Deep Unlearning - by Timnit Gebru (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

Timnit Gebru is a Silicon Valley prophet who has been present at nearly every inflection point in tech's recent history. She was an engineer at Apple on the cusp of the iPhone's first release, a PhD student at Stanford's computer vision lab as her advisor compiled the enormous datasets so crucial to AI's development, and the most senior Black woman on the Ethical AI team at Google as DeepMind and Open AI took over the field of artificial intelligence. Gebru is one of the fiercest voices in the world speaking truth to power. When she talks, people listen. And for very good reason.

Starting with her childhood during which she was forced to flee the 1998 Ethiopian-Eritrean war, through the fraught process of achieving refugee status, Gebru shows how her early love of science and math was inextricably intertwined with her belief that these were reliably objective safe spaces. Over time, through high school in Greater Boston, college at Stanford, and jobs at Apple, Microsoft, and Google, she came to realize that perhaps some of the biases and injustices she witnessed in her life outside of academics were true about technology too.

Over the course of her life, Gebru has seen up close how destructive ideologies and outsized egos have come to wreak havoc on our environment, our economies, and the lives of billions of people--through technology. She also came to understand how we could have made a different choice every step of the way--and still can. Part memoir and part manifesto, Deep Unlearning is as much about ideology as it is about technology--and about how to privilege justice in both.

About the Author