Weapons of Math Destruction

We all know that the future is dangerous. Nukes, artificial intelligences, superbugs, global warming, military drones, and black hole supercolliders are all competing to see which will ultimately spell the end of humanity. In Weapons of Math Destruction, Cathy O'Neil reveals yet another destructive agent of the future: mathematics itself. Well, not quite. The problems that O'Neil details are much less conspicuous and much more insidious than a hostile takeover of all computers or the collapse of the very foundations of logic. These problems lie in mathematical models, and in the amount of implicit trust we’ve placed in those models.

Mathematical models are all around us, and most of them are unfortunately complicated, confusing, and opaque. Most of us, however, don't often think about these models, or even realize that they exist. If every mathematical model ever used were perfect and wonderful and reflected the world in all the right ways, then this would be fine. The models would chug along, sorting people into and out of jobs and sentencing people in reasonable ways, giving every person what they deserved as we continued our lives none the wiser.

This is of course not what happens. Weapons of Math Destruction reveals the many, many ways that blindly trusting math can cause problems. You see, while no model is perfect, some models are imperfect in ways that undermine their own effectiveness, sometimes with terrible consequences. Models that fall into these traps are called Weapons of Math Destruction, or WMDs for short. Often, these models are unflinching in their imperfections, taking irrelevant factors into account and never learning from their mistakes or successes. To make it worse, many people trust these mathematical models as impartial and infallible just by virtue of them being powered by math.

O'Neil quickly and effectively dispels the notion of math as an all-knowing arbiter and exposes WMDs for the dangers that they truly are. Each chapter of Weapons of Math Destruction focuses on a part of our lives that is becoming increasingly controlled by mathematical models, and how WMDs are making everything worse. The book is full of analogies and examples, but it never strays far from its core argument, that WMDs exist and could well ruin everything if we don't do something about them.

If you are at all curious about anything I've said, or if you are intrigued by the concept of dangerous and biased mathematics, then you should read Weapons of Math Destruction. It goes into far more detail than I have, providing not only real-world examples of WMDs but also strategies for identifying a WMD in the wild. For an extensive introduction to a slightly terrifying facet of our society, look no further than Weapons of Math Destruction.