Book Review: Unmasking AI: My Mission to Protect What Is Human in a World of Machines by Joy Buolamwini

This review was first published by Booklist on November 1, 2023.

**STARRED REVIEW** 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.