More than a Glitch: Confronting Race, Gender, and Ability Bias in Tech

by Meredith Broussard

Overview

When technology reinforces inequality, it’s not just a glitch—it’s a signal that we need to redesign our systems to create a more equitable world.

The word “glitch” implies an incidental error, as easy to patch up as it is to identify. But what if racism, sexism, and ableism aren’t just bugs in mostly functional machinery—what if they’re coded into the system itself? In the vein of heavy hitters such as Safiya Umoja Noble, Cathy O’Neil, and Ruha Benjamin, Meredith Broussard demonstrates in More Than a Glitch how neutrality in tech is a myth and why algorithms need to be held accountable.

Broussard, a data scientist and one of the few Black female researchers in artificial intelligence, masterfully synthesizes concepts from computer science and sociology. She explores a range of examples: from facial recognition technology trained only to recognize lighter skin tones, to mortgage-approval algorithms that encourage discriminatory lending, to the dangerous feedback loops that arise when medical diagnostic algorithms are trained on insufficiently diverse data. Even when such technologies are designed with good intentions, Broussard shows, fallible humans develop programs that can result in devastating consequences.

Broussard argues that the solution isn’t to make omnipresent tech more inclusive, but to root out the algorithms that target certain demographics as “other” to begin with. With sweeping implications for fields ranging from jurisprudence to medicine, the ground-breaking insights of More Than a Glitch are essential reading for anyone invested in building a more equitable future.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780262373067
Publisher:	MIT Press
Publication date:	03/14/2023
Sold by:	Penguin Random House Publisher Services
Format:	eBook
Pages:	248
Sales rank:	107,892
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Meredith Broussard is Associate Professor at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute of New York University and Research Director at the NYU Alliance for Public Interest Technology. She is the author of Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World (MIT Press). Her work has been featured in the New Yorker, the New York Times, the Atlantic, BBC, Wired, the Economist, and more. She appears in the 2020 documentary Coded Bias and serves on the advisory board for the Center for Critical Race & Digital Studies. More information at @merbroussard or meredithbroussard.com.

Table of Contents

1 Introduction 1
2 Understanding Machine Bias 11
3 Recognizing Bias in Facial Recognition 29
4 Machine Fairness and the Justice System 45
5 Real Students, Imaginary Grades 65
6 Ability and Technology 79
7 Gender Rights and Databases 103
8 Diagnosing Racism 117
9 An AI Told Me I Had Cancer 135
10 Creating Public Interest Technology 157
11 Potential Reboot 173
Acknowledgments 189
Notes 193
Bibliography 205
Index 223

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“With unmatched clarity and galvanizing insight, Meredith Broussard demystifies the mathematical underpinnings of AI and slays the magical mythos of Big Tech like no other! Everyone who cares about the future of tech and society should read this book yesterday.”
—Ruha Benjamin, author of Race after Technology and Viral Justice
 
“With the clarity that few technology scholars can muster, More than Glitch powerfully demonstrates why we must understand culture - not just computation - if we are to imagine and design a future that reaches beyond fairness to build equity and justice into our technological systems.”  
—Charlton McIlwain, Professor, NYU; author of Black Software: The Internet & Racial Justice, From the Afronet to Black Lives Matter
 
“From the case of the racist soap dispenser to the assistive listening technology that wasn’t, More than a Glitch exposes and analyzes the way unreflective use of tech can reinforce the very human biases it claims to be immune to.”
—Jordan Ellenberg, Professor of Mathematics, University of Wisconsin-Madison; author of How Not To Be Wrong and Shape

“Broussard is a patient, empathetic, and witty tour guide, ushering the reader through multiple deep-dive journalistic and personal endeavors that are alternately terrifying and heartwarming, enraging and inspiring. She deftly reframes the question of how to build AI equitably from a technical issue to a human one.” 
—Cathy O’Neil, author of The Shame Machine and Weapons of Math Destruction

