Code-Dependent

November 1, 2023

Tech correspondent for the Financial Times, where she leads AI coverage, Murgia uses a series of global stories to illustrate how AI is already infiltrating daily life, and the consequences, threats, and inequities stemming from a reliance on automated decision-making when humans give up--or deliberately cede--control to a machine. With a 60K-first copy printing. Prepub Alert.

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Starred review from April 8, 2024
In this mordant debut exposé, Financial Times editor Murgia goes into the global trenches where artificial intelligence is being rolled out and finds a proliferation of lousy jobs, impenetrable red tape, grotesque misogyny, and tyrannical surveillance. Among those she visits are poorly paid workers in Nairobi and Bulgaria tasked with labeling pictures to train AI systems; an African American engineer who learns that the facial-recognition systems he works on are prone to misidentifying Black people; an Argentinian government official who wrote an AI program to help prevent teen pregnancies that proved a useless failure; UberEats delivery contractors fed up with Uber’s opaque AI system, which routinely cheats and misdirects them (like when it dispatches them to long-shuttered restaurants); an English writer who discovered deep-fake porn of herself all over the internet; and activists battling China’s ubiquitous surveillance of Uyghurs, whose every step is analyzed by AI. Murgia’s vivid, sympathetic reportage looks beneath the grandiose promise of AI to get at the mundane reality of systems that merely automate the inept, callous, and unaccountable mismanagement and dispossession that ordinary workers and citizens already endure. She also intriguingly spotlights an interpretation of all this as a kind of “data colonialism” that extracts data from poor communities just like any other resource. The result is a biting and skeptical look at the brave new world of AI.

April 15, 2024
A study of how artificial intelligence "is altering the very experience of being human." Murgia, a British Indian tech journalist with the Financial Times, has been investigating AI for a decade (previously for Wired magazine), and her exploration takes readers to Nairobi, Amsterdam, the rural Indian village of Chinchpada, and the city of Salta, in Argentina, among other destinations. Defining AI as "a complex statistical software applied to finding patterns in large sets of real-world data," of which generative AI tools such as ChatGPT are a "subset," the author looks at how it affects the people who train it, use it, and are victimized by it. Among the first category are low-wage workers who label and describe images that may train, for instance, self-driving cars; among the second are health care providers in underserved areas who use AI-powered apps to assist with diagnoses. AI's victims are many: women whose deepfaked images proliferate on pornographic websites; Uber Eats drivers whose pay is shorted by the algorithm; young people stigmatized by statistical software as likely to commit crime or to become pregnant; Uyghurs who live in China's surveillance state; and content moderators forced to engage with hateful, violent material for hours on end. With chapter titles that illuminate AI's effects on the self--e.g., Your Livelihood, Your Body, Your Freedom, Your Safety Net--the survey is peopled with vividly drawn subjects who help readers understand AI and its impact on a deeply personal level. Murgia has consciously reached beyond Silicon Valley to focus on the "global precariat," a strategy that is valuable in its own humanizing right and also drives home how thoroughly implicated the developed world is in the continuing harms endured by the developing one. Throughout, the author writes with clarity and compassion in equal measure. A fascinating, sobering, wide-ranging examination.

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