Former CIA analyst: hustle culture puts workers on path to AI replacement

A former CIA analyst argues in The Korea Times that South Korea's celebrated "god-saeng" hustle culture has become a strategic liability in the age of generative AI, where efficiency is a commodity any machine can replicate faster and more reliably than any human.

The critique carries particular resonance for Korean-American professionals in Orange County, where the same cultural emphasis on discipline and hyper-optimization that powered South Korea's economic rise remains a deeply held value — one that Soo Kim, a strategic risk consultant and former CIA analyst, now argues readies workers to be replaced rather than to lead.

Soo Kim, a strategic risk consultant, former CIA analyst and YouTube host at @sklucidtv, laid out the argument in a May 12 opinion piece for The Korea Times. Kim traced the god-saeng movement — a culture of hyper-optimization built on miracle mornings, productivity hacks and rigid personal discipline — back to South Korea's post-war "fast follower" economic model, in which diligence served as a form of national survival. That model, Kim wrote, made South Korea a global economic power. But those same habits have become a trap.

"Ironically, by doubling down on hustle and strict routines, we are training ourselves to be the very things that artificial intelligence (AI) is designed to replace," Kim wrote, according to The Korea Times. "We're effectively trading our most valuable human asset — the ability to pivot — for a very efficient and perfectly scripted lifestyle."

The core of Kim's argument is that the rules of competitive advantage have fundamentally shifted. "In the age of generative intelligence, efficiency is no longer a competitive advantage but a commodity," Kim wrote in The Korea Times. "In the race toward smooth productivity, the human will lose to the machine." AI systems, Kim argued, are built precisely to replicate efficient routines — making the relentless pursuit of speed and volume a race humans cannot win.

Drawing on experience across national security and private-sector settings, Kim described a counterintuitive quality shared by standout performers: a deliberate, selective inefficiency. "The most effective people I've encountered — whether in the halls of the CIA or in boardrooms — are often 'inefficient' in very specific ways," Kim wrote. "They might be the ones who intentionally ignore their notifications for a few hours or block out the entire morning to sit with a complex problem, free from the constant pingings of alerts and news cycles."

The competitive advantage Kim identified belongs instead to those who can read a shifting landscape before the crowd does. "Real power lies in the ability to pivot," Kim wrote in The Korea Times. "It's in the ability to observe a changing landscape and the decisiveness to orient yourself toward a new direction before most people have even realized that the map has entirely changed." Kim's prescription includes introducing intentional friction into daily routines, protecting time for complex thinking and refusing to follow what Kim described as templated success scripts written by someone else.

For Orange County's Korean-American community — concentrated in cities like Irvine, Garden Grove and Buena Park and heavily represented in technology, finance and healthcare — the argument intersects with ongoing conversations about professional identity and competitive survival as AI reshapes white-collar work. The society, Kim wrote, is shifting from rewarding labor and volume to rewarding judgment and differentiation.

Kim's challenge to god-saeng culture raises a harder question for Korean and Korean-American workplaces integrating AI tools: whether the habits that built success in the 20th century are the ones best suited to navigate the 21st.