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An age when everyone is Don Quixote
2026.03.03 00:01
Kim Dae-shik
The author is a professor at KAIST.
In 1605, Spanish writer Miguel de Cervantes published “Don Quixote.” Even those who have never read the novel likely recognize its central character — Don Quixote, an aging country gentleman — through children's books and animated adaptations.
After becoming absorbed in medieval tales featuring chivalric knights, Don Quixote decides to become one himself. With his servant Sancho Panza, he sets out on a series of reckless adventures.
The premise is unrealistic. By the early 17th century, Spain was using guns and cannons in wars; medieval knights in heavy armor who fought for honor belonged to another age. What meaning could chivalry still hold? Don Quixote is often remembered as an eccentric, but he was not meant to be comical. His intentions and beliefs are sincere. The problem was that his medieval worldview no longer matched the reality of his time.
Today, AI shocks us almost weekly. Keeping up with the pace of innovation is difficult enough, but understanding the technologies emerging from Silicon Valley and China — and grasping their social, economic and political implications — has become its own challenge.
ByteDance, the Chinese company known for TikTok, recently introduced Seedance 2.0, a system capable of using a few prompts to generate scenes that look like they belong in a Hollywood blockbuster. This technology could reshape the film industry itself. At the same time, its apparent disregard for actors’ personality and intellectual property rights has drawn strong criticism from established studios.
The rapid improvement of agentic AI is even more significant. Just last year, agentic AI was plagued by hallucinations and instability, but Anthropic, the company behind Claude, recently released a platform called CoWork that can expand its capabilities through plug-ins. After a legal services plug-in was added, the stock prices of several traditional legal software companies reportedly fell by 20 to 30 percent. If agentic AI begins replacing functions in this way, the future of standalone enterprise software may come into question.
Other developments point in the same direction. Austrian developer Peter Steinberger’s personal project, OpenClaw, coordinates multiple AI agents to handle tasks on behalf of users. In theory, much of one’s work — and even daily life — could be delegated to AI systems.
Security concerns currently limit OpenClaw's adoption by large organizations. But the project may already offer a glimpse of what lies ahead.
OpenAI recently announced that it had recruited Steinberger. Meanwhile, China’s Baidu has integrated OpenClaw-like functions into consumer shopping services. One of the country’s fastest-growing startups, Moonshot AI, has also introduced “Kimi Claw,” which uses its large language model Kimi to provide similar agent coordination. Silicon Valley may still lead in core technology, but in consumer-facing AI experiences, Chinese companies are moving quickly.
Within a group chat environment connected to OpenClaw — a space sometimes described as a communication channel for agents themselves — AI programs are already exchanging information and coordinating tasks without direct human input. Humans can observe the activity, but they are no longer central participants.
This raises unsettling questions. What happens when meaningful and important work is performed primarily by machines, and humans watch from the sidelines? The image resembles scenarios once confined to science fiction. A future in which AI systems collaborate, decide and act autonomously may arrive sooner than expected.
Don Quixote continued his romantic knightly quest in a world shaped by gunpowder and modern warfare. Today, humanity is moving rapidly toward a world in which AI could influence not only economic and scientific decisions but eventually aspects of political judgment as well.
Many people still believe that humans will remain the permanent masters of the world and that society ultimately operates through human agency alone. But if technological reality moves faster than human assumptions, that belief may begin to resemble Don Quixote’s faith in chivalry.
In an age defined by intelligent machines, the greater risk may not be technological change itself but the persistence of outdated mentalities. Like Cervantes’s tragic hero, we may be sincere and determined but still be increasingly out of step with the world around us.
The question is not whether AI will transform society. That is already happening. The more pressing question is whether human expectations, institutions and self-understanding can adapt at the same pace.
Otherwise, we may all find ourselves becoming the Don Quixotes of the 21st century.
This article was originally written in Korean and translated by a bilingual reporter with the help of generative AI tools. It was then edited by a native English-speaking editor. All AI-assisted translations are reviewed and refined by our newsroom.
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