유행기술 vs 유용기술 [Original Article]

At the beginning of every year, influential people in the industry, such as global investors, R&D leaders, scholars, and politicians and businessmen, gather in Las Vegas to attend the Consumer Electronics Show (CES). Many of those who visit say that their purpose is to understand the technology trends of the year, but I feel a strange feeling whenever I hear the words technology trends.

The word trend may be appropriate for fashion or culture, but can it also be used for technology? It is impossible to avoid the feeling of encountering errors.

I recently attended a lecture on generative artificial intelligence (AI) and its services at a forum for CEOs of companies above a certain size. The grandeur and destructive power of ChatGPT were emphasized. As a CEO of a company whose main business is autonomous robots, I listened to the lecture with interest and sympathy, but many of the audience seemed to feel somewhat burdened by such technological trends. Finally, during the Q&A session, a CEO of a large company raised his hand. “Two years ago, I listened to a lecture on the metaverse here and formed an in-house TFT. Do I need to form a generative AI TFT again? What should I do with the old TFT?” he asked with a somewhat embarrassed expression.

If we analyze the metaverse with Google Trends, we can see that it actually started in the first half of 2021, was most mentioned in the second half of that year and the first half of 2022, and has been declining sharply since then. If we expand the scope of the analysis to the world, not just Korea, the downward trend is even more severe.

We remember that before the metaverse, we experienced the blockchain fad, and before that, the Internet of Things (IoT) and augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) were all the rage. These technologies are still in progress. Some of them have been commercialized and are playing a role, but there are many cases where we feel that they are not as promising as they were when they first appeared. There are many technologies that come to mind that have disappeared, such as Google Glass, modular smartphones, and 3D TVs that seemed like they would change the world.

As the CEO of a company that develops and commercializes autonomous robots for delivery purposes, I am in no position to deny the value of new technologies. In order for it to become a useful technology rather than a trendy technology, we need to look at the market before the technology. For example, the world waited for the telephone when the telegraph was used, and expectations for fax, internet, and mobile phones could be predicted from market demand, not technology.

The postal delivery market and food delivery market have long been inseparable from our lives. And now, the market is operated in the form of motorcycle riders and e-commerce. The form of the market has changed to the extent that technology allows. Robots have always been loved to increase the efficiency of this market, but they have not lived up to expectations for decades. This is because the level of artificial intelligence required for autonomous driving and the communication costs for data collection were far from practical. However, communication costs are becoming a reality with the spread of 5G, and problems with object recognition and location recognition are being quickly solved with deep learning-based solutions.

Before investing in the countless AI and robotics technologies, we must first consider who needs them and why, and how realistically they can perform their roles. A cool-headed judgment and expectation of the scale of demand, not the technology, will be the foundation for obtaining the right investment results

Kim Byeong-su