[Review] Writer Jang Kang-myeong

Among the books I’ve read recently, this is the one that made me think the most. The depth of its ideas was so vast and so vivid that it kept circling in my head long after I finished reading it.

Jang Kang-myeong’s A Future That Came First begins with a story about go, but it is not a book about go. Through one event that most clearly shows how AI is encroaching on the areas once considered uniquely human, this book forces us to confront the raw face of the future we are facing.

I don’t know how to play go at all. At most, I only know it as a game where black and white stones are placed alternately. Even so, the shock this book delivered was incredibly vivid. Perhaps because I’m unfamiliar with the world of go, the unfamiliarity made the impact even stronger.

We often accept technological progress as something that “helps” us. But the people in this book say that technology suddenly changed the entire world they had lived in. The world of go, with its long history and tradition, was rebuilt in just a few days after the appearance of AlphaGo.

The author visited the go world in person to report on it, and through interviews with 30 professional players and 6 experts, he calmly recorded their confusion, disruption, acceptance, resignation, and new attitude toward learning. The shock of technology brought not just change, but the collapse and redesign of a worldview.

An era in which existing values and authority are collapsing and a new order is taking over. Jang Kang-myeong describes this not simply as innovation, but as a redesign of values. He asks: Are humans creative beings? Or can creativity itself be implemented within the scope of an algorithm? What must we prove in order to be human?

The medical field is no exception. As mentioned several times in the book, AI has already entered various points in medical settings. Until now, I had thought of myself as someone who would become a doctor who “uses AI well.” But while reading this book, I found myself thinking that a future in which I become an assistant to AI may actually be more realistic. Not the person making the final decision in front of the patient, but someone whose role is to review and adjust the judgments AI has made.

A Future That Came First goes beyond the field of go and lays out, in advance, the questions that our entire society will soon face. More important than the introduction of technology is reflection on how that technology changes human life. The shock the go world experienced may well be a preview of the tomorrow that education, medicine, art, and journalism will soon confront.

“AI did not destroy go; we just realized too late that we were the ones being destroyed.” This sentence made me think a great deal. I want to quietly ask myself what is being broken, and what I want to hold on to in the midst of it.

A Future That Came First

Author
Jang Kang-myeong
Publisher
Dongasia
Release
2025.06.26.

It is like how mental arithmetic skills were treated after the appearance of portable electronic calculators

What happened in the go world from 2016 over several years will happen in many industries in the future

...There was no longer any reason to do joint research. The answers AI produced in a few minutes were far superior to what human players arrived at after debating for days.

There may have been a player who worked harder than me, but there probably was no player who studied more painfully than I did

From an answer in an interview with Shin Jin-seo, 9-dan, in response to a question about studying AI

The conflict structure after that is no longer “AI versus humans.” It becomes “experts using AI versus many other experts using AI in different ways versus older-generation experts who do not use AI.”

If there is a god of go, then in that god’s eyes, vague terms like decisive move and momentum would all look ridiculous. In a god’s eyes, there would be only the best move and the bad move.

From an interview with Seo Bong-soo, 9-dan

I also taught one lawyer for several years, but after AlphaGo, they quit, saying, “I can’t find any reason anymore to learn go from professional players.” ... Before AlphaGo, they had thought of go teachers as gods, but that illusion was shattered. They said they no longer even understood why they should learn go in the first place...

From an interview with Lee Da-hye, 5-dan

The intensity of human players’ labor depends on competition with other human players. ... We should not harbor the hope that some new technology will fundamentally improve the quality of life of human players.

The side using a new technology that the other side has not yet accepted may be able to relax for a while, but useful new technology soon spreads and becomes commonplace.

The idea that AI will free us from bothersome routine work and allow us to enjoy our leisure time in a refined way is not persuasive. The many new technologies that have emerged over the past 95 years have not been applied to our society in that way. From the outset, they were not even designed with that direction in mind.

Sports are an excellent material for storytelling, and in fact, this is the core of today’s professional sports industry.

If a singer’s skill is only good enough to satisfy the public, wouldn’t a more effective success strategy be to sign with a professional writer or a personal image consulting company and develop a personal backstory instead?

The cast members of Kick a Goal are far behind ordinary soccer players in skill. Still, viewers feel pleasure and gain energy from watching people they know make an effort.

From an interview with Lee Ho-seung, 3-dan

In other words, the go industry needs to transform into a fandom business.

What professional players will need in the future is not excellence, but “star power.”

In any industry, once it reaches a mature stage in a mathematical sense, competition among top participants over excellence becomes so fierce that even moving up one rank requires enormous time and effort. At that point, pursuing star power rather than excellence can be a good strategy. That is, if the goal is maximizing profit rather than the glory of being number one.

...Even for a novelist who is the type to focus only on writing, I think there is a need to make an effort to appear in public.

From an interview with Jo Han-seung, 9-dan

What is the fishing lure that Minumsa TV provides for free on YouTube? It is the staff’s personal stories. Personal stories from living people are also among the most popular content on YouTube and social media.

The grammar of YouTube and social media that people working in the content industry, including publishing, came to understand over several years in the late 2010s is: “Approach people personally.” Make users feel like they are your friends. Then they will open their wallets for you, their friend. What is the fastest way to become a pseudo-friend? Share personal stories. What’s in your bag, what mistake did you make when you were a new employee, what are you going to have for lunch today, and so on.

...What we need is the strength to endure loneliness. People who have the strength to endure loneliness grow and become healthier through it. People who do not know how to endure loneliness do not live a good life. In fact, to live a good life, a certain amount of loneliness is essential.

We must be wary of the nonsense that science and technology are value-neutral. Science and technology are powerful forces that exert influence not only over the material world, but also deep within the mental world.