“Reason for Resignation: AI” Lee Sedol relearns ‘labor’…poignant and moving [Lee Jin-Song’s “Wait, But”] - 경향신문

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<Unemployed Lee Sedol> shows Lee Sedol setting out to deliver yogurt. KBS provided

On October 23, KBS launched a somewhat provocative(?) variety show: <Unemployed Lee Sedol>. To call Lee Sedol, a 9-dan who earned humanity’s first win against the artificial intelligence AlphaGo ten years agothe hope of humanity, the light of humanity, humanity’s opening movethe greatest sin of the neoliberal era, ‘the unemployed’?! And yet the title is an intuitive truth. Three years after his match with AlphaGo, when he retired from the world of Go, another epithet attached itself to Lee: “the first human to have a job taken by AI.” The program’s subtitle is ‘10th Anniversary of the AlphaGo Match.’ Remembering the frenzy around the 2016 match, it feels startling that ten years have already passed, and when Lee points out, “Since then, Korean society has done shockingly little to prepare for artificial intelligence,” it sends a chill down the spine. In truth, the match was consumed less as reflection and preparation for how technology would change society, and more as dramatic narratives and memes like ‘a showdown between machine and human’ and ‘the divine move by the human who beat the machine.’ When ChatGPT appeared in November 2022, six years after Lee’s match, the reaction was similar. And now, as irreversible changes driven by AI rattle the foundations of life across many fields, both crisis and expectation are mounting. <Unemployed Lee Sedol> reflects the moment and aims to catch two rabbits at oncevariety-show fun and reflection on laborby putting forward Lee Sedol as a ‘divine move.’

The show’s official introduction reads: “A real analog survival wandering of unemployed Lee Sedol! Lee, who earned humanity’s first win over AI, but ten years later, now, once he has stepped off the Go board…he is nothing but an ‘unemployed’ man with zero specs! He is a 9-dan at reading sequences, but a 0-dan in on-site specs, so Lee Sedol takes on ‘work only humans can do’ that AI cannot!” Even if he quit his job, this is Lee Sedolthere is no way he is truly unemployed. The program exaggerates his situation somewhat because, to borrow the title of Jang Kang-myeong’s book, he is the “future that arrived first” (Jang Kang-myeong, Dongasia, 2025). Anyone, even someone who devoted a lifetime to one field and rose to the undisputed top, now lives in a world where that may no longer count as a ‘job.’ In the opening of episode 1 of <Unemployed Lee Sedol>, Lee writes a resume. Over the scene of him entering ‘professional Go player’ for previous job and ‘AI’ for reason for resignation, the Buggles’ ‘Video Killed the Radio Star’ plays. That’s right. Before AI took jobs, video killed the radio star. The radio star, in turn, was born by killing the magazine star. Each time technology advanced, some jobs disappeared and others were born, in a repeating cycle. Panelists Jang Do-yeon and Jung Jae-hyung say that because the changes of the AI era belong to all of us, “we are Unemployed Lee Sedol, this is our program.” (Of course, it pricks the conscience to identify with a number one, but let’s ride the safe status of viewer and let it slide.)

‘Legend of the Go world’ Lee Sedol poses at the production presentation for KBS’s new variety program ‘Unemployed Lee Sedol’ held at the KBS annex public hall in Yeongdeungpo-gu, Seoul, on the 22nd. Yonhap News

When he first appears, Lee Sedol wears the suit he is used to, despite the midday heat. Even if he has quit being a Go professional, the habits ingrained by that work do not vanish. When, at a planning meeting, Lee asks the AI, “I’m Lee Sedol, so what job would I absolutely seem unable to do?”, the answer that comes back is emotional labor that directly faces customers and sells. Lee bristles that the AI does not know him at all, and he candidly tells the producers that, having done nothing but Go, he is no different from a social novice. A brief montage that follows compresses the journey of labor Lee will undertake. Most of the jobs are sharply different from Go, which used the head, was static, and was done alone. Selling beer at a baseball stadium, delivering and selling yogurt, and cleaning the Hangang swimming pool make up episodes 1-2, and cleaning high-rise building windows is shown in the trailer. As an on-screen caption puts it, a ‘storm rider of variety shows’ who takes on grueling, over-the-top challenges, Lee, who has worked his whole life only while seated, literally breaks into beaded sweat on the job. The program explains that the work Lee experiences is ‘still’ beyond AI’s ability to replace, and achieves a finish different from AI’s because it demands delicate, improvisational responses and meticulous wrap-ups.

