Weapons of Math Destruction: How Large Information Will increase Inequality and Threatens Democracy

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • 
A former Wall Avenue quant sounds the alarm on Large Information and the mathematical fashions that threaten to tear aside our social cloth—with a brand new afterword

 

“A handbook for the twenty-first-century citizen . . . related and pressing.”—Monetary Occasions

 

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We dwell within the age of the algorithm. More and more, the selections that have an effect on our lives—the place we go to high school, whether or not we are able to get a job or a mortgage, how a lot we pay for medical insurance—are being made not by people, however by machines. In idea, this could result in better equity: Everyone seems to be judged in line with the identical guidelines.

 

However as mathematician and information scientist Cathy O’Neil reveals, the mathematical fashions getting used at the moment are unregulated and uncontestable, even once they’re improper. Most troubling, they reinforce discrimination—propping up the fortunate, punishing the downtrodden, and undermining our democracy within the course of. Welcome to the darkish facet of Large Information.