A manual for the 21stcentury citizen... accessible refreshingly critical relevant and urgent Financial Times Fascinating and deeply disturbing Yuval Noah Harari Guardian Books of the Year In this New York Times bestseller Cathy ONeil one of the first champions of algorithmic accountability 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 loan how much we pay for 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. And yet as Cathy ONeil reveals in this urgent and necessary book the opposite is true. The models being used today are opaque unregulated and incontestable even when theyre wrong. Most troubling they reinforce discrimination. Tracing the arc of a persons life ONeil exposes the black box models that shape our future both as individuals and as a society. These weapons of math destruction score teachers and students sort CVs grant or deny loans evaluate workers target voters and monitor our health. ONeil calls on modellers to take more responsibility for their algorithms and on policy makers to regulate their use. But in the end its up to us to become more savvy about the models that govern our lives. This important book empowers us to ask the tough questions uncover the truth and demand change.