Don't Be Devil Genie(The Fairy of the Lamp)
The latest technologies — so-called AI, big data, systems, solutions, platforms — are all starting to look alike, like cosmetic-surgery beauties. Whether you go to a finance service, a travel service, a content service, or a portal service, each and every one rolls out an "intelligent service" optimized to the user via big data.
Oh my god — let's not try to become an omniscient, omnipotent system ourselves. A service should be a service.
The reason Venerable Pomnyun's Q&A is praised isn't only because in this age where speed is everything, he gives an answer the moment you ask. It's that he listens carefully to someone's worry all the way through, and delivers his view on that worry with care using analogies that resonate with others with similar worries. That's probably why the program is called not "instant question, instant answer" but "instant question, instant sermon".
One more thing — most of the "omniscient, omnipotent" people in each field (wealth, fame, talent): high-ranking officials, politicians, famous celebrities, the 2nd and 3rd generations of chaebol families — most of them are actually prone to various kinds of forgetfulness. Of course, systems haven't quite gotten there yet, but I hope the people who build and operate those systems don't fall into the same forgetfulness.
Fear of Freedom
Offering a wide variety of content or experiences actually makes users unable to do anything. For data like books, photos, and music — when quantity grows without a system to organize it, choice becomes not an abundant benefit but suffering from choice paralysis.
Of course, most beginnings start from the point where even owning a single thing was hard. Nothing is as grueling as making 1 from 0. But once one and two gather, and as those ones and twos pile up, you start pursuing quality over quantity, and once even quality things start to saturate, the basic requirement starts to become: having the right thing delivered to you, at the right timing, without so much as a twitch. Of course, it doesn't stop there. The opposite of the early scramble to go from 0 to 1 — now the trend is to reject ownership and to only stream and browse when needed, or to share what you own with the outside.In the end, what we pay for is not the content itself but time. Dwelling. In that virtual space.
This flow isn't limited to the cutting-edge tech fields or latest product categories like big data and AI — I suspect it's similar in the ordinary daily lives of individuals too. If we don't lower the complexity of the complex — of technologies, contents, or personal knowledge and experiences — we have to either throw away what we fought so hard to gain, or give up on our own the very possibility of gaining more.
When too many things are just there, uncurated, you don't know what to pull out among all of them, so you end up unable to do anything at all.
