Isn’t it nice to have an excuse to read books?  At the end of the semester (due December 6) you will be turning in a book review of a book of your choice that is related to technology/information ethics or policy. You can optionally turn in your book review early (by 4/14) and I will give you feedback so that you can revise before the final version you turn in.

The default assignment is to write a book review of roughly 1,200 words. It might look more like a scholarly book review, what you might write for a journal (see the first three examples below) or a book review as would be published in a media outlet (see the last two examples below). Both of these are excellent practice! As part of this book review, you should write in part about how the book fits into the broader landscape of ethics/policy as we learned about in class; as part of this you should cite at least 4 scholarly sources. You should also explicitly tie the book review to current events, including citing at least 2 news articles. Note that because of these requirements (to ensure similar effort across students and connections to class!) what you turn in for class won’t be quite the same as what could be actually published.

Book Review Examples

• Book Review: Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence (a first draft of this review was actually written for this class!)
• Book Review: Race after technology: Abolitionist tools for the New Jim Code
• A Review of Twitter and Tear Gas
• We, Robots (Alone Together)
• Book review: ‘Dataclysm,’ a look at human behavior, by Christian Rudder

If you would like to do something else--for example, a creative project related to the book, or whatever else you might think of--that is totally fine! Just get approval from me ahead of time.

Choose one of the books from this list, or another book relevant to this class that you choose. If you choose something not on this list, please check with me that it’s appropriate!

Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism (Safiya Noble)

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (Shoshana Zuboff)

Race After Technology (Ruha Benjamin)

Weapons of Math Destruction (Cathy O’Neil)

Automating Inequality (Virginia Eubanks)

Technically Wrong (Sara Wachter-Boettcher

Ghost Work (Mary Gray & Siddharth Suri)

Design Justice (Sasha Constanza-Chock)

Data Feminism (Catherine D’Ignazio & Lauren Klein)

Custodians of the Internet (Tarleton Gillespie)

Antisocial Media (Siva Vaidhyanathan)

Black Software (Charlton D. McIlwain)

Behind the Screen (Sarah Roberts)

Invisible Women (Caroline Criado Perez)

Programmed Inequality (Mar Hicks)

This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things (Whitney Phillips)

Calling Bullshit (Carl Bergstrom & Jevin West)

Remix (Lawrence Lessig)

Code 2.0 (Lawrence Lessig)

The Charisma Machine (Morgan Ames)

The Black Box Society (Frank Pasquale)

Intersectional Tech (Kishoanna Gray)

Artificial Unintelligence (Meredith Broussard)

Coding Freedom (Gabriella Colman)

Atlas of AI (Kate Crawford)

The Alignment Problem (Brian Christian)

Silicon Values (Jillian York)

Your Computer is On Fire (eds. Thomas S. Mullaney, Benjamin Peters, Mar Hicks, Kavita Philip)

System Error (Rob Reich, Mehran Sahami, Jeremy M. Weinstein)

The Fight for Privacy (Danielle Keats Citron)

IBM and the Holocaust (Edwin Black)

Not My Type: Automating Sexual Racism in Online Dating (Apryl Williams)

The Secret Life of Data (Arram Sinreich and Jesse Gilbert)

AI Snake Oil: What Artificial Intelligence Can Do, What It Can’t, and How to Tell the Difference (Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor)

The AI Mirror (Shannon Vallor)

Unmasking AI (Joy Buolamwini)

Digitally Invisible (Nicol Turner Lee)