The year 2026 has dawned. As the new year begins, we sat down for a "digital fortune reading" to open the year with data scientist Song Gil-young, whose vantage point is high. After a hiatus for various reasons, we reunited after two years. In the meantime, Song released the "Forecast of the Times" series, a long-breath preparation for what comes next.
After "the age of the nuclear individual" and "the naming society," the newly published "birth of a lightweight civilization" breaks through the turbulent era of AI technology with bold language. Song declared an age not of fast followers but of fast switchers.
With a big tech war and the chill of mass layoffs forecast, humanity, having just begun cohabiting with AI, is lowering its posture and catching its breath. As AI structuring repeats, how will the dynamics between embodied humans and artificial intelligence unfold?
Is AI my secretary? Or am I AI's agent? How will the "AI efficiency gospel" affect the efficacy of my job and life?
Song Gil-young, who has presented the next scene of a society through numerous statistics and indices, started shouting into a megaphone even before the cold winter arrived.
"A truly big hurricane is coming. It's coming for everyone with a livelihood."
Chills ran down my spine at the thought that, as in the movie "The Matrix," humans are destined to become AI's sensors and provide senses and knowledge. There was neither optimism nor pessimism in Song's assertion that AI will pass down almost everything from humans.
The message repeated in the interview was, "The world has changed, so do what you want to do right now." He added that jobs that meet people kindly and use the body delicately will not lose their value.
On a winter morning, in his new studio where sunlight shattered through the floor-to-ceiling windows, we had a long conversation. The serene, private dwellings were moderately bustling with young companions seeking to share wisdom and seasoned leaders. Here you can do tea ceremony and meditate, and at night you can see stars pouring down from a place close to the sky.
-What are you watching?
"Videos made with AI. Now commercial videos come out even without on-site staff. Director Kang Yoon-seok, who made "The Roundup" part 1, also made a movie called "Middle-earth" and released it in theaters. Humans did the acting and directing, and AI did most of the sets and creatures.
If you can't make money on tickets, it's right to cut costs. You can't touch actor fees, so they touched post-production. The days when it took five to 10 years to make one work after getting 20 billion to 30 billion won in funding are already gone. The production environment is becoming lightweight."
-Director debuts will speed up too.
"Now even middle schoolers can easily make movies. Teen directors have diverse styles and clear creative motives. The era when you had to spend more than 10 years as an on-site assistant director before getting your first directing job is over. The era when, if you wanted to be a TV producer, you first had to ace Korean, English and math and get into a good university is over. The old apprenticeship grammar and the high-education solution no longer work."
-How does a lightweight civilization change the value of corporations?
"In the era of heavy civilization, they dragged in all the people to build the Great Wall. Output was proportional to labor costs. Now lightness is competitiveness. Smart people prefer small corporations. If 10 people make 10 billion won, each can take 1 billion. There's no reason to join a big corporation and take one over n. As top performers prefer small corporations, investors also weigh scale.
Investors dislike large headcounts. In the past, they only asked about market cap. Now they ask about market cap per person. They compare whether it's 1 billion won per person or 200 billion won. Increasing revenue isn't something the CFO can do, so under pressure they choose to cut people."
-Automatically…
"Yes. Everything gets structured. They'll cut everything. The scary part is that it comes all at once. When it all hits at once, it's hard. The IMF crisis was hard because it came simultaneously. AI is sweeping away desk jobs. They're telling beneficiaries of higher education, simultaneously and all over, "Clean up your job," so everyone is startled.
On top of that, Korea has many last beneficiaries of seniority-based pay. How many people said they were chilled watching the drama "The story of Director General Kim who lives in Seoul and works at a big corporation." Even if someone looks like a respectable big-corporation Director General to others, that person was standing on a knife's edge."
-The stories of two unemployed breadwinners set social media ablaze. Lee Byung-hun in the movie "No Choice" and Ryu Seung-ryong in the drama "The story of Director General Kim who lives in Seoul and works at a big corporation"... In the end, Lee walks alone through an automated factory, and Ryu lives a different life through a great transformation of relationships and work. They felt like simulations of a future that will soon arrive for me.
