Weapons of Math Destruction

Weapons of Math Destruction by Dr. Cathy O'Neil

In her introduction, Dr. O'Neil informs the reader about how the advances in technology and automated decision making have made human lives simpler but at the cost of encoding human prejudice, bias, and misunderstanding into these advanced frameworks. She calls such models Weapons of Math destruction of WMDs for short. These models have a tendency to be self-pertuating (often lack feedback), punish the poor, hard to appeal (can be re-tweeked), and go unquestioned. She states that often human victims are held to higher standard of providing evidence than these algorithms. Moreover, she points out that the data scientists creating this model pay little attention to the end consumer of the algorithm, but rather simply re-train their model with newer data and claim no statistical component can be perfect.

Side note: Hussien Al-Olimat was reading this book and posting about it! So decide to give it a try! Thanks Hussien for bring this book to my attention!