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lexiefolkerts's review
5.0
Really good informative book. I like that this focused in on three programs rather than only providing generic data. Being able to follow real programs and real people that these programs are impacting makes the data that much more tangible. I’d recommend this to anyone who doesn’t understand what implicit bias is or that thinks technology can solve all modern problems. I can understand how hard it would be for most people to realize the bias and flaws inside technology but I think we are expected to accept it as the end all be all solution. I’d also recommend this to anyone that thinks technology will eventually replace all jobs. Great book, more reason to not trust big data or anything that claims to streamline or trim the fat.
angieg112's review
3.5
had to read it for school. good, interesting, important to learn about. only complaint is how the chapter are so long and there are so few of them. i hate books like that
cythera15's review
emotional
informative
fast-paced
5.0
God of History will say that was not enough. Such a moving and powerful account of how inequality in the US is now automated, how we continue to hate poverty instead of doing something about it, and why forgetting history inherently perpetuates injustice.
capshaw's review against another edition
4.0
Compelling. At the very least it's clear that ethics should be taught in every computer science program... and even more broadly.
"Like earlier technological innovations in poverty management, digital tracking and automated decision-making hide poverty from the professional middle-class public and give the nation the ethical distance it needs to make inhuman choices: who gets food and who starves, who has housing and who remains homeless, and which families are broken up by the state. The digital poorhouse is part of a long American tradition. We manage the individual poor in order to escape our shared responsibility for eradicating poverty."
"I will remember that the technologies I design are not aimed at data points, probabilities, or patterns, but at human beings."
"Like earlier technological innovations in poverty management, digital tracking and automated decision-making hide poverty from the professional middle-class public and give the nation the ethical distance it needs to make inhuman choices: who gets food and who starves, who has housing and who remains homeless, and which families are broken up by the state. The digital poorhouse is part of a long American tradition. We manage the individual poor in order to escape our shared responsibility for eradicating poverty."
"I will remember that the technologies I design are not aimed at data points, probabilities, or patterns, but at human beings."
srash's review
3.0
Wanted to like this book more than I did. The arguments Eubanks makes are solid, and the best part of the book are her profiles of high-tech social programs gone awry, whether they are the social services system in Indiana, housing for the homeless programs in Los Angeles, or child abuse prediction systems in Pittsburgh. These profiles reminded me of long-form journalism, the type of in-depth reporting you see in better-quality magazines. They were well-written and included powerful anecdotes and observations.
But the introduction and the conclusion, which Eubanks devotes to advancing her own arguments about a new "digitial poorhouse," while compelling, are really boring. These sections take perfectly reasonable insights and arguments and just repeat them repeatedly in a repetitious way that I found really redundant. The result becomes tedious in the extreme. I actually read most of this book about a month ago but only finished it this week because I was bogged down in the conclusion and had a hard time mustering the urge to finish. That's a shame because Eubanks' subject is an important and timely one.
But the introduction and the conclusion, which Eubanks devotes to advancing her own arguments about a new "digitial poorhouse," while compelling, are really boring. These sections take perfectly reasonable insights and arguments and just repeat them repeatedly in a repetitious way that I found really redundant. The result becomes tedious in the extreme. I actually read most of this book about a month ago but only finished it this week because I was bogged down in the conclusion and had a hard time mustering the urge to finish. That's a shame because Eubanks' subject is an important and timely one.