BOOK REVIEW: Unnatural Selection: The Catastrophic Cost of Misusing AI (Pafel Dubois)

Unnatural Selection is the perfect title for this book, taking a jab at what we have known for a long time, proposed by Charles Darwin.

I am someone who is always cautious about privacy and AI. Unfortunately, I’ve been called paranoid way too many times by my own friends and family. Imho, I am not even at the paranoia border line. The things I do are basic, from covering my front cameras, clearing cache, only installing very necessary apps that don’t ask unrelated permissions, never signing up for lucky draws, and opting out of pesky unwanted services. I fact-check and question things I see or are sent to me, and that is apparently not fun. Just this morning, I had to opt out of another Gemini integration. This is not right; the option should be opt-in instead of opt-out, but the world is ridiculous right now.

This book educates the readers about this AI world, not in a preachy way, because it approaches everything logically, presenting facts and explaining what makes things happen. It gives real-life examples (and of course, I fact-checked some). I think it’s very well-written and inspiring. Everyone should read this, even the sceptics, and intellectually-challenged social media zombies who worship AI.

It feels optimistic. While I think the power of ordinary people is very limited, and without the power of the masses, there is nothing much one can do (because look at the political and social climates around the world right now, it’s very disheartening), optimism is still necessary. The challenge now is the education and awareness that can hopefully be improved by books like this.

I really recommend this book.

5 stars out of 5 

The Modern Day Problem

 

The other day, I had to travel to settle something. Everything should have been in order, but upon arrival, my data plan didn’t work.

This shouldn’t have been a problem in the past, but today, we rely too much on the phone. Sometimes it’s not because we want to, but because we have to, since the options are getting very limited. I couldn’t order public transport, and the only public transport I could flag down there was a taxi, which had become rarer than fat unicorns (rhinos).

There was no way to communicate with people to let them know I had arrived. Somehow, my balance (I was using prepaid) had mysteriously been sucked into oblivion, and it wasn’t enough to do anything. I couldn’t top it up to buy the internet because I didn’t have the internet to access the top-up function! It had become a modern-day problem that I needed to find a shop, and it had to be done manually because I couldn’t ask Google, because I didn’t have internet!

Thankfully, I finally found a small shop that refused to sell me anything unless I had the exact amount of change. Why? Beat me. I had to dig the bottom of my bag to find it, and I did. Fortunately, the problem ended there. It’s ridiculous, but that is the reality now.

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Thank you for reading. Have a great weekend!