PC’s Review

In “Weapons of Math Destruction”, by Cathy O’Neil, the bias behind machine learning and its algorithms are exposed and elaborated on by providing various examples seen in cases across the country. The main areas covered in the book include opacity and scaling of the models, unfairness, and corruption behind the creation of the models. O’Neil further elaborates throughout the book how these algorithms and the biases that come with them have led to hundreds of people falling victim when the models were originally intended to bring efficiency to the world and makes jobs easier for others, when some of the models do the exact opposite.

As someone new to the field of data science, this book was eye-opening to see the negative impacts algorithms can bring to others. When first learning about data science, it is preached how beneficial it can be and the how it is contributing to furthering the different industries. After reading “Weapons of Math Destruction”, a new perspective is gained making those who plan on going into the field of data science more educated on the dangers of algorithms, which will help instill better practices among individuals to incorporate when working with machine learning models to try and eliminate bias.

R’s Review

Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism is a 2018 book written by Safiya Umoja Noble. Noble focuses on problems caused by the Google algorithm as the biased search algorithm discriminations against people of color, particularly women. The issue of Google’s algorithm first drew Noble’s attention when she was with her stepdaughter and nieces, wanting to find fun activities for them to do. Upon typing “black girls” into the search engine, the first several results were all from pornography sites. Throughout the book, Noble uses screenshots from social media or her own computer’s search results to show the inappropriate and racist results that are brought forward by Google. Throughout the exploration of Google’s algorithms, Noble criticizes Google’s response to many scenarios, where their statements regarding inappropriate search results often blame the people who are doing the searches, rather than faulting their own algorithm for putting discriminatory and sometimes dangerous results on the first few pages of Google. An example in the book includes the search for “Jew” leading to antisemitic websites, and Google’s statement calling for people to search for “Judaism” or “Jewish people” instead. In her book, Noble addresses the monopoly that Google has on information, and expands to talk about the problem of free search engines, such as Google and Yelp, and their use as advertising websites rather than information providers.

Algorithms of Oppression is a great book that had me reexamining my daily use of Google as a search for information. Many of the screenshotted tweets shown in the book were viral on social media at the time, so seeing them online when they first occurred versus revisiting them in the book and looking at the results as one part of a continuous problem was really eye opening and made the book more relatable. Some parts of the book are technical, as Noble cites information provided by professors or other researchers, but the book is easy to follow and Noble does a great job of breaking her points down.