Editorial Reviews

01/30/2023

“The biases embedded in technology are more than mere glitches; they’re baked in from the beginning,” argues Broussard (Artificial Intelligence), a data journalism professor at New York University, in this scathing polemic. Telling the stories of individuals from marginalized communities who have been wronged by technology, the author shows how design and conceptual failures produce unfair outcomes. She describes how a Black man was arrested by Detroit police because a facial recognition algorithm incorrectly flagged him as a match for a shoplifter, reflecting the tendency of such programs to produce false matches for people of color, who are underrepresented in the images used to train those programs. Other case studies are Kafkaesque, such as the Black Chicago man who was shot twice under suspicion of being a snitch because police cars frequently parked outside his house after predictive policing software identified him as at risk for gun violence. The author condemns “technochauvinism,” or the belief that “computational solutions superior to all other solutions,” as exemplified by the story of a Deaf Apple Store employee who was denied an on-site interpreter because Apple preferred alternative, inadequate solutions that used its products. The stories enrage and drive home the cost of the failures and prejudices built into ostensibly cutting-edge programs. This sobering warning about the dangers of technology alarms and unsettles. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly

Included in the FT's best summer books of 2023: Technology
Included in The Enterprisers Project's "10 must-read tech books for 2023"
Included in the Next Big Idea Club's “40 Nonfiction Books to Watch Out for in 2023"
Included in Ms. magazine's "The Most Anticipated Feminist Books of 2023" list
Included in Cosmopolitan's "11 Best New Nonfiction Books to Add to Your TBR Pile in 2023"
Included in Glamour's "The 15 Best Nonfiction Books of 2023, So Far"
Featured in Wired, Getting Curious with Jonathan Van Ness, Fast Company, CBC's Spark, and more

"Telling the stories of individuals from marginalized communities who have been wronged by technology, the author shows how design and conceptual failures produce unfair outcomes...The stories enrage and drive home the cost of the failures and prejudices built into ostensibly cutting-edge programs. This sobering warning about the dangers of technology alarms and unsettles.”
–Publishers Weekly

"Broussard brings her perspective as a multiracial woman, data journalist, and computer scientist to an eye-opening critique of racism, sexism, and ableism in technology. She decries technochauvinism, which she defines as 'a kind of bias that considers computational solutions to be superior to all other solutions'...An informed analysis of one of the insidious elements of technology."
–Kirkus Reviews

"With her latest book, Meredith Broussard picks up on the threads of Safiya Noble and Ruha Benjamin as she demonstrates how technology reinforces injustice through its ubiquitous algorithms and questionable human interactions."
–Ms.

"Technology often discriminates against marginalised communities because society does, writes this leading researcher into algorithmic bias and New York University associate professor. But Broussard argues a potential reboot is possible and that public interest technology can be used to promote a more just society."
–The Financial Times

"Meredith Broussard is unusually well placed to dissect the ongoing hype around AI. She’s a data scientist and associate professor at New York University, and she’s been one of the leading researchers in the field of algorithmic bias for years. And though her own work leaves her buried in math problems, she’s spent the last few years thinking about problems that mathematics can’t solve. Her reflections have made their way into a new book about the future of AI. In More than a Glitch, Broussard argues that we are consistently too eager to apply artificial intelligence to social problems in inappropriate and damaging ways. Her central claim is that using technical tools to address social problems without considering race, gender, and ability can cause immense harm."
–The MIT Technology Review

"People like to think of technology as a neutral force, but the truth is that racism, sexism, and ableism are often coded right into the tech systems we use every day (like how facial recognition technology is primed to work on lighter skin, or how mortgage-approval algorithms lead to discriminatory lending). It's an important topic in an increasingly tech-reliant world, and More Than a Glitch is a great place to start learning about it."
–Cosmopolitan

