer the meaning of life on your own, then a constantly changing world can become a stage and a playground of new possibilities. For those who refuse to disappear as part of the phenomenon, for those who want to explore a new reality that resonates with the new era, for those who want to be reborn as mature individuals who have built solid originality, this book will serve as a fine signpost.


p.143

Most humans live busily, but in the end die hollow without ever properly answering the question of who they truly are. He drives that point home, and offers the insight that to live properly, you must first know yourself.
The message of these ancient sages still holds. The more turbulent the times, especially as we enter periods of stagnation, the more we must turn our gaze from the outside to the inside, hold our center, and develop our own weapon. Many change experts and strategists agree without dispute that this is the essential survival strategy. Just as in old days as in today, observing oneself is regarded as an unchanging truth, but how to understand oneself seems to get harder as time goes on. Because we now try not so much to understand ourselves as living existences but to convert ourselves into data and to begin treating what the computer tells us, through that data, as ourselves.
What the computer shows about us may be a fact, but it may not be a truth. Truth allows access only when fact is attached to context. So a fact-based perception that excludes context has plenty of room for distortion. It can be dangerous. And in carrying out the survival strategy of “Know thyself,” we are in a state of holding a poisoned chalice. We are at the point where two enormous revolutions, the life sciences revolution and the information technology revolution, are converging.

p.145
We exist in this world as separate individuals, that is, as individuals. The English word “individual” literally means “that which can no longer be divided” — a unique whole distinguished from others. When we truly pay attention and try to touch ourselves, we discover, deep inside, our own clear and authentic voice. That is our true self, and from there come all the meaning and authority in the world. This kind of self forms a relationship with the world by giving meaning to what it has experienced.
To experience is to receive (sense) internal and external stimuli. And to give meaning to experience is to make sense of it (sense making). Experience itself is thoroughly neutral. So it can be turned into data. But giving meaning to experience cannot be turned into data, because the surrounding context is what bestows it. We pull experiences out of particular situations and use them to talk about, decide upon, and act on. At that moment the meaning-giving function operates, and because interpretation is involved, it is not neutral. So it varies wildly from individual to individual. Therefore it is hard to turn into data.
The unique aspect of each individual stands out exactly at the point where meaning is given to experience. Because it cannot be turned into data, this is precisely our pristine zone that super-machines cannot fundamentally enter. The very point where meaning is given and interpretation proceeds — the very place where “sense making” begins.
Allow me to introduce a major experiment that taught us why concepts like “experience,” “interpretation,” “sensing,” and “sense making” are essential when fundamentally examining the area unique to us, distinct from machines. It is Daniel Kahneman’s “colonoscopy felt-experience study,” for which he received the 2002 Nobel Prize in Economics.
Through this study, Kahneman revealed that when we are experiencing, we perceive moment by moment, but when we are interpreting an experience, we follow the “peak-end rule” and “duration neglect.” That is, if the experience is painful, while we are experiencing it we want it to pass as quickly as possible, but when we evaluate and interpret it, we remember only the peak of pain and the final moment, and assign meaning to the whole experience as the average of those two.


p.151
We identify ourselves not with raw experience but with the interpretation of that experience. Beyond sensing, we form our identity through sense making. When we say “I,” what we mean is not the physical collection of moment-by-moment experiences, but in the end the meanings we have given to those experiences. We identify ourselves with the meaning-system we have extracted from the changing and disorderly experiences of life. Seen this way, the question “Know thyself” can be rephrased as follows.
Know your own meaning-system.

p.273
The future
is led
not by “those who know first”
but by “those who realize deeply.”
— Richard Watson, «Future Minds»