"Right. It's unavoidable that Director General Kim, who lives in Seoul and works at a big corporation, quits the company. Increasingly, interrelationships are being replaced by functions. In the past, even if the older guy next door was a bit lacking, we included him as the odd man out. We acknowledged the weak link and embraced it. Now everyone has to be a hexagon. Social pressure is intensifying to raise everything—looks, personality, self-management, culture.
In the past, the group's achievement took priority over mine, so whether you were good or bad, if you were part of a good group, you were similarly rewarded. It was a structure mixing Adam Smith's division of labor and Max Weber's bureaucracy. Things were papered over with stuff like open recruitment classes and rotational assignments. But with the rise of the nuclear individual who says "I decide my fate," and then suddenly AI, the value system is changing."
An era when a one-person unicorn makes 1 trillion won. In an era when "augmented individuals" soar, like Son Ogong plucking his hair to make clones, can we really continue a system where we held each other up and endured?
-Executives and rank-and-file alike, we are all experiencing vulnerable homeostasis. Life feels too precarious and fragile.
"An executive at a big corporation said to me during a lecture: things were fine until last year, but starting this year he's slowly begun to resent his team. 'I can't even have them work as I want, and we don't build affection over drinks, so does the company really need to nurture people? At a time when the influence of large groups is plummeting…' Executives and employees alike feel the intensity. They say we need a different way."
-In any case, in the drama, Director General Kim tries to hold on to the end.
"Koreans can't stand having their pay cut when they switch. If you try to move laterally on the same pay you were getting, you have no choices. You need to simplify your life and rebuild your portfolio, but you're not prepared.
Because you've expanded the race at every life stage. Even among Director Generals, one living in a Banpo apartment, another in an older apartment—if you keep lining them up, it's stranger not to become unhappy. So get out of that race quickly and move to a universe with different gravity."
Academic pedigree, rank, titles… lighten the various weights on your body, go fast, go simple. The broadcasting station Director General who used to stiffen his neck, and the youth who stayed up all night to prepare for exams and stack credentials to get into that station, will now compete on equal terms in the YouTube universe.
-Back in 2023 during COVID, you also said 2025 had been yanked forward. That digital transformation suddenly happened. It feels like the future that arrived early is grabbing us by the scruff and dragging us.
"Amazingly, two coincidences overlapped. The GPU made by Jensen Huang is a graphics card for games, but it was a lightning-fast computation engine. With the technology prepared first, COVID suddenly set off digital acceleration, and demand for data and computation exploded. As those two events met, AI leapt into everyday life in an instant.
Like an asteroid one day striking Earth and causing environmental change that wiped out the dinosaurs, AI suddenly changed our lives. In a way, it's incredibly lucky. For the moment, we have an environment where we can avoid labor."
-I'm not sure yet whether that's lucky or unlucky.
"Nikola Tesla said in 1935: 'In Roman times slaves did the labor, so citizens lived elegantly. Within the next 100 years AI or robots will emerge to ease human toil, so try something a bit splendid then.' He prophesied that in 1935, and 90 years later AI really did arrive.
Then, can we live elegantly as he said? Become a minstrel, or a climber. The problem is that while that's a good future for humanity, we don't know if it's my future. We've gone to work every day, rubbed shoulders with colleagues, paid our apartment mortgages, and lived our lives—then at some point, if they say 'Humanity will be splendid, so let's eliminate your job,' you can't help but fall into shock.
How will we make a living and sustain life through that transition? Given the situation, for anyone with a livelihood, the advice is unconditionally 'collaborate with AI.' Get through the lean season well."
-Say an elderly person running a small neighborhood restaurant—should they also get along with AI?
