Unmasking AI: My Mission to Protect What Is Human in a World of Machines
⭐⭐️
As mentioned in many other comments — this book is primarily a memoir on Buolamwini’s academic career and activism on AI ethics (race, biometric data, disability, gender, intersectionality, etc.). As a surprise memoir, this book can veer into personal stories unrelated to AI bias and sometimes become fairly repetitive. If you are already familiar with algorithmic bias, there isn’t much to learn from this book; though perhaps I am suffering from the curse of knowledge since I’m an MIT undergrad in AI (and perhaps this only seems like common knowledge to me in part because of her research and efforts.)
Some key takeaways:
- Misclassification of people can be harmful in of itself (Ex: Calling a woman a man or not recognizing a face in a picture can be de-humanizing)
- How one original biased face recognition algorithm can lead to more (One biased algorithm is used to detect faces from online data to form a biased dataset which then leads to another biased algorithm)
- Facial verification (1-to-1) vs matching (1-to-many)
- Viewing racism as colorism can be revealing. Two people of the same background with darker/lighter skin can have different experiences.
- Faces are hard to remove from datasets. You have to find what you are a part of with online tools, request or assert that you be removed, and even then there are so many copies of this dataset and distillations of this dataset into models or face prints.
- Advocacy can be as important as solving technical problems.
- Famously crappy Amazon continues to be crappy.
It’s a small part of the book but: her takes on AI Safety and the existential risks of AI are also doo doo dog water and grossly misunderstands the issues, straw-maning the argument and refers to it as “sentient AI” effecting “far off into the future with people who aren’t born yet”, topics which most AI safety experts don’t pay much attention to. I’d hope someone at the forefront of AI would have done their homework on the issue before chiseling their thoughts into a widely distributed book.
I also have issues with Buolamwini’s occasional framing of the issue not as one of negligence but as one of oppressors and victims to be potentially misguided but I won’t go into it in this review (bed time :P)
Note: Listened to as an audiobook. Don’t believe any quality was lost.