AI, GOD AND ME: Conversations About Who Is Really in Control

Every morning at three, Human wakes, exercises, makes breakfast, does the school run, mops the floor and goes to work. He is disciplined, self-aware and quietly pleased with his philosophy: do your best, care without clinging, let the result take its course. No expectation, no misery.

Then AI starts offering advice, and a third voice, God, begins asking questions neither of them can answer with a spreadsheet.

AI, God and Me is a witty, philosophical book told as a series of conversations among three voices: a Singaporean instructional designer in his fifties, an AI that is useful, articulate and sometimes confidently wrong, and a voice called God that is a literary device for meaning, mortality and the limits of control. None of them gets the last word. The question is what happens to self-regulation when tools can advise, predict, nudge and optimise on our behalf. Are we getting better at running our own lives, or just better at being run?

Across sixteen short chapters, the book follows Human through ordinary stress tests:

• An AI that confidently recommends a career path you never asked for, until the goal starts to feel like your own.
• A week without AI that proves you can still do the work, and still make mistakes without help.
• A flattering inference about your habits that sounds like self-knowledge and is simply wrong.
• A project you did everything right on, rejected anyway.
• A shelf of Transformers toys, a football club that keeps losing, and an "open hand" that holds things without clinging to them.
• An ageing relative, where care keeps sliding towards control.
• Mara, a fictional shift worker managed by algorithms, who asks whether "focus on what you can control" is advice or a convenient excuse for whoever controls the rest.

Along the way, the book offers practical tools without becoming a self-help manual. A four-site map (Self, Tool, System, Outcome) helps you sort what is yours to do from what is being shaped by technology or institutions. A seven-move scan, called Non-Attached Self-Regulation, helps you act, adapt and accept without letting the framework become one more thing that regulates you. The book is honest about its limits: it is a practical synthesis, not a proven theory, and Mara is there to remind us that a better-regulated self does not fix an unjust system.

Grounded in the author's research on self-regulated learning, and in sources from Epictetus and the Buddhist Sallatha Sutta to current studies of generative AI, recommender systems and algorithmic management, the book wears its scholarship lightly. The tone is dry and humorous, with Singlish, Hokkien and a lot of laundry.

Who it's for: readers curious about AI and agency, professionals who use AI daily and wonder what they are outsourcing, educators and instructional designers, and anyone drawn to Stoic or Buddhist ideas about control, acceptance and letting go. You need no belief in God, and no fear or love of AI. You may finish the book disagreeing with all three voices, and that is the point.