"Of course. If the restaurant next door uses a payment kiosk and I don't, my labor costs rise and so do food prices. If the cafe next door uses a robot to make coffee and I don't, I lose in coffee price competition. Such things will happen everywhere. These days, when clients commission translators, they're told to just use AI. But the responsibility is yours. They're told to be an AI agent. Office workers in their 50s who say, 'My job isn't easy' or 'I'll retire soon so it's fine,' also need to get a grip.
Not long ago I went to New York to give a lecture and took an Uber; we went barely 5 km and I paid $70 plus tip. Inflation is that severe. With low births and low growth and even the won's value uncertain, it's hard to cover the next 50 years with current assets. Productive capacity must be maintained. So this time you really must change."
-Even if AI boosts productivity, if human consumers lack purchasing power, I wonder whether an AI efficiency system is sustainable.
"That's a later issue. Even if you warn corporations that 'cutting people will hurt you,' that's for society to solve. You have to fight the Walmart next door right now and face revenue pressure from shareholders, so you can't avoid cuts. In the end, layoffs will hit across the board. Finance has been cutting headcount for more than five years.
Amazon, after structuring office labor with AI, announced it would cut about 30,000 people. Internal documents say they are pursuing automation with a goal of up to 600,000 cuts by 2030. That's 600,000 people laid off.
Corporations and humans alike make selfish choices—for immediate survival. Of course, decision-making in the public sector looks farther ahead, but most of the economic system is built in the private sector. If they can't cut here, they cross borders. They say they'll run corporations in another country. If you don't seize opportunities during a transition, you can plummet in an instant."
-The historian Neil Howe predicted that the current turmoil and crisis, which began with the financial crisis and deepened with COVID and AI, will end around 2035. He cited a historical pattern that has repeated every 100 years. If Generation X plays the adults this winter season with their distinctive survival sense, then Millennials and Gen Z will reboot spring with a healthier social system.
"Generational role theory is certainly interesting. But the singular point now, unlike the past, is that young people are always amped up because of AI and smartphones and can't tolerate boredom at all. In any case, I don't view today's confusion negatively."
-A time of dismantling is also a time of creative destruction.
"Right. Going through the IMF crisis, the next generation learned that big corporations aren't safe. That's why tech startups like Naver and Daum emerged. When there's a paradigm shift, new opportunities always arise. What I keep saying is that the era of lightweight civilization is good for unfolding dreams.
According to Sequoia Capital, which has invested in successful tech corporations, hot startups these days refuse funding. If five people are making money, even if revenue grows, they don't scale up; five people run it. In the past, you took investment, scaled, and sold high and exited, but now you don't sell.
'If it makes money and it's fun, why sell?'… The root of that attitude is family corporations that have lasted for centuries, like Goldman Sachs and Rothschild. I started it, I can sustain it, and if I don't scale recklessly, I can keep going… Young people are dreaming like this now."
-Is it important not to overreach?
"Yes. People who made money from virtual currency always buy buildings, they say. Because you never know when the bubble will pop. The more you do what you don't want or what makes you anxious, the more you crave and the more you overreach. Conversely, if you do what you want to do, that alone has beautiful sustainability. You feel contentment without overreaching."
He said that to catch the enjoyable vibe of a lightweight civilization, keep trying AI collaboration starting now.
-In the book, you liken diligent intelligence and massive intelligence to light-footed running and folding the earth. What do you mean?
"Diligent intelligence is the 'light-footed running' that helps with 'hard-to-do things' and runs fast, while massive intelligence is the 'earth-folding run' that makes 'impossible things' possible. Diligent intelligence shortens time, and massive intelligence finds patterns in countless data to deliver insights we didn't know.
The real question is this. Humans who became smart slowly over a long time—how should they divide work with AI that evolves in real time? Should we use AI as diligent intelligence, or also as massive intelligence… it's all possible. You can make it do everything humans dislike or find tedious, but I actually think it's right to give AI somewhat difficult tasks.
