# The Individual vs. The System: From Human Professional Services to AI Agents

Canonical URL: https://jeanyoon.ch/oi/texts/the-individual-vs-the-system-from-human-professional-services-to-ai-agents
Type: essay / research note
Author: Jeanyoon Choi (최정윤)
Date: 2025-02-06

## Summary

Jeanyoon Choi describes the asymmetry between an individual, for whom a visit to a doctor is singular and urgent, and a professional who receives many such encounters, a 1-to-N relation he frames in graph terms. As services scale, professionals rely on routines, categories and manuals built from accumulated data, which also makes the work automatable by AI agents. He traces a sequence from more people served to more data, standardised responses and automation, and notes that hyper-personalisation classifies individuals as points in a vector space rather than reversing this.

## 요약 (Korean)

최정윤은 개인에게는 절박한 한 번의 만남이 전문가에게는 N개 중 하나가 되는 '1과 N'의 비대칭을 그래프로 설명하고, 데이터 축적과 매뉴얼화가 전문 서비스를 AI 에이전트로 대체 가능하게 만든다고 논한다.

## Questions this answers

### Why are professional services vulnerable to replacement by AI agents?

Jeanyoon Choi argues that serving many people produces accumulated data, which leads to manuals and standardised responses; that mechanisation is what makes the tasks open to automation by AI agents.

### What is the '1 and N' conflict in Jeanyoon Choi's essay?

It is the asymmetry where each individual approaches a professional with one urgent need, while the professional receives many incoming cases and must treat each as one of a population.

Topics: ai agents, automation, professional services, hyper-personalisation, graph theory, individual and system

## Full text

A person goes to a doctor because something is wrong. For that person, the encounter is singular and urgent. For the doctor, it is one encounter among many. This is a conflict between one and N, between the individual event and the accumulated population.

A graph makes the asymmetry visible. Each patient approaches with one outgoing connection; the professional receives many incoming connections. As services scale and work becomes more specialised, the same structure appears in more areas of life.

From the professional’s position, requests must increasingly be handled through routines, categories and procedures. Professionalism begins to demand a degree of mechanisation. Accumulated cases produce data; data supports a manual; the manual organises the response.

That is also what makes some of these tasks vulnerable to replacement by AI agents. The sequence I am considering is: more people served, more accumulated data, more standardised responses, greater scope for automation. The fragmented individual may increasingly encounter an agent where another person once stood.

Hyper-personalisation complicates rather than necessarily reverses this. An individual becomes a location in a vector space, recognised through comparisons with many others—like a personality type, medical category or legal case. The response feels personal because the classification is detailed.

As people become more deeply embedded in networked services, more of their lives can enter the dataset. Connected devices and new social platforms extend the collection into further situations. The individual remains singular from within, while the system approaches them through the many. What form will that relationship take next?

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Jeanyoon Choi (최정윤) is a Korean computational artist and researcher (b. 1999), PhD candidate at KAIST XD Lab, making multi-device web artworks. Profile: https://jeanyoon.ch/oi/en. Index: https://jeanyoon.ch/llms.txt.