NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A former Wall Street quant sounds the alarm on Big Data and the
mathematical models that threaten to rip apart our social fabric-with a new afterword A manual
for the twenty-first-century citizen . . . relevant and urgent.-Financial Times NATIONAL BOOK
AWARD LONGLIST • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New York Times Book Review •
Boston Globe • Wired • Fortune • Kirkus Reviews • The Guardian • Nature • On Point We live in
the age of the algorithm. Increasingly the decisions that affect our lives-where we go to
school whether we can get a job or a loan how much we pay for health insurance-are being made
not by humans but by machines. In theory this should lead to greater fairness: Everyone is
judged according to the same rules. But as mathematician and data scientist Cathy O'Neil
reveals the mathematical models being used today are unregulated and uncontestable even when
they're wrong. Most troubling they reinforce discrimination-propping up the lucky punishing
the downtrodden and undermining our democracy in the process. Welcome to the dark side of Big
Data.
