Unmasking AI
My Mission to Protect What Is Human in a World of Machines
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- €11.99
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- €11.99
Publisher Description
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • “The conscience of the AI revolution” (Fortune) explains how we’ve arrived at an era of AI harms and oppression, and what we can do to avoid its pitfalls.
“AI is not coming, it’s here. If we answer the beautiful call inside these pages, we can decide who we are going to be and how we’re going to use technology in service of what it means to be fully human.”—Brené Brown, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Dare to Lead
A LOS ANGELES TIMES BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR • Shortlisted for the Inc. Non-Obvious Book Award
To most of us, it seems like recent developments in artificial intelligence emerged out of nowhere to pose unprecedented threats to humankind. But to Dr. Joy Buolamwini, who has been at the forefront of AI research, this moment has been a long time in the making.
After tinkering with robotics as a high school student in Memphis and then developing mobile apps in Zambia as a Fulbright fellow, Buolamwini followed her lifelong passion for computer science, engineering, and art to MIT in 2015. As a graduate student at the “Future Factory,” she did groundbreaking research that exposed widespread racial and gender bias in AI services from tech giants across the world.
Unmasking AI goes beyond the headlines about existential risks produced by Big Tech. It is the remarkable story of how Buolamwini uncovered what she calls “the coded gaze”—the evidence of encoded discrimination and exclusion in tech products—and how she galvanized the movement to prevent AI harms by founding the Algorithmic Justice League. Applying an intersectional lens to both the tech industry and the research sector, she shows how racism, sexism, colorism, and ableism can overlap and render broad swaths of humanity “excoded” and therefore vulnerable in a world rapidly adopting AI tools. Computers, she reminds us, are reflections of both the aspirations and the limitations of the people who create them.
Encouraging experts and non-experts alike to join this fight, Buolamwini writes, “The rising frontier for civil rights will require algorithmic justice. AI should be for the people and by the people, not just the privileged few.”
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Part memoir, part polemic, this trenchant debut from computer scientist Buolamwini chronicles her career studying encoded bias in artificial intelligence. She explains that her interest in the failures of AI started when, as a master's student at MIT in 2015, she struggled to get a facial recognition program to track her face. Putting on a white theater mask did the trick, revealing that the program only worked for light-skinned faces and alerting Buolamwini to how human prejudices get baked into tech. Exploring the ethical quandaries posed by AI, she shares research that found facial recognition software's spotty record detecting dark-skinned individuals' faces stemmed from training the software with image datasets mostly comprising light-skinned people. Attempts to fix this bias have led to further injury, according to Buolamwini, who describes a China-based startup's initiative to collect photos of Zimbabwean individuals' faces for AI datasets as a form of "data colonialism" that exploits Zimbabwean people "to build the wealth of foreign companies." Buolamwini proves that she's among the sharpest critics of AI, and her list of principles for achieving "algorithmic justice," which includes the stipulation that "people have a voice" in shaping the algorithms that influence their lives, charts a path forward. Urgent and incisive, this is a vital examination of AI's pitfalls.
