October 9, 2023
Part memoir, part polemic, this trenchant debut from computer scientist Buolamwini chronicles her career studying encoded bias in artificial intelligence. She explains that her interest in the failures of AI started when, as a master’s student at MIT in 2015, she struggled to get a facial recognition program to track her face. Putting on a white theater mask did the trick, revealing that the program only worked for light-skinned faces and alerting Buolamwini to how human prejudices get baked into tech. Exploring the ethical quandaries posed by AI, she shares research that found facial recognition software’s spotty record detecting dark-skinned individuals’ faces stemmed from training the software with image datasets mostly comprising light-skinned people. Attempts to fix this bias have led to further injury, according to Buolamwini, who describes a China-based startup’s initiative to collect photos of Zimbabwean individuals’ faces for AI datasets as a form of “data colonialism” that exploits Zimbabwean people “to build the wealth of foreign companies.” Buolamwini proves that she’s among the sharpest critics of AI, and her list of principles for achieving “algorithmic justice,” which includes the stipulation that “people have a voice” in shaping the algorithms that influence their lives, charts a path forward. Urgent and incisive, this is a vital examination of AI’s pitfalls.
October 15, 2023
A computer scientist chronicles her journey from eager graduate student to crusader against algorithmic bias. The daughter of Ghanaian immigrants to the U.S., Buolamwini, the founder of the Algorithmic Justice League, first caught the AI bug as a 9-year-old watching a PBS program about a "social robot" named Kismet, "a dazzling and intricate web of metal and wires topped off with enchanting eyes." At 25, she was a graduate student in MIT's Media Lab. At the end of her first semester, Buolamwini made a troubling discovery. Working on a final class project that involved face-tracking software, she discovered that the software was unable to "see" her "dark-skinned" face. However, it could see her face when she donned a white Halloween mask, which meant she could only finish coding the project in "whiteface." At first, Buolamwini was reluctant to embrace the political dimension of her work, despite more than one encounter in which she realized that the software libraries she was working with "were not optimized for people like me with darker skin." Eventually, she decided to fully focus on bias in technology, specifically on "AI systems applied to human faces." At the time, facial recognition systems were being marketed to law enforcement agencies in the U.S. and U.K. Huge tech companies like Amazon and IBM were entering the field, touting programs that could analyze faces and guess demographics like age and race. However, as the author discovered in her groundbreaking research, the systems had largely been trained on data sets predominantly made up of white men; unsurprisingly, they were best at analyzing the faces of white men. Buolamwini is clearly an exceptional scientist and passionate champion of the cause; if her prose is not always inspiring, the content certainly is. A timely call to action about the near-and-present dangers of AI systems.
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Starred review from November 1, 2023
Buolamwini fell in love with robotics as a teenager and found a passion for using technology to solve real-world problems when she studied in Africa. At MIT she discovered the burgeoning world of artificial intelligence and, hidden within it, programmatic biases she calls "the coded gaze." AI encodes the personal assumptions of the individuals who develop it as well as the structural biases of the communities who use it. Trained on datasets that reflect the social inequities of our society, AI too often ends up perpetuating prejudice. As we increasingly rely on AI to handle decision-making responsibilities in everything from hiring and housing to criminal identification and immigration, these baked-in biases have immense power to destroy lives and worsen social inequalities. Buolamwini takes readers step-by-step through an examination of how such biases enter AI in the first place, how they affect people in the real world, and how we can correct them. Woven through her critique of this increasingly important technology is her personal story of discovery and awakening. This is as much a memoir as it is a clarion call for change. Unmasking AI belongs alongside Cathy O'Neil's Weapons of Math Destruction (2016) and Safiya Umoja Noble's Algorithms of Oppression (2017) as essential warnings for our time. It's an important corrective to our unquestioning embrace of technology.
COPYRIGHT(2023) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.