Skip to main content

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.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Data from Government Portals

In last some months I happened to see the vast amount of data and statistics available in our govt. portals. I was always surprised at the amount the data available to public in western countries. Cities like NewYork provide charts on various topics available to people. They used a business intelligence tool (OBIEE) I work on for providing many useful graphs too. (No I did not not work on that project) Check the NewYork CPR (City Wide Performance Reporting) here: http://www.nyc.gov/html/ops/cpr/html/home/home.shtml Even UN made its database available to public for along time and has been updating the way people can access it. ( http://unstats.un.org/unsd/cdb/ updated to http://data.un.org/ ) One can see numerous infographics made out of these by people e.g: http://projects.flowingdata.com/state-of-the-world/ http://www.npr.org/news/graphics/2009/apr/electric-grid/ http://www.candychang.com/desk/2008/11/12/vendor-power/ Now the best news of theme all is this: http://googleblog.blogspot...
Post a Comment
Read more

Cybercoolies and IT super-power : Myth resolved

Cybercoolies and...... as a preface plz go thru this blog first.. http://bakerstreetirregulars.blogspot.com/ Though it's rude, it's truth.Now things apart.....u can easily think of this. Why are we given these IT projects, try to understand...how it all works? It's not that difficult. Now Us and many other development countries have a large pool of talent which is gud . Still companies ther outsource ther project to countries like India. Reason is the talent they have is costly...... though they have masters of technology among them, they do and will outsource their projects. Mostly something laborious and hectic is given, to cut the cost their finance department takes the decision over to outsource. Now their tech guy ther is guru of technology and can do all their project but he will demand a lot of dollars...now he will just administer and do the key parts and remaining are outsourced..so he is paid less....gud for the company. Then the company outsource to a IT services...
6 comments
Read more