[Insight & Opinion] In the AI Era, Good Questions Shape a Better Future

Questioning Skills Matter More Than Memorizing Answers
Achieving Educational Innovation in South Korea
Building a Society That Utilizes AI to Foster Inquiry

Everyone knows that questions are important. However, actually asking questions and making it a habit is not as easy as it seems. Creating good questions is naturally even more difficult.

Children are full of curiosity and have many things they wonder about. They ask and ask again. Through constant questioning, they learn about the world. But once they start school, the number of questions decreases, and as they move to middle and high school, questions become even fewer. They spend all their time memorizing answers for entrance exams. Even in universities where questioning is truly necessary, it is rare to find students who ask questions. The absence of questions is one of the biggest problems in South Korea’s education system.

Amid this, the era of artificial intelligence (AI) is fully opening. The power of AI is truly astonishing. No matter what difficult question you ask, it provides quite satisfactory answers. It’s as if thousands of experts are sitting right next to you, ready to advise you with good solutions to anything you ask.

Recently, I asked ChatGPT a somewhat unusual question: “Could you list 100 questions that help create a better future?” Surprisingly, within 3 to 4 seconds, it presented 10 categories and provided 10 meaningful questions under each category. Then, I slightly changed the question to “questions that help create a better future for individuals.” It responded with a total of 100 very useful questions divided into 10 categories such as self-understanding and self-exploration, personal life philosophy, financial management and goals, well-being and health, among others. Just answering and putting into practice a few of the important questions from that list seemed likely to genuinely improve an individual’s future.

In the AI era, the importance of questions is growing much more. Because change is rapid and the future is more uncertain, we must constantly ask questions and seek answers. AI instantly provides appropriate answers no matter what you ask. Since good answers come out just by asking, there is no reason not to ask.

In this regard, AI could become the best tool to transform South Korea from a society without questions into one that asks questions. Beyond AI digital textbooks, let students ask AI anything they want to know and engage in conversations with AI. This could be the best way to enhance students’ questioning ability, thinking skills, inquiry skills, and creativity. Through the spread of the habit of questioning, we could effortlessly achieve the educational innovation we have long wished for.

The same applies in the workplace. It’s good to use AI to write reports, organize meeting minutes, and create presentation materials, but let’s also use AI more for asking questions and finding answers for important decision-making and problem-solving. The executives who worry more than anyone else about the future of their companies should do the same. While it’s good to get help from internal and external experts, also try asking difficult questions you want to solve to AI. You will either find the answers you wanted or discover clues to the answers.

For a long time, we have mainly sought answers to given questions. Students, companies, governments, and society have all done so. Now, before finding answers, let’s first think about what questions to ask. And let’s make more effort to find good questions. If you create good questions properly, it is an era where you can more easily find good answers with the help of AI. Good questions are the first step to creating a better future. This applies to individuals, organizations, and society alike.

Kim Hyungon, Invited Professor at Chungnam National University Graduate School of Public Policy · Former Director of the National Assembly Future Institute