Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy

In 2008, Cathy O’Neil, a data scientist at the hedge fund D.E. Shaw, watched as the entire financial sector around her imploded.1 The financial crisis gave O’Neil, a self-proclaimed math nerd with a Ph.D., a front row seat to the weaponization of mathematics. During the financial crisis, complex mathematical models designed and marketed to be superior to human ability and beyond the confines of human subjectivity turned out to be farces—layers of false assumptions coated in difficult-to-understand layers of mathematics. In order to dupe both the public and themselves, financial analysts at banks used models and algorithms as a justification for their subjective and flawed inputs. Ten years after the financial crisis, O’Neil sees these nefarious models infiltrating every aspect of modern life. These “Weapons of Math Destruction”—as O’Neil calls them—are (1) “opaque,” (2) “beyond dispute or appeal,” and (3) disproportionally impact the underprivileged.2 These Weapons of Math Destruction, or WMDs, replace the role of traditional subjective decision makers and cause those affected by their decisionmaking to adjust their ways of life to the models. In Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy, O’Neil highlights different WMDs that have infiltrated various areas of American life.