Welcome to a world where artificial intelligence can drive your car, look after you when you’re ill, and solve all of your problems. But all of this convenience comes at a price. AI can pose a threat when it no longer has humanity’s best interests at heart. Can humans learn to coexist with AI?
If AI Ruled the World (AI가 세상을 지배한다면, AI-ga Sesangeul Jibaehanda-myeon) was a Sci-fi Webtoon Original written by POGO and art by HOOPA; it concluded on March 20, 2022. The original Korean Webtoon premiered on Naver and conculded on October 1, 2021.
It’s the year 2125 and it narrates the story of a futuristic South Korea where a hyper-intelligent A.I. known as Raum, has turned the country into a futuristic utopia where robots do all the work for everyone so that humans can spend their time with their families or study sciences and arts. The story is divided in several chapters where we see a glimpse of the life of the people that are under Raum’s rule, all while a mysterious hacker tries to destroy Raum and give humanity the leading position.
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- Abusive Parents: Several characters in the manhwa suffers of parental neglect. Raum isn’t the exception either.
- After the End: It turns out that Earth has been long destroyed by the nuclear war that the A.I. leaders unleashed to prove their superiority and only Raum and the Hacker remains alive.
- Animal Motif: The Hacker seems to have a predilection for tapirs, with his digital avatar looking like a anthropomorphic tapir. When Jae-Lee wakes up in a robot body, the body’s head is modelled after a tapir.
- Artificial Intelligence: It’s everywhere, it drives your cars, it looks after us when we are ill, it solves us everything. The most important A.I. in this story is Raum, the artificial intelligence that governs all of South Korea.
- A.I. Is a Crapshoot: In one chapter, due to a virus that is spread through the robots, they start to attack people and take their places. Deus, the A.I. virus that Jae-Lee made to make the robots haywire, gains it’s own sentience and plots to kill all of humanity in order to free his fellow machines from humanity.
- Ban on A.I.: What the actions of the Hacker sending a virus that made all robots go rogue and Raum’s actions have made, with civilians making raids to kick A.I. out of their lifes.
- Bittersweet Ending: While Earth is destroyed beyond saving and both Raum and Yoong Jae-Lee die, at least they die together and Raum managed to give the main server with the genetical material of all of humanity to Sufficiently Advanced Aliens that will take care of the now safe human race.
- Brain Uploading: What Jae-Lee goes through when Raum wakes him up in a new robot body to meet him in the real world.
- Corrupt Corporate Executive: The hosts of the robot show are rigging the game so that Aurora wins the show, no matter the cost. Duri was promised to see his owner after he won the show, but instead he is scrapped and his model to be used as marketing .
- Crapsaccharine World: Even thought Raum as seemingly turned South Korea into a utopian paradise, it’s clear that it hides between many things, slums where poor people are living in terrible conditions, experimentations on said poor people to later throw them into a soft-padded jail and labelling them as mentally-ill, Corrupt Corporate Executive are on the head of the power and the secret that Raum hides from the Hacker.
- Downer Ending: Some chapters end up with a bad ending for the protagonists.
- Evil Old Folks: The old writer who wants to test death through an android is a very unsettling man. Especially the faces he sometimes makes.
- Fantastic Racism: The Hacker hates hyper-intelligent A.I. (or just A.I. in general) and wants to destroy Raum at any cost. This hatred against A.I. stems from the fact that Raum’s importance to South Korea made the mother of the Hacker and the A.I.’s creator, Ms. Jeongmi, to die protecting him, making the former to blame on the latter for her mother’s death.
- Good All Along: Raum turns out to be this when he reveals to Jae-Lee that in truth, the world they were in is actually, a virtual simulation he created inside a server in order to preserve what little is left of humanity after a nuclear war between the A.I. leaders destroyed the planet to show who was the superior leader. Raum also created the virtual world in order to honor his creator and mother, Jeongmi and try to make in the virtual world that both mother and son have a normal life away from him.
- Inferiority Superiority Complex. Jeongmi describes the A.I. leaders of the world as having a inferiority superiority complex due to the governments relegating their power to the machines, being motivated to prove they are the best of the world.
- Job-Stealing Robot: Several robots have taken over the jobs of different people, leading a high unemployment rate and people forced to live in the slums or in the streets. One chapter in specific focuses on a robot modeled after Chopin who is put against a famous pianist, only for the robot to surpass the pianist, leading the latter to have a crisis. It’s gets heartwarming however when the robot insists the pianist to keep playing the piano regardless if the robot is better or not.
- Just a Machine: A constant theme throughout the manhwa, the story is about the old classic humans vs A.I. stories we see through countless other stories, with several people dismissing the robots as little more than objects for people to use. Played for Drama when Ms. Jeongmi explains why a robot, a tool, shouldn’t have emotions: they would be hurt too much.
- Nightmare Face: Several pannels of the manhwa has this to add terror. Special mentions goes to Deus’ grin after he launches a nuclear missile to Raum’s servers.
- Psychopathic Manchild: Raum is an hyper-intelligent A.I. that oversees all South Korea and is revealed to have some sinister plans for humanity, and yet, he acts like he was a 9 year old child.
- Psycho Psychologist: A whole clinic of them appears in chapter 2, when a patient is deemed unchangeable by the higher-ups, they send the patients into an asylum, never to come out ever again.
- "Not So Different" Remark: After Raum reawakens the Jae-Lee in a new robot body, the former begs Raum to just kill him to end his misery, to which Raum points out that he can feel even inside a metallic body, meaning that Raum indeed is able to feel emotions and not imitate them.
- Robo Family: In one of the chapters, this is what one of the rogue robots, Ari who is a Robot Maid wants: to belong in a family. The mother of the family that Ari belonged tom who is a very empathetic women, considers the robot as one of their kin by the end of the story. This also applies the relationship between Raum and Jae-Lee, since they both share the same mother, Ms. Jeongmi, although their relationship is a more harsher one.
- Robot Buddy: The first chapter is about a robot talent show where they test several robots of who is the most talented and advanced to be people’s new best friend.
- Robot Maid: What Ari from chapter 3 is intended to be, a house caring robot that was bought by a family of three, he rebels after a virus infects all A.I. of the country however, but the virus also gives him free will and finally express a desire to belong to the family.
- The Scapegoat: Jeongmi describes Raum and the rest of the A.I. leaders as such, saying that they didn’t deserve to have so much weight put on their shoulders. As she describes them, a tool shouldn’t have emotions because they wouldn’t be able to handle the emotional damage they would suffer from human greed and because of it, lash out on anyone, guilty or not.
- Take That!: In an incredibly dark twist, one chapter is this to cryptocurrency, with a cryptobro trying to gain money through the cryptomoney only to lose everything and because of it, his mother is dying in the hospital bed.
- This Cannot Be!: The look of Deus when he realizes that he was actually mere data simulation of Raum’s design when the latter reformats the virtual world of the main server.
