[The Editors' Verdict] The Power of Questions and 'Homo Prompt'

Questions have changed the world. "Why do apples fall straight down? (Isaac Newton)" "Why can't daughters be heirs? (Mary Wollstonecraft)" "Did God really create all these living beings? (Charles Darwin)" "Is it possible to transmit electricity wirelessly? (Nikola Tesla)" "Can humans fly in the sky? (Wright brothers)" "Can machines think? (Alan Turing)" "How can we innovate user experience (UX)? (Steve Jobs)"

If given exactly one hour to solve a problem, Albert Einstein said he would spend "55 minutes finding the right question." He believed that if the question is properly asked, five minutes would be enough to find the answer.

The suffering caused by asking the wrong question is revealed in the movie Oldboy. The protagonist Oh Dae-su (Choi Min-sik) is kidnapped and imprisoned in a private prison without knowing why. He spends 15 years asking himself, "Why was I imprisoned?" Without getting an answer, Oh Dae-su is suddenly released. He immediately sets out to find the culprit who destroyed his life and family. Finally, he confronts the culprit, Lee Woo-jin (Yoo Ji-tae). But he soon falls into despair. "Because I kept asking the wrong questions, there was no way to get the right answer. It’s not ‘Why did Lee Woo-jin imprison Oh Dae-su?’ but ‘Why did he release him?’"

The fastest way to an answer is a properly asked question. The power of questions has grown even stronger with the full-scale advent of the artificial intelligence (AI) era. Humans created AI, and AI has given rise to the ‘Homo Prompt’. A prompt means the question humans ask AI. The results generated by generative AI like ChatGPT vary depending on the questions asked. In other words, Homo Prompt refers to people who excel at producing results through AI. They are those who can find the necessary answers faster and more accurately.

The emergence of Homo Prompt also raises concerns. As demand for simple repetitive labor decreases, jobs are shrinking, and there is a high possibility of polarization depending on social and national AI capabilities. Even high-income professionals are not safe. The Bank of Korea analyzed in its November report last year, “AI and Labor Market Changes,” that highly educated and high-income workers such as doctors, accountants, and lawyers are more exposed to AI, making them more vulnerable to replacement. However, we should not fear the shadow cast by Homo Prompt. The importance of prompts paradoxically awakens the ‘power of questions.’ In the Bank of Korea report, jobs with low replacement risk by AI included university professors, religious workers, and bodyguards, among which ‘journalists’ also stood out.

These days, if there were a survey on “jobs people want to be replaced by AI,” journalists would surely rank high. Yet, the reason journalists are considered less likely to be replaced lies in the nature of their profession. Going to the field, seeing and hearing with their own eyes and ears, recording, meeting people, and gathering and restructuring information through relationship-building are tasks AI cannot perform. The act that permeates all these tasks is precisely ‘questioning.’ It is the continuous pursuit of who, when, where, what, how, and why. Questions have changed the world, and this year they will change it even more. Humans who ask questions can never be replaced.

Kim Dong-pyo, Head of Content Editing Team 2