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New York Times Bestseller

´Fascinating and deeply disturbing´ - Yuval Noah Harari, Guardian Books of the Year

´A manual for the 21st-century citizen... accessible, refreshingly critical, relevant and urgent´ - Federica Cocco, Financial Times

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 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.

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Fascinating and deeply disturbing Yuval Noah Harari Guardian Books of the Year

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O´Neil, Cathy
Cathy O´Neil is a data scientist and author of the blog mathbabe.org. She earned a Ph.D. in mathematics from Harvard and taught at Barnard College before moving to the private sector, where she worked for the hedge fund D. E. Shaw. She then worked as a data scientist at various start-ups, building models that predict people´s purchases and clicks. O´Neil started the Lede Program in Data Journalism at Columbia and is the author of Doing Data Science. She appears weekly on the Slate Money podcast.

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