Prologue: There Are No Jobs
In 2029, the great AI era had arrived—the age when even virtual reality games were on the verge of launch. One click was all it took to generate high-quality artwork of any kind. You could even play games alongside high-performance AIs. On paper, it sounded like a perfect world.
But the reality was anything but.
Youth unemployment rate: 22.2%
Increase in idle young people: Record high
Era of five million unemployed: Fully realized
AI job displacement rate: Highest increase ever recorded
Exchange rate: 1 USD = 1,781 KRW
Because of all this, even graduates from Seoul National University struggled to find work that paid 2.5 million won a month. So obviously there was no chance for someone like me, a graduate from some no-name third-rate university that no one had ever heard of.
These days even manual labor was impossible without connections—every position had already been snatched up by foreign workers. To put it plainly… there were no jobs.