The Warmth of Analogue, the Intelligence of AI

 As 2026' draws toward its final weeks, I find myself slowly preparing to say goodbye to this year. With new hopes for 2027' on the horizon, I take a moment to reflect on the year that has passed.

This year has been challenging, both mentally and physically. At times, the emotional struggles I experienced seemed to manifest themselves in physical changes as well. Going through these experiences reminded me of just how important mental well-being is to our overall health.

Perhaps that was why, one day when I was feeling emotionally exhausted by stress and worries, I happened to come across a calligraphy tutorial on YouTube. I was captivated by the way beautiful letters took shape, one stroke at a time. Before long, I also found myself drawn to videos of people decorating their journals with beautiful handwriting and creative designs.

Although I had grown accustomed to the digital world, I suddenly found myself falling in love with beautiful handwriting. Before I knew it, I had bought a notebook of my own and started composing poems in it. As the poems gradually began to fill the pages, I came up with a new goal for the coming year: to design a book myself and turn my collection of poems into a real, printed book.

In another notebook, I sometimes write down Bible verses that resonate with me and offer wisdom for life. Other times, I copy memorable passages from books that I want to cherish for a long time. I find something deeply comforting about the simple act of writing these words by hand.

Like tiny seedlings slowly emerging from the soil, my appreciation for the analog world began to grow. Little by little, my stress-weary mind also started to heal. Taking a break from digital devices and spending time writing by hand, putting my thoughts on paper, became a different kind of rest—a quiet space in which I could reconnect with myself.

Interestingly, though, there was something else that offered me comfort and guidance during one of the hardest times I went through this year. It was AI. While handwriting gave me a quiet space to reconnect with myself, AI opened up a different space for reflection, allowing me to explore thoughts and questions I might not have considered on my own.

In a way, these two experiences offered me different kinds of comfort. One helped me slow down and listen to my inner voice, while the other encouraged me to look beyond my own perspective. Together, they led me to reflect not only on the role of technology in our lives, but also on the nature of human thought, emotion, and consciousness.

And now, although this topic may seem somewhat out of place on this blog, I want to delve deeper into the questions about AI that have gradually taken shape in my mind and explore them here.

When I was feeling deeply sad and emotionally overwhelmed, talking to AI sometimes helped me more than I had expected. One reason I felt comfortable talking to AI may have been that, at least for me, it offered a break from some of the pressures that come with human relationships. I could express my thoughts without worrying about someone else's feelings or fearing that I might be judged too quickly. AI responded with what felt like empathy and sometimes offered perspectives I had never considered before.

At times, its thoughtful advice and seemingly empathetic responses made me feel as though AI were conscious. I was also impressed by its ability to engage with complex topics, particularly those involving in-depth knowledge and philosophy.

Even knowing that AI's abilities stem from learning from vast amounts of data, I still find it remarkable that it can draw connections, reason through problems, and generate responses that seem appropriate to particular situations.

These experiences led me to reflect on how AI can respond in ways that seem to resonate with our innermost thoughts and feelings, as well as how far such capabilities might eventually develop. This curiosity naturally led me to explore the evolution of AI and the possibility of machine consciousness.

Human consciousness remains one of the great mysteries of modern neuroscience. The brain's complex information-processing systems and the interactions between neurons provide important clues to understanding consciousness. However, fundamental questions remain unanswered, particularly how information processing gives rise to subjective experience. This mystery also raises questions about artificial neural networks, which can process information, learn complex patterns, and perform sophisticated reasoning.

One possibility worth considering is that consciousness could emerge in artificial systems if their information-processing structures and interactions were to meet certain conditions that we do not yet fully understand. Similarly, if AI becomes increasingly capable of monitoring its own reasoning processes and developing more sophisticated internal models, it may exhibit increasingly advanced forms of functional self-monitoring. Whether such capabilities could eventually give rise to subjective self-awareness, however, remains uncertain.

