There's an old saying that you cannot judge a book by its cover. So you can
only imagine my amazement when I was at the bookstore browsing through books
when my eyes caught the autobiography of the Swedish footballer Zlatan
Ibrahimovic with his mug on the cover. It indeed is a book about Zlatan
Ibrahimovic that led me to thinking that perhaps not all old sayings come
with the inherent wisdom that we have been brought up to believe. While this
particular proverb sounds wise, practical examples can easily be shown to
disprove it after which it will be nothing else but a blatant lie meant to
manipulate the masses to buy books that they wouldn't otherwise be interested
in buying. If you really think about it, the book covers are designed and
picked by the publishers and they do it very intentionally. Thus the whole
idea that you couldn't judge a book by its cover is bizarre because typically
the cover has been designed to attract reader's attention and quite often the
book is exactly what you think it will be.

Naturally this is only the case if the saying is taken very literally. It is
also possible to use the saying metaphorically, when it can indeed be more
accurate. To best explain when this old saying is true, I will use an example,
a really strange occurrance, that happened to me last Monday when I visited
the local McDonalds. It started very ordinarily with me walking to the counter
and ordering a Big Mac meal with fries, coke and a chili dip. The young lady
behind the counter took my order, we exchanged some witty banter, and the lady
put the fries and the coke on the tray. At that specific moment they didn't
have Big Mac-burgers ready, so she casually said: "I'll bring your burger to
the table." so I left and sat down to a table at the back to wait. It all
seemed very normal, but little did I know that everything was about change
and that my world would soon be turning upside down.

Few minutes later a young man approaches me, puts a hamburger on my tray and
says to me: "Here's your Big Mac."

"Shapeshifters!", I thought when the guy's back was getting farther from me
as he was heading back to the kitchen. He? Or she? How could I even tell what
would be its original form. Was this person even real? What if it's a robot
programmed to do easy chores such as waiting on the tables? That seemed
plausible but I couldn't help thinking why these robots would be equipped
with a gender transformation feature. Perhaps it uses artificial intelligence,
a piece of code, which had maybe detected nervousness in my behaviour when
submitting my order and has now come to the conclusion that I'd feel more
comfortable when dealing with a male waiter rather than a woman. Maybe it
wasn't witty banter after all, but a test that the robot uses to profile
customers in order to provide the best service. Should I complain to the
manager and tell that their piece of code has a bug that wrongly thinks that
I would prefer male service when in reality I was perfectly happy with the
young lady?

I looked for the shift manager and indeed saw him there serving another
customer. That was my problem. Him! Was he also a shapeshifting robot?
What if all these robots are sharing a network and operating with the same
corrupted data? How could I even explain my worries to a robot? Science has
progressed rapidly. There was a time when artificial intelligence meant a
blonde woman dyeing their hair black but since then science has progressed
rapidly. I still wasn't sure if these robots would even understand my
dilemma that was mainly emotional, human feeling. Another reason for my
hesitation was that I felt that perhaps I shouldn't reveal to them that
I've found out about their shapeshifting robots because I am still not
sure what the ramifications could be, but let's just say that there's one
thing that I've learned when dealing with the shapeshifters, and that is
to never judge book by its cover.

--Darol