In the middle of technological ‘progress’ I saw God.

Yes. It happened today, during a meeting.

When a colleague of mine asked if it was possible to run Co-Pilot on a very crucial document, that kind of was defining our new team structure, what will happen to us and what not.

I started thinking of Qur’an and Peter Conrad’s brilliant book Mythomania. I will tell you how at that very moment it all hit me. If you are still reading and not thinking of going back to scrolling on insta, great. I will tell you why.

“Read, in the Name of your Lord who created” is the 1st line of the Al-Alaq Sura of the Quran. The translation of ‘ikra’ as ‘read’ doesn’t do justice to the real meaning. (Ikra’ bismi rabbikellezî halak). Ikra doesn’t simple mean read. It means to gather, to collect, to bring pieces of information together in the mind, synthesise and tell them back, to the outer world. In a way it means to question, to use your own brain. It is active thinking: question, assemble, reason, speak.

In his book Mythomania, Peter Conrad links mythological or biblical stories to modern time giants and monsters and modern time people like us: Homo consumericus. In line with the premise of the book, the first chapter delves into the logo choice of Apple , the apple. It is of course inevitable that he starts telling the story of the worlds most notorious apple of all times: the one that Adam and Eve ate. As we all know, that apple, was from the “tree of the knowledge of good and evil” and “it shouldn’t be eaten”. According to Conrad, they were not kicked out of the garden because they ate but because they didn’t question the reason why. Their lack of curiosity and their lack of questioning was the first original sin.

So when someone proposed handing a defining document to Co‑Pilot, my reaction wasn’t fear of automation. It was a warning about abandoning our own rights. The PDF in question was not a casual memo. It was a document that outlined how our work, roles, and responsibilities would change; it had information on what would be expected of us, what opportunities and consequences were coming. That kind of text demands close reading: to trace implications, to spot the logic gaps, to mark what’s left unsaid. It asks for skepticism, for cross-checking, for contextualizing. It asks for accountability. Offloading interpretation to a tool no matter how smart risks turning ikra into passive receipt. We stop gathering, stop testing assumptions, stop arguing the premises that will shape people’s roles and futures. We risk letting an algorithm synthesize decisions we should be interrogating. We risk letting crucial information on our collective future get lost in a summary. We risk not questioning the decision makers who are making.

Curiosity (ikra) becomes an ethical obligation and nothing less for the future of humanity.

Countries are led by business people who aims for nothing but power and money, businesses mimics and becomes the micro version of how countries are led. We accepted the terms and conditions without reading, look where we are now. Our data against us is making a bunch of guys disrupt the balance of the world.

Reading and requesting answers might be the most rebellious thing to do nowadays.

So do it. Read. For your own good. If not in the name of the God.

Selin