Weapons of Math Destruction
Publisher,Penguin Books Ltd
Publication Date,
Format, Paperback
Weight, 189.94 g
No. of Pages, 272
Shelf: Non-Fiction Books / Business Finance & Accounting / Economics
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'A manual for the 21st-century citizen... accessible, refreshingly critical, relevant and urgent' - Financial Times
'Fascinating and deeply disturbing' - Yuval Noah Harari, Guardian Books of the Year
In this New York Times bestseller, Cathy O'Neil, one of the first champions of algorithmic accountability, sounds an alarm on the mathematical models that pervade modern life -- and threaten to rip apart our social fabric.
We live in the age of the algorithm. Increasingly, the decisions that affect our lives - where we go to school, whether we get a loan, how much we pay for insurance - are being made not by humans, but by mathematical models. In theory, this should lead to greater fairness: everyone is judged according to the same rules, and bias is eliminated.
And yet, as Cathy O'Neil reveals in this urgent and necessary book, the opposite is true. The models being used today are opaque, unregulated, and incontestable, even when they're wrong. Most troubling, they reinforce discrimination. Tracing the arc of a person's life, O'Neil exposes the black box models that shape our future, both as individuals and as a society. These "weapons of math destruction" score teachers and students, sort CVs, grant or deny loans, evaluate workers, target voters, and monitor our health.
O'Neil calls on modellers to take more responsibility for their algorithms and on policy makers to regulate their use. But in the end, it's up to us to become more savvy about the models that govern our lives. This important book empowers us to ask the tough questions, uncover the truth, and demand change.
Dimensions : 7.8 x 5.08 x 0.65 inche
Weapons of Math Destruction" is a well-thought-out and well-organized book that plainly explains how the emerging technological systems of our era are engineering, reinforcing, and then criminalizing poverty.
A must-read for anyone that wants to understand how issues of personal data interact with technology and society.
The subtitle of this book, How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy really says it all. Big data has come into our lives in numerous ways, and many of them are a scourge on our lives. Big data, in and of itself, is not to blame, but the uses to which it is put are often outrageous. Take the case of automated teacher evaluations. These are often based on the improvement of students' scores. It seems like a no-brainer, and since the scores take into account the improvement rather than the absolute scores, they seem to be very fair. However, one New York teacher received an abysmal score of 6 (out of 100) one year, and the following year received a wonderful score of 96. Obviously the teacher did not suddenly improve his teaching methods.
I loved this book! It unveiled the truth about the misuse of big data and how our deepest believes can misguide the benefits of properly defined models in coding!