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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