The new technologies that appear every day can make us feel as though we have left the dry land of the analog world and been cast out onto the vast open sea of the digital one. Yet when we look at how humanity has dealt with the events brought about by technological progress, both yesterday and today, we can guess at what tomorrow may hold. After all, no matter how marvelous and unprecedented a technology may be, it is still we who handle it. With this book (4차혁명 표류기), I hope we can begin an enjoyable conversation, predicting where the Fourth Industrial Revolution will steer the direction of our lives.
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We are told this is the age of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, but it does not quite sink in.
It feels somehow insufficient to grandly invoke the word 'revolution' for terms and technologies we have already grown familiar with through TV and the internet. After all, we use 'smartphones' as a matter of course, and we ride Ttareungi (Seoul's public bike-share) to practice the 'sharing economy,' where things belong neither to you nor to me. We own little 'drones' that we fly when we are bored, but we doubt whether such crude drones can do anything more than serve as toys. We buy and sell cryptocurrency on exchanges as a form of investment, yet we have no idea what value the technology called 'blockchain' actually holds, or how much it might add to our bank accounts.
But how did these technologies and devices of the Fourth Industrial Revolution—the ones we experience only in fragments in our daily lives—come to be in the first place? And we grow curious about how these everyday experiences, as they accumulate, will shape our future lives. After all, we have only used these things as consumers of finished products and services; we have never really thought about how, specifically, these developments came about. That is why, somewhere in the back of everyone's mind, there has probably always lurked an anxiety—that I, unable to understand these technologies, might someday be left behind.
This book washes away the anxiety we have all carried. Rather than explaining the technologies of the Fourth Industrial Revolution in difficult, pedantic terms, it sheds light on the circumstances that gave rise to each one and on where they stand today, showing us what sense of direction we should adopt as we look ahead. The author—who develops home appliances rather than robots in order to keep the peace at home—offers a log of drifting through future technology that will serve as a fine guidebook for those of us floating aimlessly on the vast open sea of the Fourth Revolution.