Wherever I Am Is My Hometown

盡人事取天命 — do everything humanly possible, then accept heaven's will.

The sense needed by the one who expands the era of AI human liberation. If you ask why I am the right person to expand the era of AI human liberation, I can answer very simply. Because wherever I am is my hometown. I do not think of hometown only as a birthplace. The place I was born is certainly my root. But the place where I live, where I meet people and form relationships, where I find problems and solve them — that too is my hometown. When I am in Seoul, Seoul is the site of my life; when I am in Tokyo, Tokyo is the site of my life; when I am in New York, New York becomes the site of my life. Wherever I am, rather than thinking of it as a foreign country where I briefly stay, I tend to accept it as one world I am now responsible for living in. This difference is larger than it seems. There are many kinds of people who look at the world. Some place their own country at the center and look outward. Some want to move to a stronger country. Some go to open new markets. Some want to export what they have to other countries. But what I want is a little different. I do not want to conquer the world — I want to be a person who, wherever I am, can accept that place as my own problem. If a person living there spends three hours a day on meaningless repetitive work, that is not another country's inefficiency. If I am there, it is my problem. If a small business owner spends all day sending reservation texts, copying estimates over, repeating the same answers to customer inquiries — that too is not 'their people's' problem. If it is before my eyes, it is a problem I must solve. If in a factory a person is repeating what a machine should do, if in an office a person is spending their life moving data between programs, if a person of real ability is losing their time to administration and reports and approvals, my first thought is: why is a human doing this? The AI human liberation I have in mind begins here. --- For a long time we have measured human worth by how long a person works. How many hours did you work. How many documents did you process. How many calls did you take. How many reports did you write. How busily did you move. In industrial society that was reasonable to a degree. Raising output required more people working longer, and much of the work truly needed human hands. But with the arrival of AI this premise began to collapse. It can read documents. It can understand speech. It can analyze images and drawings. It can write programs. It can compare enormous amounts of data. It can answer the phone in a person's place, and manage schedules and orders and customer relationships. Then the question changes. We should no longer ask only, "How much of people's work will AI take?" We should ask the more fundamental question: «Was this ever work a human had to do in the first place?» I do not see humans escaping repetitive labor as the process of human worth disappearing. I see the opposite. I see it as the process of humans being released from inhuman work. The Industrial Revolution liberated human muscle through machines. The automobile reduced the need to walk great distances, the washing machine erased the hours of washing by hand, the calculator cut the time people spent on repetitive computation. No one says the washing machine erased human worth. We simply came to spend that time elsewhere. AI stands on that same line. Only this time the object is not muscle but a large share of cognitive labor — which makes the scale far greater. So I do not see today's change as the mere growth of an AI industry. I see it as the beginning of the era in which humans reclaim their own time. --- And precisely for that reason, this change needs people who cross borders. If AI is truly an instrument of human liberation, it cannot be the property of one nation. It is not only Americans who should escape repetitive labor. Not only Koreans who should gain more free time. The owner of a small shop in Japan, the manufacturing worker in Southeast Asia, the office worker in Europe, the young founder in Africa — all the same human beings. The time that must be returned to people has no nationality. But technology does not work by being plugged in anywhere as-is. This point matters. People are the same, but societies differ. Languages differ, payment methods differ, company cultures differ, labor relations differ, laws differ, and the way business owners relate to customers differs. Carrying Korea's system to Japan unchanged is not understanding Japanese life. Translating a SaaS that succeeded in America into Korean does not solve how Korean companies work. Real expansion is not replication. It is entering the place and understanding it anew. How do people work in that society? What do they find painful? Why can they not abandon the old way? Who loses from the change? Who becomes freer by using this technology? Which cultural grammar must not be touched? What should be changed and what should be kept? This must be learned in the field. So I believe engineers alone are not enough for the expansion of AI human liberation. People who can enter the lives of others are needed. --- I say that wherever I am is my hometown. This sentence does not mean I hold no attachment to any country. The opposite. It means I am not limited to loving one place — I can love the place where I live. Entering a society, rather than looking with an outsider's eye and asking, "Why do these people live like this?", I want to become a person who can gradually say, "Why do we work like this?" 