Artificial Unintelligence
by Meredith Broussard
Broussard exposes technochauvinism - the belief tech solves everything - through adventures in driverless cars and biased algorithms
"We are so eager to do everything digitally that we have stopped demanding that our technology actually work".
Editorial Summary
In Artificial Unintelligence, Meredith Broussard argues that our collective enthusiasm for applying computer technology to every aspect of life has resulted in a tremendous amount of poorly designed systems, making a case against technochauvinism—the belief that technology is always the solution. Broussard, Associate Professor at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute of New York University and Research Director at the NYU Alliance for Public Interest Technology, undertakes a series of adventures in computer programming, going for an alarming ride in a driverless car, using artificial intelligence to investigate why students can't pass standardized tests, deploying machine learning to predict which passengers survived the Titanic disaster, and attempting to repair the U.S. campaign finance system by building AI software. She appears in the 2020 documentary Coded Bias and demonstrates through hands-on experiments why our faith in digital solutions often leads to poorly designed systems that replicate existing inequalities.
Perspective
"Reading this feels like getting a reality check from a programmer who has seen behind the curtain of Silicon Valley's promises and found them wanting. Her distinctive contribution is coining and defining technochauvinism—the belief that technology is always the solution—a framework that exposes how our blind faith in digital fixes perpetuates the very problems we're trying to solve. Tech professionals and policymakers who have bought into the myth of computational objectivity will find a sobering analysis of how engineering solutions overlook fundamental social constraints like school budgets and poverty."
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