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Opinion

Columnists

Can the self survive augmented intelligence?

By AI, I actually mean augmented intelligence, not artificial intelligence. And by augmented intelligence, I mean technology that will allow us to do what we do faster, more, higher, stronger, etc. In short, AI doesn’t replace the human; it makes us better in every way. While this seems less threatening than artificial intelligence with its PR baggage of Skynet and Terminators, HAL9000 and Dave, etc., augmented intelligence may be more of a threat to what it means to be a human being because it can fundamentally redefine how we define ourselves. Arati Prabhakar, the former director of DARPA,...

2017-08-04 17:50

Elon Musk's AI challenge

So, Elon Musk wants us to start thinking about how to regulate artificial intelligence. Speaking at the National Governors Association Summer Meeting on Rhode Island, Musk suggested that the gubernatorial assembly start thinking about putting in regulations to prevent artificial intelligence from wiping out humanity. Huh. A push for proactive regulation coming from the world’s most famous serial entrepreneur is somewhat disorienting. You would think that an entrepreneur would want the government to get out of the way, rather than get in the way on purpose.

2017-07-21 17:21

Gaya to nowhere

Recently, President Moon expressed his explicit wish that the fresh articulation of Gayan history across the whole swath of Korea’s southern coast would facilitate the easing of the current regional animosity between South Korea’s southeastern and southwestern regions. Moon basically wants to use the history of this ancient Korean kingdom to create an alternate, common cultural identity that could overcome the seemingly intractable emotional and political separation between the two regions.

2017-06-23 16:11

Human immune system as cybersecurity

Cyberattacks and response patterns have become painfully obvious in the last few years. There is some type of an advanced persistent threat (APT) lurking in a system, siphoning off important information that includes personally identifiable information (PII) or financial information such as credit card passwords. Or there is a new exploit that suddenly becomes visible with the potential to create catastrophic damage across countless systems around the world.

2017-06-09 17:10

Articulating gay-ness in Korea

Back in the late 1990s when I spent a few years working at an English language institute in Seoul, something that almost seems like a rite of passage for Korean Americans, there were no gays in Korea even though I saw them everywhere. Let me explain. Having grown up in New York City, seeing gay people, especially gay men, was not an especially surprising event for me. However, when I first saw a gay man in Korea, it almost seemed as if he didn’t realize that he was gay. While I admit that you can’t judge a person by his or her cover, my “gay-dar” was pretty tuned and it was very quickly obvi...

2017-04-28 17:29

We beat the competition. Not you.

The image is that of a sparkling Southwest Airlines plane flying through the gorgeous sky. Underneath, the copy says, “We beat the competition. Not you.” Funny. And pretty brutal. This was only one of the countless mock advertising memes that popped up on social media platforms in the aftermath of the disastrous action by the United Airlines in forcibly yanking the Vietnamese American doctor from its flight from Chicago to Louisville. By now, everyone knows what happened, so I won’t recount what happened. Suffice it to say that it was pretty disturbing. And with the times being what they are...

2017-04-14 17:11

Become a certified 4th industrial revolutionary

Everything is certified these days. From used cars, massages and organic foods to program management and cyber security, certification is a ubiquitous and somewhat mysterious term that denotes a certain level of quality, authenticity, truthfulness, expertise, and everything good about the product or person. In fact, there are certifications that certify other certification processes so as to certify their capability to certify things in a certifiable way. It’s certifiably crazy sometimes. Granted, certification is oftentimes useful way for potential consumers to lessen their chances of buyin...

2017-03-31 16:48

Overcoming Korea's founder's syndrome

Many organizations experience the founder’s syndrome, in which a charismatic founder establishes a successful company on the power of his personality but ultimately becomes an impediment to the growth of the organization because of his need to remain in absolute control or misuse of the organization for personal gain. Most often, accountability and transparency are subverted by the founder himself through the use of nepotism, abusive leadership, and demands for personal loyalty that rivals those reserved for religious cults. Unless the founder’s syndrome can be overcome, it will prove to be ...

2017-03-17 16:58

What's tomorrow's critical infrastructure?

Back in 2001, I visited China to go to Mount Baekdu, which sits along the border between northeastern China and North Korea and is considered the mythical birthplace of the Korean nation. Its place in the Korean creation myth is so important that Kim Jong-il’s official bio claims that he was born on the mountain, although Soviet records say that he was really born in the village of Vyatskoye, near Khabarovsk in Russia. In any case, I actually wanted to talk about getting on a bus in Jilin to ride for four hours along a brand new highway to reach Mount Baekdu. While the highway was new, every...

2017-03-03 16:39

North Korea's `Game of Thrones'

A few months ago, I wrote about two widespread cognitive biases about North Korea that tend to mislead us when making policy decisions about North Korea. One, that North Korea is a one-party, socialist dictatorship like the former Soviet Union or today’s China, with internal decision-making dynamics similar to what we see in those systems. Wrong. North Korea is still essentially a monarchy with hereditary kings who rule in conjunction with a tight-knit group of elites mostly interrelated by blood and whose original elite stature was given through their forefathers’ participation in the origi...

2017-02-17 17:17

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