Why read Automating Inequality?

Book cover of Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor

Book description

In Indiana, one million people lose their healthcare, food stamps, and cash benefits in three years-because a new computer system interprets any application mistake as "failure to cooperate." In Los Angeles, an algorithm calculates the comparative vulnerability of tens of thousands of homeless people in order to prioritize them for…

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Why read it?

1 author picked Automating Inequality as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Jerry Fishenden

Author

From the moment I picked this up, it gripped me.

Virginia Eubanks writes in an incredibly immersive and engaging style, making her book as compulsive as a work of fiction—and equally hard to put down. It exposes the deeply toxic consequences of the way automated decision-making increasingly dominates our public institutions, creating a sort of “twenty-first century digital poorhouse”.

This automated inequality denies citizens their humanity and any sense of agency, condemning them to the sort of negative moral judgments and cycle of decline and despair that would have been familiar to Charles Dickens in his day.

From Jerry's list on technology and democracy.