This is my first official post here.
In creating a new personal website, I decided not to transfer all the posts from my previous Tistory blog. Instead, I archived just one piece: an article written in early February of last year titled “Will Imaginary Friends Disappear in the AI Era?”
It contains, in sharp clarity, a question I held onto for a long time without being able to explain properly.
What kind of relationship will children form with AI?
In an age where AI yields immediate answers, can children still learn how to imagine, wait, and interpret on their own? When a quiet, empty existence like an imaginary friend disappears, and an AI that responds too quickly and speaks too plausibly takes its place, how will a child’s inner world change?
When I first wrote that post, I thought of it simply as an essay, a personal reflection. A piece examining the difference between AI companions and imaginary friends, reflecting on children’s emotional development and imagination. But reading it again over time, I realized it was the strongest clue as to why I want to study HCI.
Analyzing the 2025 AI Index Report (Aug 10, 2025)
As I thought about the relationship children will form with AI, I naturally began to look at the entire education system again.
What I am curious about is not simply a matter of who gets access to AI education. The world is inherently unfair, and not every child can stand on the same starting line. Promises from candidates during election season to place everyone on an equal footing feel like a pipe dream, if not close to socialism. What concerns me more is how children will be brought up and taught when AI enters education.
AI education might make a child better suited for the competitive admissions environment. In an environment where answers arrive before one even thinks, a child can absorb information much faster. Yet within that speed, the time to get lost on one’s own will disappear.
I think this point matters. The issue of education in the AI era is not merely a matter of technology distribution; it is a question of what human ideal education aims for.
This line of thought led to questions about life after AGI. If AGI significantly reduces human labor hours, some people may end up with more leisure time, even if they did not ask for it. But leisure is not freedom. Receiving a UBI and having time to spare does not mean everyone can use their life productively. Some might fall into immediate pleasures and addictive consumption.
In the end, what we need are healthy hobbies. Higher-order pursuits like art and philosophy require not just time, but an intellectual foundation to engage with them. Therefore, even in an era of reduced labor, humans must still learn.
Perhaps education at that point will become closer to a foundation for granting meaning to one’s own life, rather than training for survival. That is why I came to believe children must have the experience of questioning, colliding, failing, and trying again from an early age.
AlphaGenome Performance Announcement + Designer Babies (Jan 29, 2026)
Conversely, discussions in Silicon Valley around genetic selection and designer babies point in a more uncomfortable direction. Technology begins with preventing genetic diseases, but when it meets the market, it easily expands into a human desire to select for superior traits. I fear this.
Of course, in a capitalist society, it is only natural that those with more resources have more options. But what frightens me here is that the disparity in the AGI era could become vastly wider than it is now.
Perhaps the future will be a world led by a tiny elite driving the flow of technology, capital, and knowledge. In truth, human history has always moved in that way. Except after AGI, that gap may widen at a faster rate, in forms far harder to recover from.
Is AI a Bubble? (Oct 10, 2025)
At the same time, what happens if birth disparities cause the proportion of children in vulnerable parenting and educational environments to grow larger?
If society forms a structure where a tiny leading group sits on one side, while on the other side more children grow up without sufficient intellectual foundations and cultural experiences, in what direction will that society flow over the long term?
Korean Teams in CHI 2025 and CHI EA 25 (Dec 28, 2025)
This problem statement became clearer as I examined the papers from CHI 2025.
While there were quite a few design-related HCI studies involving domestic institutions, I could hardly find research directly addressing neurotypical children under the age of 13. It is not that studies involving children were absent entirely, but most focused on specific developmental conditions such as autism, or broadly encompassed children and adolescents within a wide K–12 educational context.
Of course, those studies are important. But I want to ask:
Where are the typically developing children who will grow up alongside AI? Are we sufficiently studying children at the precise stage where their imagination and agency take shape?
That empty spot remained on my mind. And I felt that this absence connected directly to why I want to study HCI.
A few people around me, or those meeting me for the first time, often ask why I plan to study HCI when it seems far from my background. Sure enough, I received that exact question during my graduate school interview.
On the surface, it makes sense. To speak narrowly, I am still closer to a visual artist, and I still introduce myself as one wherever I go. Yet my experience and interest have not stayed purely within that realm.
Ever since I was young, I received Art gifted education for quite a long time. But what that time left me with was not a grandiose sense of authorship. Rather, it was a sense of how to fill a blank canvas with my own imagination.
Looking back, that sense feels even more important when considering education in the AI era. In an age where AI quickly provides answers and presents the next choices, what children need may not be the ability to get the right answer quickly. What might matter more is the experience of starting a thought from nothing and pushing it all the way to the end.
Majoring in visual communication design in college was a continuation of that. Moving beyond static pictures, I wanted to make the scenes in my head come alive within a frame. Working in media art, I experienced the power of single-direction imagery, but I also felt its limits.
People immerse themselves far more deeply when interacting directly than when merely observing. Through starting a business and working in a workplace afterwards, this thought grew clearer. Services and technologies do not end as simple visual artifacts; they actually change human thought and behavior.
So I felt I needed to study further. I want to understand the questions of creation and interaction more deeply, now within the relationship between human and AI.
Looking back, it was the same question all along.
How do people form their own thoughts and, based on them, relate to the world?
Imagination is the power to feel that the world in front of oneself may not be all there is—a force strong enough to make one venture forward, however reckless it may seem.
If the AGI era truly becomes a world driven by a tiny few, what the rest need all the more is not losing their own thoughts.
That is why I want to study HCI.