The end-of-the-year "Best Books" lists are starting to come out and one that I'm seeing a lot is Cathy O'Neil's Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatans Democracy.
Here's the sales pitch:
A former Wall Street quant sounds an alarm on the mathematical models that pervade modern life — and threaten to rip apart our social fabric
We live in the age of the algorithm. Increasingly, the decisions that affect our lives—where we go to school, whether we get a car loan, how much we pay for health insurance—are being made not by humans, but by mathematical models. In theory, this should lead to greater fairness: Everyone is judged according to the same rules, and bias is eliminated.
