This review was first published by Booklist on January 1, 2025.

**STARRED REVIEW** Carr (The Shallows, 2010) does a deep dive into the history of social media and examines the damage it’s doing to modern society. Our craze for communications technology began with the invention of the telegraph, when people predicted that our expanded ability to communicate would put an end to wars. This echoes language we hear today from tech moguls who believe social-media platforms will bring about unprecedented freedom and democratic ideals. But it never turns out that way. Carr considers what we know about human communication and psychology and argues that modern social media is ideally suited to increase intolerance, anxiety, and factionalism. Turns out, more communication isn’t automatically better. Quality matters more than quantity; efficiency is anathema to deep understanding. He examines the history of how governments have regulated communication media over the years and the ramifications of deregulating both news media and the internet. We sacrificed accountability to the public good for the sake of innovation and convenience. Far from empowering all people, social media has accelerated the concentration of wealth and power into the hands of only a few. As always, Carr’s perspective is urgent and bracing, a necessary challenge to idealistic visions of a democratic internet.

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.

This review was first published by Booklist on September 1, 2021.

Autonomous vehicles promise to eliminate congestion on our roadways, reduce traffic accidents to near zero, and end greenhouse gas pollution. But as Norton points out, we’ve heard these promises before, many times. Car manufacturers have been proclaiming solutions to traffic problems since the 1930s, always by adding more roads and putting more cars on them. Autonorama is a deep dive into the history of our car dependency and the ways automotive manufacturers have strung along American consumers with promises of “just over the horizon” solutions to the problems cars themselves have caused. Norton argues the goal of car manufacturers has never been to satisfy mobility needs but to promote ever-increasing car dependency: Charles Ketterings’ famous maxim to keep the customer dissatisfied. Autonomous vehicles offer more of the same: empty promises of imminent solutions which can only increase our dependence on cars. Car dependency itself is the problem and cars can’t solve that. This is a bracing challenge to the dogma of autonomous vehicle enthusiasts and a clarion call for more varied and humane mobility solutions.