The affect of <Unemployed Lee Sedol> is diverse, and from it come reflections on labor. Panelist Jung Jae-hyung consistently feels sorry for Lee. Empathy for a peer who, after a long time in one field, suddenly becomes a beginner and flounders reveals that Jung, too, is not free from anxiety about AI’s influence, which has penetrated deeply into music. Many viewers may feel something similar at this point. There is also an overly tender pity about ‘that’ Lee Sedol struggling at ‘this’ kind of work, a reaction that reflects real hierarchies of labor. It is objectively a shame when someone who is the best in a field cannot use that talent at all, but if Lee had been assigned to work that has a better social reputation than ‘Go’ and had floundered there, the reaction might have been different. In fact, the jobs Lee experiences are low-wage and nonstandard, the kinds in which women or young people work as temps or part-timers. Some labor may be ‘left’ not because AI cannot do it, but because humans are cheaper than AI. If it keeps featuring only physical labor or so-called 3D labor, the program will not avoid the concern that it defines ‘what humans can do’ far too simply; we shall see.

Mentors who worked with Lee say he smiles more than expected and gets along well with people, expressing their fondness. Even to those ignorant of Go, Lee was known for a cool-headed and highly strung demeanor. The job itself demanded such traits, and the Korean social climate of the time and the Go association’s practices also influenced him. But as he sells beer and yogurt, meets people, experiences collaboration, and leans on seniors, Lee draws out another self. He acts playfully when told the uniform suits him, fixes his habit of not making eye contact, and answers people’s hospitality in kind. Being a bit mellowed with age and a temperament of giving his all to whatever he does surely help, but these moments also make the saying that a position makes the person feel real. What, after all, are jobs, ocupations, and labor? Asked by the producers whether, strictly speaking, he is not unemployed, Lee answers, “(I may be serving as a special-appointment professor and filming YouTube,) but can it represent me as a person the way Go did?” For humans, labor is not only about earning money. Just as Lee has long pondered whether that last ‘divine move’ was really ‘fine because he won,’ many people in real life seek value and meaning in work that go beyond compensation and wins or losses. They suffer through work that is meaningless or goes against their values, and they form identity through labor. In the reportage The Future That Arrived First, in which author Jang Kang-myeong interviews Go professionals as an occupational group that experienced ahead of us the change that will come to all, he asks, “When we say ‘new jobs will keep being created,’ what exactly do we mean by a job? A source of social value and pride, or a reason for me to receive a steady, sizable deposit into my bank account?” (p. 202)

‘Unemployed Lee Sedol’. KBS2 provided.

Lee Sedol is excited. Having become the best in the field to which he devoted his life and having reached middle age, he could well feel aversion to unfamiliar work or insist on his own ways, yet he approaches everything with curiosity. That is because he is seriously exploring a new job as an act of defining himself. When he has to work late and sleep with the staff in the on-call room until the next shoot, he gets giddy as if on a school trip; he genuinely relies on a beer-selling senior nineteen years his junior; and while cleaning the Hangang swimming pool with part-timers young enough to be his children, he shares the bittersweetness of life with candor. At a time when more viewers are calling celebrities, including entertainers, ‘heavenly dragons’ and rejecting even variety shows in which famous people experience ordinary labor as deception, seeing a player immerse himself like this is moving.

If you render ‘baeksu’ simply in Chinese characters, it means ‘white hands.’ In the past, labor meant only manual work done with the hands, so slender jade-like hands were a symbol of those who did not work or of high status. As eras and technologies changed, different forms of labor emerged and vanished. We still do not know in what sense this episode will remain amid the many transitions humanity has experienced so far. Amid this uncertainty and fear, the ballast that <Unemployed Lee Sedol> seeks is fidelity to the present. Appearing on Lee Dong-jin’s YouTube <Paiakia>, Lee said he is feeling happiness he would not have known without retirement. Entering the Hangang swimming pool in a suit, he feels awkward, then says, “I do not know exactly what gelato is, but I will try it,” and through new work he comes to know himself. Watching ‘Lee Sedol living in a world without Go,’ which no one imagined, as he dives into a new life with neither optimism nor pessimism but with genuine sincerity, offers a precious precedent before the future that will one day arrive.