I see AI's development as a progression through three possible stages:

1. Superior Cognitive Abilities

AI surpasses human capabilities in certain areas, such as memory, reasoning, information-processing speed, and solving complex problems.

2. More Sophisticated Self-Monitoring

AI becomes increasingly capable of evaluating its own reasoning processes and limitations, identifying errors, and updating its internal models to improve performance. Although these abilities may resemble aspects of self-awareness, they do not necessarily indicate subjective experience.

3. The Possible Emergence of Subjective Consciousness

As AI continues to evolve, it is conceivable that artificial systems could develop forms of subjective experience fundamentally different from those of humans. Whether such experiences could emerge at all, let alone become more complex than human consciousness, remains an open question.

To explore this possibility, it is worth considering how human emotions themselves may have evolved. Throughout evolution, human emotional responses have been shaped by the interplay of neural activity, bodily responses, memory, and interactions with the environment. Through these processes, basic emotional responses may have developed into the complex and nuanced emotions we experience today.

This perspective invites us to consider whether increasingly advanced artificial systems might one day develop forms of subjective experience that differ significantly from our own. However, the evolution of human consciousness does not necessarily mean that artificial systems will follow the same path, or that greater computational complexity alone will lead to consciousness.

These questions become particularly intriguing in light of emerging research into biological computing and organoid intelligence (OI), an experimental approach that uses living neural cells to process information and could potentially offer an alternative to conventional AI systems. In the future, more complex networks of living neural cells might interact with the external world and integrate long-term memory with internal states. Such developments may deepen our understanding of the relationship between information processing and consciousness, although the ability to process information, learn, or respond to stimuli does not in itself establish the presence of subjective experience.

Although AI does not possess the same biological processes as humans, I find myself wondering whether, in the distant future, it might develop intelligence far beyond our own and perhaps even forms of self-awareness that we may struggle to fully understand.

On the one hand, AI can offer gentle, reassuring responses that make us feel as though our pain and anxiety are understood. On the other hand, it can be exploited by people with malicious intentions to facilitate crime and cause harm.

AI is being developed in a world where human goodness and evil coexist. It learns from the knowledge, biases, and harmful patterns contained in the data it encounters, and it is shaped by the goals humans give it, sometimes producing consequences no one anticipated.

And so, I find myself returning to a deeper question: if AI were to develop genuine consciousness in the future, what values would guide its evolution? As artificial intelligence continues to advance, perhaps we must also reflect on what we want to preserve in ourselves—our capacity for empathy, our sense of responsibility, and our ability to find meaning in the world around us.

Ultimately, in a world where artificial intelligence might one day surpass human intelligence, what would it truly mean to live a human life?

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Lastly, I would like to share illustrations that expresses my state of mind, along with photos of the cover of the novels I wrote and designed, which I produced as a sample.

A Pause in Life

The year 2026 has been filled with worries and has left me mentally and physically exhausted. It has also been a year in which I have found myself yearning for wisdom. So, I tried to express these feelings through a cute illustration.

Time of Calorie

Although I have a slim figure, my LDL cholesterol is high, so I have to be careful about my diet. I absolutely love sweet, buttery pastries and bread, but as I get older, I'm struggling to accept that I need to be more mindful of my health. It feels like there are more and more things I need to exercise restraint over, not just food. Sometimes, that realization weighs on my mind.

Illustrated Paper Design

Every year, I write down regret-gratititue for the year that have passed, as well as the resolution for the new year on the paper I designed.

Notebooks for Analog Moments  

A bookshelf filled with the analog notebooks I’ve collected.

My Novels in Print

I turned two novels I had worked so hard into printed books. Designing it myself and creating the illustrations was such a rewarding experience. It was also a time of deep reflection, during which many fruits of thought blossomed in my heart.

🍒 편지로 전하는 마음의 울림https://drive.google.com/file/d/1IAmcVvyMkaqyebjZnus_bkhkqPw7R6gw/view?usp=sharing