Weapons of Math Destruction

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER A former Wall Street quant sounds the alarm on Big Data and the mathematical models that threaten to rip apart our social fabric—with a new afterword “A manual for the twenty-first-century citizen . . . relevant and urgent.”—Financial Times NATIONAL BOOK AWARD LONGLIST NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New York Times Book Review The Boston GlobeWired Fortune Kirkus Reviews The Guardian Nature On Point We live in the age of the algorithm. Increasingly the decisions that affect our lives—where we go to school whether we can get a job or a loan how much we pay for health insurance—are being made not by humans but by machines. In theory this should lead to greater fairness: Everyone is judged according to the same rules. But as mathematician and data scientist Cathy O’Neil reveals the mathematical models being used today are unregulated and uncontestable even when they’re wrong. Most troubling they reinforce discrimination—propping up the lucky punishing the downtrodden and undermining our democracy in the process. Welcome to the dark side of Big Data.