For example, DeepMind founder Demis Hassabis won the Nobel Prize in chemistry. Chemists struggled for 50 years to reveal the protein structures of the human body, but through the DeepMind team's research, more than 90% were revealed in a few years. Massive intelligence solved a grand challenge at once.
To collaborate well with AI, you need persistence and wisdom enough to assign it hard tasks. That's why geniuses can do more with AI now. Oppenheimer was a genius physicist, but in his time, with that brain, he had to focus on making the atomic bomb. Today's geniuses can multi-task with AI.
Like simultaneous exhibitions in Go where you play many opponents at once. Then humanity will advance by leaps and bounds. Will ordinary people despair at such augmented geniuses? No. For example, if such a genius comes to biotech and is at "another level," I can just find what I want to do more. Cooking, or bonsai."
-It's certainly an era of fast switchers, not fast followers.
"Yes. The bio-pharma industry is on fire. We're revealing protein structures and shortening clinical processes… Thanks to AI, there's much more we can do. Geniuses are heading into bio. If we uncover protein denaturation, we can conquer even Alzheimer's and Parkinson's."
-On the other hand, I find solace these days in the human classical language that has flowed like water, which the computational language of AI can never reach. If "AI will do everything anyway," I worry that the vivid, imperfect "attempts" only humans with bodies and minds can enjoy—the time of trial-and-error and accumulation—might all disappear… What should we do about training, narrative and enlightenment? Is a human who skips failure truly human?
"What I'm wary of is the 'myth of hard work.' AI transcends physiological limits. So if you compete with AI at anything, you'll burn out. Even if you win, you'll be out of breath. So I advise skipping 'trial and error' and, from the start, finding fields where you can succeed and that you want to do, and dreaming big.
You asked whether a human who doesn't fail is human—everyone will fail. But fail while doing something close to your dream. Since AI will do whatever makes money anyway, you can start untried things, bigger things, a journey into the unknown."
I agreed in my head, but unwilling to let go of the handle of "human-ness," I grasped at straws and brought up the "Tao Te Ching" again.
-Large language models complete our sentences, but the "Tao Te Ching" teaches how to leave sentences incomplete. It says more knowledge only leads to narrower paths, so stay empty and open. It's a stark contrast to AI's omniscient, omnipotent stance.
"Great sages of the past spoke in metaphors about what they saw far ahead. Some of their vessels are large, and they survived a long time, so their inner power is tremendous. You can draw inspiration and comfort from such sentences. But language is what machines do best. The time to structure thought is so short now it leaves you dumbfounded.
Some professor raged at students, venting anger—if you leave thinking and writing to ChatGPT, what will you do going forward? But if you have a car, is it right to leave it in the yard and run? In the end, you have to run and drive. You have to run marathons and do car chases."
-A future where everyone has outstanding intelligence in hand is equal but more cutthroat.
"Look around these days—everyone's on another level and everyone's a golden child. It's the story of students who ace every subject. Smart people also have fashion sense and strong social sense. So in an era of generalized intelligence and lightweight collaboration, you only need to remember one standard. The age of living as tools of production is over, so spend time doing what you want. Don't waste time chasing credentialism—find the field where you become excellent."
He said not to worry about teens augmented by AI. The cost of transition will be larger and more painful for the older generation. Since the "age of mass employment" is over anyway, I nodded at his suggestion to regroup our lives while we're down. "Don't force it. Scatter happily to places that match the dreams each of you wanted."
-Jeremy Rifkin said in an interview that "in the age of resilience, our ecological selves scatter in their own patterns." He said to "take steps of adaptability to the choreography of time." Before AI, it read as a metaphor for the "great resignation," but now I understand it as footwork for the "age of mass layoffs." "We meet now, we meet briefly, we meet again." I saw hope in the catchphrase of meetings in the age of lightweight civilization.
"That's right. People will feel it now. The era of warm organizations that teach and embrace you is over. The pattern is that we meet right now, work together on a project for three weeks, and part. If you're not kind and not excellent, you're expelled from the industry pool. With Blind and reputations so dense, if you forget consideration and fear, you're naturally weeded out.
