Weapons of Math Destruction

Guest: Cathy O’Neil PhD, data scientist and founder of the O’Neil Risk Consulting & Algorithmic Auditing company Are you one of those people who gets credit card offers every day? Well, the offer in your mailbox might be different from the one in your neighbor’s because your credit score, your income, your outstanding debt and other factors are mysteriously processed by a number-crunching algorithm and out pops your APR. But that algorithm is not as objective as you think. Data scientist Cathy O’Neil says they can actually do a lot of harm. Her book is called, “Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy.” We had this conversations with her last year.