“When today’s technology relies on yesterday’s data, it will simply mirror our past mistakes and biases.”
AI and other high-tech tools embed and reinforce America’s history of prejudice and exclusion — even when they are used with the best intentions. Patrick K. Lin’s Machine See, Machine Do: How Technology Mirrors Bias in Our Criminal Justice System takes a deep and thorough look into the use of technology in the criminal justice system, and investigates the instances of coded bias present at every level.
In this book, you’ll learn how algorithms and high-tech tools are used in unexpected ways: suggesting which neighborhoods to police, predicting whether someone is more or less likely to commit a crime, and determining how long someone’s prison sentence should be.
Machine See, Machine Do takes you on an eye-opening journey of discovery, encouraging you to think twice about our current system of justice and the technology that supposedly makes it more “objective” and “fair.” If you are someone who cares deeply about criminal justice reform, is curious about the role of technology in our day-to-day lives, and ultimately believes we should aspire to make both of these spaces more ethical and safe, this book is for you.
Patrick K. Lin has the rare ability to explain complex technical matters in plain English, and his book is a valuable contribution to the literature of AI. As Lin warns, unless we ask the right questions right now, AI is more likely to replicate the problems of yesterday than to create the solutions for tomorrow.
If you care about the future of our civil liberties, you must also care about AI and algorithms that are being developed and deployed today. Machine See, Machine Do is a clarion call to recognize the serious consequences of treating technology as neutral and ensure that the speed of AI does not outstrip our ability to control its impact. Lin does a masterful job of demystifying the overpromise of AI and folly of tech solutionism in the criminal justice system, while centering the tech conversation on where it should be: our humanity.
Machine See, Machine Do: How Technology Mirrors Bias in Our Criminal Justice System is a work of non-fiction in the political subgenre. It is suitable for the general adult reading audience and was penned by author Patrick K. Lin. The book scrutinizes the machine-based aspects of the current criminal justice system and the biases that have been programmed into the automation at every level. From police utilization to district attorney decision-making and beyond, the issues with our thinking in the past have been set into the foundations of the supposedly objective systems currently in use.
There’s nothing quite like reading a non-fiction book written by a passionate expert, and Patrick K. Lin certainly fits this description; breaking down the technical matters into understandable pieces, consistently demonstrating and exploring the crux of the complex issue, and writing with a view to educate and inform change. As a layman on the details of computer programming, I appreciated the author's natural ability to break the technical side of things down to an accessible level in order to focus on the social and philosophical issues at stake. This is an important book in its genre with serious warnings about the implications of current AI application on our civil liberties, with frequent moments to discuss the wider societal issues that have been inadvertently embedded in the things we’ve built. Overall, Machine See, Machine Do offers constant reminders that if we stop reflecting on ourselves and the information we feed into our machines as they learn about the world, then we risk amplifying the problems that we currently face, especially with society-wide issues such as law and order.
