Book

The First Questions That Could Shake the World: The Third Challenge
Grand Quest: Season 3

When David Hilbert took the stage as a speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Paris in 1900, he did not arrive with answers. Instead, he presented 23 questions. Those 23 questions would go on to shape the direction of mathematics for the next century.

That is precisely what Grand Quest, an initiative pursued by the Seoul National University Institute for Future Strategy since the fall of 2022, seeks to do. Its mission has been to identify the questions that could transform the future of science and technology in Korea—and, through those questions, to offer not conclusions, but direction. Now, its third installment has arrived.

Season 1 of Grand Quest argued that Korean science and technology must move beyond the ability to excel at solving problems that are given to us and advance toward the ability to formulate the problems ourselves. Season 2 identified a national imperative: achieving technological sovereignty through creative accumulation and original concept design. Season 3 turns its attention to the connection between humans and technology. It asks what lies at the frontier where technology is becoming deeply embedded in the everyday world of human life and in the systems of civilization.

Can robots safely interact and coexist alongside humans? Can healthcare become truly personalized? Can we clean up the space debris created by humanity? Can we sustain a data-driven civilization? Can artificial intelligence collaborate with humans to create entirely new industries with unprecedented flexibility? Each of these questions asks how the relationship between humans and technology should be fundamentally redesigned. And none of them can be answered by a single technology or a single field of expertise alone.

(Excerpted from Chapter 0, “What Makes a Question a Grand Quest?” by Professor Jeongdong Lee)

Three young scientists at the forefront of cutting-edge research in each of five fields—robotics, life sciences, space, energy, and industrial AI—joined the project as authors, with leading scholars from each field serving as mentors. Through months of in-depth discussions, colloquia, and open forums, they arrived at five questions. These are the Grand Quests of Season 3:

Question 1 Can we develop robots that can safely interact with humans in close proximity?

Question 2 Can we create truly personalized healthcare through the development of adaptive biohealth models?

Question 3 Can we clean up Earth's low-Earth orbit, which is surrounded by space debris measuring 10 centimeters or less in diameter?

Question 4 Can we operate data centers using half the energy through multimodal energy transformers?

Question 5 Can industrial artificial general intelligence enable innovative product and process design?

Just as a single good question can open the door to a new world, we hope that Grand Quest: Season 3 will become the key that unlocks it.