“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.
“Dr. Joy
Buolamwini has been an essential figure in bringing irresponsible,
profit-hungry tech giants to their knees. If you’re going to read
only one book about AI, this should be it.”—Darren Walker,
president of the Ford Foundation
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.”