Remember: "we meet now, we meet briefly, we meet again." Command, oppression and force don't maintain the viscosity of relationships. The generalization of intelligence and the lightening of collaboration are inevitably inducing fair and courteous individuals."
-It seems a lightweight civilization also deepens the layers of truth, goodness and beauty. The part about competition becoming beauty versus beauty, not beauty versus ugliness, was fresh.
"These days, most cosmetic containers look pretty, right? With AI-trained design, everything is cool and sophisticated now. When pretty fights pretty, the not-pretty fails. When pretty becomes the average, we start weighing narrative. We ask, 'What kind of life have you lived, CEO?' Since individuals can whip up results, they're asked for the ingredients of the results, the ethics of their lives, and even the beauty of their expression."
-Attractiveness will differ depending on the combination of truth, goodness and beauty.
"The blending of truth, goodness and beauty is the character. The truly scary thing is that now, if what humans do lacks charm, it can't even prove value. Consumers judge the charm of the cafe owner who pours drip coffee. The taste is basic; they also appreciate and evaluate the banter, manners and clothes. Consumers buy that person's charm. The moment you give up your own discernment and charm because it's hard, AI arrives."
In the end, he said, only if I love the work and the other party feels that vibe will that job be sustained.
-Not long ago I saw a stand-up comedy show in Yeonnam-dong. People with disabilities, incurable diseases, high academic pedigrees, pregnant women and sexual minorities—various people came on stage for six minutes to crack jokes and stepped down. From a Seoul National University professor to a lesbian office worker… When they threw out jokes about their real joys and sorrows, the satire pierced to the core and the place erupted in laughter. It looked like a signal of "lightweight civilization." People lightening their identities to enjoy freedom, a scene where light, countless stories drift for six minutes… it was marvelous.
"People with 'lightweight identities' don't crave recognition from an unspecified mass. They define their targets of recognition themselves. Not a big market, but a small one. Novelist Won So-yoon also graduated from Seoul National and does stand-up. I see this as efficient.
Publicly recruited comedians are selected by limiting the market pie. If too many applicants flock, they can't treat them well, so they raise entry barriers. But if the barrier is too high, many can't even try and have their wings clipped. After a lifetime doing something off-base without ever spreading their wings, they say, 'I wasn't meant to do this.' Don't do that—do what you want to do now. Don't regret it later."
-What should we say when children ask about the future?
"Say you don't know. A better answer is, 'Shall we find out together? Shall we learn?' What's clear is that jobs that kindly meet people and use the body delicately will thrive even in the age of AI and robots. If your current job disappears, a new one will surely come."
-Should CEOs be reborn as chief entertainment officers?
"Smart people don't get intimidated by 'being intimidated.' Nor do they overdo it. A leader who encourages joyfully is best."
-Finally, in what direction will individual growth continue?
"Even as technology improved, humanity kept going its way. Just as modern art deepened after Impressionism and abstract art. In any situation, humans will seek meaning. For survival and self-respect, we always try to find ideals and trade-offs beyond limits. In that process, we need to get along well with AI colleagues, but also with human colleagues.
While getting along with AI, we also have to prove at the same time that we are not AI. These days, to be recognized by human colleagues, people have begun to upload their work processes live. Musicians upload all of their struggle. At concerts, plays, musicals and book talks, what people want to see isn't only the performance. They want to join in and applaud the process of finishing the work. Live and support cultures will accompany the growth of you, a human."
As geniuses team up with massive intelligence to solve humanity's grand challenges, and ordinary people leave work to diligent intelligence and pursue tastes and dreams, will the AI utopia Song Gil-young speaks of come to pass?
Meanwhile, MIT economist Daron Acemoglu, who won the 2024 Nobel Prize in economics, said "AI's impact may be far smaller than the industry predicts," projecting that only 5% of jobs will be replaced by AI over the next 10 years.