“Meredith Broussard is not your usual AI scholar…what’s also notable about Broussard’s work on AI is that she has found ways to convey just how much AI has already infiltrated the lives of everyday people. In her latest book, More than a Glitch, for instance, she writes about various tangible examples that bring to light the very significant and at times problematic ways AI is already affecting various facets of people’s lived experience, whether it be soap dispensers that do not recognize darker skin tones or the AI technology that told her she had cancer. And this book is not just for Big Tech developers or professors who debate the ethical implications of AI. Her book is written for people of all tech-literacy levels. You can tell Broussard is a teacher as well as a scholar; she’s not afraid to explain some of the most obscure issues in plain words.”
–TheMarkup

"Broussard, a researcher and reporter whose work focuses on ethics in AI, is the perfect guide to this moment. She brings transparency, analysis, and personal touches to a field that is kept intentionally opaque, in part so its creators can maintain its mystique."
–Glamour

"Broussard’s book is distinguished by at least two elements: its extraordinarily expansive scope on the one hand, and its no-nonsense approach to both the problem and its solutions on the other...It is undeniably hard not to be overwhelmed by the seemingly unstoppable course of technological development in the contemporary world, especially around AI and everything it appears poised to reinvent. But cynicism can also be a hiding place for privilege, and those who say despairingly that nothing can be done are often those who stand to benefit most from nothing being done."
–The Conversation

"As machine learning capabilities only continue to improve, finding more ethical – and therefore more equitable – solutions to programming is an increasing priority for tech companies and developers. Broussard’s book calls to mind the work of Anna Jean-Baptiste, and points to an overall cultural focus on equity and inclusivity.”
–Forbes

"Why you should read it: You’re a tech leader who understands that there is always bias in modern technologies – you recognize the fallibility of humans – but you want to learn about potential solutions to this problem. Explore the frameworks that target specific demographics as “other” in the first place. This is essential reading for anyone invested in building a more equitable future."
–The Enterprisers Project

"When technology reinforces inequality, it’s not just a glitch—it’s a signal that we need to redesign our systems to create a more equitable world."
–The Next Big Idea Club

"An artificial-intelligence (AI) ‘glitch’ is a problem neither expected nor consequential. Bias, by contrast, is baked in and disastrous, argues data scientist Meredith Broussard, one of very few Black women in this field, who focuses on AI and journalism."
–Nature

From the Publisher

2023-01-06
A sharp rebuke of technochauvinism.

Broussard brings her perspective as a multiracial woman, data journalist, and computer scientist to an eye-opening critique of racism, sexism, and ableism in technology. She decries technochauvinism, which she defines as “a kind of bias that considers computational solutions to be superior to all other solutions.” Examining the use of AI programs in areas such as facial recognition, learning assessment, and medical diagnosis, Broussard argues persuasively that algorithmic systems “often act in racist ways because they are built using training data that reflects racist actions or policies.” Moreover, these systems have been developed by “able-bodied, white, cis-gender, American men” who test programs on a similar pool. Racial bias is blatant when facial recognition programs are instituted in policing, leading to harassment and false arrests. “Facial recognition is known to work better on people with light skin than dark skin,” she writes, “better on men than on women, and it routinely misgenders trans, nonbinary, or gender nonconforming people.” Broussard explains clearly how data sets limit the efficacy of AI in predictive policing—“a strategy that uses statistics to predict future crimes”—as well as in medical diagnostics: “The skin cancer AIs are likely to work only on light skin because that’s what is in the training data.” The author draws on her own experience with breast cancer to point out the inadequacy of an AI assessment that missed her disease. Fortunately, her experienced doctor did not even consult the AI results. Broussard highlights the work of the Algorithmic Justice League, the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, and other groups involved in algorithmic auditing. “If we are building AI systems that intervene in people’s lives,” she warns, “we need to maintain and inspect and replace the systems the same way we maintain and inspect and replace bridges and roads.”

An informed analysis of one of the insidious elements of technology.

Kirkus Reviews