Product Description

Longlisted for the National Book Award
New York Times Bestseller

A former Wall Street quant 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 liveswhere we go to school whether we get a car loan how much we pay for health insuranceare 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.

But as Cathy ONeil reveals in this urgent and necessary book the opposite is true. The models being used today are opaque unregulated and uncontestable even when theyre wrong. Most troubling they reinforce discrimination: If a poor student cant get a loan because a lending model deems him too risky (by virtue of his zip code) hes then cut off from the kind of education that could pull him out of poverty and a vicious spiral ensues. Models are propping up the lucky and punishing the downtrodden creating a toxic cocktail for democracy. Welcome to the dark side of Big Data.

Tracing the arc of a person??s life?? O??Neil exposes the black box models that shape our future?? both as individuals and "society. These ??weapons of math destruction?? score teachers and students?? sort r?sum?s?? grant (or deny) loans?? evaluate workers?? target voters?? se