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Reviewing: Numbercaste

Numbercaste book cover
Shenoy a great fan of and a regular columnist disseminating information on the sci-fi genre, recommended this book 'Numbercaste' to me. His reasoning was simple, I am a data scientist and this science fiction book is based on that. Interesting premise for sure. And was he right, I could connect to the story so easily and got hooked.

The author Yudhanjaya Wijeratne is a big data researcher himself. Thus, the premise is closer home for him. He knows the technological advances and the research that has been going on. He knows about the next barriers to be broken. As the author so humbly acknowledges he just put together things that are already happening around us and extrapolated them to come up with this beautiful book.

*** Possible Spoilers ahead ***

Key topics of interest to a technologist in this book are exoskeletons, universal identity management based on blockchain to mitigate migration crises, and social and credit scoring system taken to extreme as proxy for trust and reputation accessible by all. The latter is fleshed out very well in the book with several use cases for a technology company to bank on and promise a utopian society. The book takes inspiration from 1984 and China’s social scoring attempt, cites them and tries to bend the criticism for such systems in place. Do read to get the whole idea and get inspired. If you keep up with latest happenings in technology, you would feel that everything here is possible, which is both impressive and kind of scary.

Sc-fi books and authors have influenced the shape of things to come. Of course, they also take inspiration from existing science and extend it or twist it to give us projections. Hence, I’d suggest people interested and working on the topics that this book touches upon to read it.

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