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Weapons of Math Destruction

How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy

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Brought to you by Penguin.

In this New York Times best seller, 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.

©2022 Cathy O'Neil (P)2022 Penguin Audio Computer Science History & Culture Machine Theory & Artificial Intelligence Politics & Government Technology & Society Technology Software Development Mathematics Software Socialism

Critic reviews

"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)
All stars
Most relevant
It was great. (smiley and heart) But the book was maby a bit too long??

great insights

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Been meaning to get hold of this book for a while having seen Cathy O’Neil in a number of interviews and been really impressed by her.

Her book lays bare the hidden truths about how data impacts our private lives as well as the gross inequalities it creates and quiet autocracy it hides.

You get an eye-opening education in to how we all are triaged by algorithms. We live in worlds were we go along in innocence not realizing just how deep the data mining of our lives goes.

Ignore O’Neils messages at your peril but know that there will be some faraway algorithms in big data land that will be noting your refusal to engage with her message for future reference. In time to come AI will use that refusal to the advantage of the entities it represents.

This isn’t conspiracy theory, O’Neil a mathematician and now data analyst who has worked as a quant backs up all her assertions with facts.

I wholeheartedly commend this book to you.



Hate math? Read this book and change your mind.

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A must for anyone interested in a fair and just implementation of new technologies which have the potential to benefit us but also harm us.

A worrying insight into the potential of AI to have a detremental impact on our lives and our democracies

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This work is now a decade old, yet many of its core insights remain strikingly relevant. While the book would benefit from updated, contemporary examples, given how dramatically algorithmic “weapons of math destruction” have evolved since 2016, it was undeniably ahead of its time.

At the time of publication, the author demonstrated remarkable foresight in identifying the ethical and societal risks posed by intelligent and increasingly autonomous systems.

For that reason alone, this book deserves recognition as a foundational text. I would strongly recommend it to anyone pursuing a career in computing, neuroscience, neuro-linguistics, psychology, software engineering, or the social sciences more broadly.

A decade on, it is telling that public discourse only truly accelerated with the arrival of mainstream AI chatbots.

We are now grappling with the consequences of systems that embody many of the very risks outlined here: systems that function, in effect, as scalable AI based algorithmic WMDs.

Congratulations to the author. I thoroughly enjoyed the book and look forward to reading Shame in the near future.

Fundamentally Important Read But Needs an Update for 2026

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Was really looking forward to this book, and the author is definitely accomplished. The book has two flaws in my view. First, it's too americanized when it would be amazing if we could have more international examples or at least more extrapolation from the examples given. It comes across as very idiosyncratic and local when the issues raised are much more general and broadly applicable. Second, a lot of the language seems eerily close to the "shame" list of words that AI models like chatGPT are producing too much of (like "delve"), and the writing can come across as a little too canned for my personal taste at times (and other times quite vivid and good, so an uneven experience). In total the book is likely good for US based readers and listeners but seems too narrow and linguistically stereotypical when the author herself has so much to give.

Too American and gpt?

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