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The Erosion of Humanity in the Fourth Industrial Revolution - A Symptomatic Narrative of Posthuman Dystopia in No Other Choice

  • Journal of Popular Narrative
  • 2026, 32(1), pp.163~207
  • DOI : 10.18856/jpn.2026.32.1.005
  • Publisher : The Association of Popular Narrative
  • Research Area : Interdisciplinary Studies > Interdisciplinary Research
  • Received : January 8, 2026
  • Accepted : February 14, 2026
  • Published : February 28, 2026

Gia Kim 1

1원광대학교

Accredited

ABSTRACT

This study examines how human nature and the status of the worker are reconfigured and placed in crisis during the technological transition of the Fourth Industrial Revolution and the so-called Second Machine Age through an analysis of the narrative and narrative subject of Park Chan-wook’s film “No Other Choice”. Although artificial intelligence is not represented as a personified entity in the film, as is often the case in science fiction cinema, this paper conceptualizes AI as a technological system integrated with the capitalist mode of production. From this perspective, the study analyzes the structural mechanisms through which the film captures the erosion of humanity and the transformation of subjectivity. Drawing on posthumanist and AI dystopian discourse, as well as Hannah Arendt’s concept of labor, this paper investigates how automation-centered industrial structures marginalize human labor and devalue human qualities. The film presents the decline of the paper industry—an analog foundation of production—as a key medium through which human labor is gradually repositioned as expendable in the face of digital and AI technologies. Through a narrative in which an unemployed subject eliminates competing humans, the film reveals that the human–machine relationship is being reorganized not as one of cooperation or coexistence, but as an asymmetrical power structure. In this process, human qualities are redefined as vulnerabilities or obstacles to efficiency and survival, and the subject is transformed into an anti-human figure who has internalized the logic of the technological system. This study argues that the film does not reduce this transformation to individual moral failure, but instead narrativizes it as a structural consequence produced by the convergence of capital and AI-driven automation. “No Other Choice” dismantles the optimistic myth that the advancement and expansion of AI technologies will liberate humans from labor, and instead functions as a symptomatic narrative of posthuman dystopia that exposes how automated technological civilization erodes the existential foundations and ethical conditions of human life. Through this narrative, the film suggests that the central task of the AI era lies not in the design of a technological utopia, but in the critical rethinking and reconstruction of the conditions and roles of humanity.

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