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New York Times Bestseller´Fascinating and deeply disturbing´ - Yuval Noah Harari, Guardian Books of the Year ´A manual for the 21st-century citizen... accessible, refreshingly critical, relevant and urgent´ - Federica Cocco, Financial Times A former Wall Street quant sounds an alarm on the mathematical models that pervade modern life - and threaten to rip apart our social fabricWe live in the age of the algorithm. Increasingly, the decisions that affect our lives - where we go to school, whether we get a loan, how much we pay for insurance - are being made not by humans, but by mathematical models.

In theory, this should lead to greater fairness: everyone is judged according to the same rules, and bias is eliminated. And yet, as Cathy O´Neil reveals in this urgent and necessary book, the opposite is true. The models being used today are opaque, unregulated, and incontestable, even when they´re wrong. Most troubling, they reinforce discrimination.

Tracing the arc of a person´s life, O´Neil exposes the black box models that shape our future, both as individuals and as a society. These "weapons of math destruction" score teachers and students, sort CVs, grant or deny loans, evaluate workers, target voters, and monitor our health.

O´Neil calls on modellers to take more responsibility for their algorithms and on policy makers to regulate their use. But in the end, it´s up to us to become more savvy about the models that govern our lives. This important book empowers us to ask the tough questions, uncover the truth, and demand change.