Artificial Unintelligence

Illustrated with examples from Broussard’s own work and experience, this is an intensely personal journey that gives a real sense of travelling with a friend. Her descriptions of hackathons and other aspects of start-up culture are honest and atmospheric, capturing the social as well as the technical aspects of the marketplace in a way that anchors moments of technical innovation in their time and place. Hopefully, this book will gather a wide general, as well as academic, audience. It deserves to become a classic – but, even more, it deserves to be read and debated.

Her book serves as a straightforward and necessary primer on the predictable ways—historically speaking—that AI and big data tend to let us down… Broussard lays out clearly and firmly just how duped we’ve been by the unique brand of technological boosterism that develops when technologists, and even whole fields of technology, have little to no social accountability.

This is, quite simply, the best book I’ve read about computers and the problems of ‘technochauvism’. Everyone should read it and it should be force-fed to every programmer in the world, as a reminder that machines are not always the answer to human problems.

This book is appropriate for the general public, computer science students, librarians, information professionals, and policymakers concerned with the increased presence of Artificial Intelligence in everyday life. Anyone intrigued with ethical implications of Artificial Intelligence or Machine Learning will find this book informative and useful.

This book deserves praise as a timely, accessible and often entertaining account that sets the record straight on what current approaches to AI are and are not capable of delivering.

Meredith Broussard is an Assistant Professor in the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at New York University. A former features editor at the Philadelphia Inquirer and software developer at AT&T Bell Labs and the MIT Media Lab, she has written articles and essays for the Atlantic, Harper’s, Slate, the Washington Post, and other publications.

This item is eligible for free returns within 30 days of delivery. See our returns policy for further details.