'They' becoming 'we.' I believe this is a rather important quality in a person who would move the world. See people only as numbers and you see a market. See people as lives and you see a society. And when you begin to feel people's time as your own time, you see what must change. If there are a million people spending two hours a day on unnecessary administration, that is not a mere productivity loss. Two million hours of human life are vanishing every day. The technology that reduces that time is not a mere workflow-automation product. It is technology that returns part of life to people. This is exactly the standpoint from which I look at AI. --- So the company I want to build is also not simply a company that sells software. Observe what people do. Find the unnecessary repetition. Redesign the process. Hand over to machines what machines may do. And leave to humans what only humans can do. Judging. Forming relationships. Loving. Making new things. Following curiosity. Understanding people. Resting. Traveling. Spending time with a child. Having long conversations with a friend. Even spending a day producing nothing must be permitted to human beings. The purpose of higher productivity is not to make humans run faster. It is to create the time in which they may finally stop running. I call that human liberation. --- But to expand this to the world, one danger must be avoided: mistaking the answer you hold for the universal answer. Throughout history countless empires and companies and ideologies tried to carry their own order into other societies unchanged. In that process, local life often disappeared. So I believe that in speaking of human liberation one must simultaneously respect locality. We must not build another standardized prison under the name of liberation. AI making everyone work the same way is not human liberation. The opposite: once technology takes the repetitive work, the room for each to live in their own way must grow. Koreans as Koreans. Japanese as Japanese. A small village as that village. And one person as that person. So the final purpose of human liberation, as I see it, is not productivity itself. It is the freedom to live diversely. --- At this point the sentence "wherever I am is my hometown" becomes important again. Think of a place as hometown and your behavior changes. A traveler can leave when uncomfortable. An investor can pull capital when returns fall. A conqueror can take what he needs. But in a hometown you do not do that. When the road is wrong you try to fix it, when a shop fails you grieve a little, when people struggle you think about why. You come to want the place to do well. So I do not want to look at the world only as one giant market. I want to look at it as an ever-widening hometown. The place I live today is my hometown, and if tomorrow I meet people and begin work in a new place, that place too becomes my hometown. Not because I can earn money there. Because I can feel its problems as my own. --- I do not think of the expansion of the AI human-liberation era as a gift one nation gives the world. Nor do I think one country is the center and others the periphery. Technology will be made in many places. A model may be built in America, a new service may be built in Korea, a new robot may appear in Japan, a new manufacturing system may come out of China, and an entirely new form of company may be born in a city we have not yet noticed. What matters is not the origin. Does the technology actually make human life freer? That is the standard by which I want to see technology. Whether OpenAI, or Anthropic, or Google, or a model from some small lab — if needed, use it. And if not needed, change it. Technology is not the purpose. The human being is the purpose. --- So the reason I believe I fit the expansion of the AI human-liberation era is not that I am the most brilliant AI researcher. Not that I know every country. Not that I can predict the future perfectly. It is far simpler. Wherever I go, I can learn again. I can meet the people there, watch the work there, learn the language there, understand the problems there, and rebuild the system together with the people there. And the moment I begin to live that way, the place is no longer someone else's country. It becomes part of the world I must answer for. --- The era of AI human liberation will not begin by being declared one day. It will begin in countless small fields of work. The moment the owner of a small company no longer does the settlement she did every night. The moment the meaningless weekly report an employee wrote disappears. The moment a teacher gains time to talk with students instead of doing administration. The moment a doctor can look at the patient longer instead of the computer screen. The moment a parent can go home early instead of working late. The moment a person, freed from the repetitive work they did to survive, thinks for the first time about what they actually love. When those countless moments accumulate, one day we will look back and know: we are already living in a different era. I do not want that change to happen only in certain cities. Nor to be enjoyed by only a certain class. Wherever that change is possible, I want to go. To listen in that place's language, understand in that place's way, and build together with that place's people. Because I do not want to be a person who drifts through the world. I want the opposite — to live, everywhere I go, like a person who has returned. So I say: wherever I am is my hometown. And if the era of human liberation truly expands across the world, I believe it must happen in exactly this way. Not changing the world from a single center, but people entering countless places, treating each as their own hometown, restoring human time one place at a time. That is what I mean by expansion. It is not going out into the world. It is the world, little by little, becoming home.