New York Times Bestseller` Fascinating & deeply disturbing`
- Yuval Noah Harari, Guardian Books of the Year `A manual for the 21st-century citizen... accessible, refreshingly critical, relevant & urgent`
- Federica Cocco, Financial Times A former Wall Street quant sounds an alarm on the mathematical models that pervade modern life
- & 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, & bias is eliminated. & yet, as Cathy O` Neil reveals in this urgent & necessary book, the opposite is true. The models being used today are opaque, unregulated, & 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 & as a society. These ”weapons of math destruction” score teachers & students, sort CVs, grant or deny loans, evaluate workers, target voters, & monitor our health. O` Neil calls on modellers to take more responsibility for their algorithms & 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, & demand change.