The Lonely, Unfulfilling Everyday Life Brought by Disruptive Technological Innovation

※ The Korea Academy of Business Administration helps large, medium-sized, and small enterprises, as well as startups, and scholars in management, economics, law, and engineering in Korea engage in intellectual exchange and grow together. Each year, it hosts various industry-academia research forums for key figures in academia and business, publishes academic journals, and runs education and advisory programs. Through contributions in partnership with the Korea Academy of Business Administration, IT Donga shares the experience and insight of academics and leading business figures.

[IT Donga] Technological innovation mostly improves human life, but the initial quality of innovative new products is often inferior to that of existing products. This is because new products tend to focus innovation not on quality, but on “convenience” or “low price.” Yet once they gain a foothold in the market through this strategy, they gradually improve in quality and eventually disrupt the markets built by incumbent competitors. And they drive them out.

This is precisely the logic of “disruptive innovation” once advanced by Harvard professor Clayton Christensen. One of his main examples was the PC industry. When PCs first appeared, their performance was inferior in quality to the minicomputers of the time, making them an “inferior good,” and they were also inexpensive. Although their quality (performance) was lower than that of minicomputers, PCs were able to secure a basis for survival in the market because they offered greater convenience and lower prices. As a disruptive technology, the PC did not remain stuck at a low level of performance. Following the trajectory of technological progress, PCs steadily improved and ultimately disrupted the minicomputer industry and became dominant. The transistor, which replaced the vacuum tube, is another example. Early transistors were inferior goods compared to vacuum tubes, but by following a similar trajectory of technological development, they improved in quality and destroyed most of the vacuum tube market.

However, contrary to Professor Christensen’s observation, many of these disruptive innovators did not completely destroy the old market and instead came to coexist with older technologies. E-books are one example. E-books are still not perfect enough in quality to overwhelm printed books. Mobile phone cameras have also improved greatly, but they still have not replaced older DSLR cameras. Convenience-store triangle kimbap and meal kits are cheap and convenient, but they have not beaten the traditional practice of buying ingredients and cooking for oneself.

Beyond these examples, countless new technologies—such as 3D printing, alternative meat, instant coffee, solar and wind power, digital pianos, remote classes, and telemedicine—are encroaching on markets with convenience and price as their weapons, yet they coexist with existing products because they have not overcome their limitations in quality. This raises a question: as these imperfect innovative products become the norm thanks to their advantages in convenience and price, are our lives being increasingly filled with lower-quality products?

An even more serious problem is that some disruptive innovations go beyond destroying old products and old markets to destroying existing “human relationships.” Consider the ordering kiosks and tablets now steadily being installed in restaurants. These devices can be seen as disruptive innovations that cut costs by reducing labor expenses. They lessen the workload of employees. But instead, they require consumers to enter directly what employees used to do. Under the name of innovation, customers are effectively doing labor in place of employees and reducing the restaurant’s costs. And the warm interaction between employees and customers in restaurants has disappeared. It has been “destroyed.” Clearly, the quality of service experienced in restaurants has worsened compared to the past.

Is the recent emergence of artificial intelligence (AI) a disruptive innovation? The pace of AI’s development is dazzling. Because its ability to answer questions surpasses conventional internet search, AI will almost perfectly disrupt and replace existing internet search services. And AI will replace or destroy human relationships on a far broader scale than restaurant kiosks or tablets.

In the past, we naturally grew closer to those around us by asking them about things we did not know. Human beings become closer by helping one another with their shortcomings. Now, if there is something we do not know, there is no need to call a friend or a senior or junior acquaintance. We can just ask AI. The more AI develops, the more distant human relationships will become.

Looking at the daily lives of modern people today, they wake up in the morning and, instead of eating a carefully prepared breakfast, make do with triangle kimbap from a convenience store. Instead of reading a physical book, they open an e-book, even if it strains their eyes a bit. For lunch, they put up with the inconvenience of fumbling through a kiosk at a fast-food restaurant to order a hamburger. After lunch, they drink instant coffee while attending online meetings, and while on the move, they work on emails on the narrow screen of a mobile device rather than on a PC screen. Studying is replaced by online video lectures; even if they miss direct interaction with professors or fellow students, they can ask AI instead of a professor or friend when they do not understand something. In the evening, they heat up a meal kit at home, and instead of watching an entire trending drama, they watch a short summary video on YouTube at double speed. Everything is imperfect, but convenient.

Of course, it is true that the low prices of these disruptive innovation products provide major economic benefits and opportunities for low-income groups. But on the other hand, for low-income people, maintaining older products or older ways instead of buying innovative new products may be both more familiar and more economical. For example, rather than newly purchasing a high-performance mobile phone camera or an e-book reader, it may be more economical to use an old digital camera they already have or to read printed books. Instead of eating meal-kit food, shopping cheaply at a market and cooking directly may be far more familiar and healthier. In other words, low-income groups as well may find themselves more dissatisfied than before even while using disruptive innovation products.

Ultimately, if disruptive innovation replaces old products and markets, products and services of imperfect quality will become widespread around us compared to the past. If disruptive innovation replaces human beings, our human relationships will grow distant. One can only hope that the endpoint of technological progress is not a life in which we consume imperfect products in massive quantities while living in loneliness.

Woonghee Lee, President of the Korea Academy of Business Administration

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Original title: 파괴적 기술 혁신이 초래하는 고독하고 불만족스러운 일상

Author: Ung-hee Lee

Date: 2026-09-22

Source: https://www.cfe.org/bbs/bbsDetail.php?cid=press&pn=1&idx=29558