Publishers Weekly
★ 04/08/2024
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. (June)
From the Publisher
Shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction
“Code Dependent is the intimate investigation of AI that we’ve been waiting for, and it arrives not a moment too soon. Murgia travels the world to bring us intimate portraits of every aspect of the human condition—inner life, family, work, class, race, geography, gender, community, politics—as each is unmade and remade by today’s global AI juggernaut. Most critically, Murgia doesn’t just ‘tell.’ She ‘shows’ us in moving detail that AI is nothing more than a spectrum of possibilities selected and shaped by the economic and political powers that bring it to life. Her work brilliantly reveals the quiet daily violence and flesh and blood consequences of today’s dominant AI regime designed and deployed by surveillance capitalism. Ultimately, the steady drumbeat of her stories opens our eyes to what could have been and what might yet become if we learn to join forces to reclaim our digital century for people and planet.”
—Shoshana Zuboff, author of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, Harvard Business School Professor Emeritus
"Brilliant storytelling. Books about AI often put the tech centre stage, but Murgia makes you, the human, the hero and sadly often the victim in this fascinating collection of stories about the impact of code on our future."
—Marcus du Sautoy, author of The Creativity Code
"With its compelling narrative, Code Dependent is a testament to the power of storytelling in unraveling the complexities of AI. Murgia's profound insights and meticulous research offer a rare and invaluable perspective on the intersection of technology and society."
—Azeem Azhar, Founder, Exponential View
"Code Dependent provides a much needed corrective to the trendy breathless Silicon Valley insider AI history. Eschewing charismatic founders and sentient machines. it focuses instead on the world outside the tech bubble—the world AI’s boosters claim to be improving. By tending to the concrete stories of AI’s subjects, Code Dependent raises critical questions about AI and the business models behind it, doing so from the perspective of those laboring for and judged by costly, centralized AI models developed and deployed by employers, governments, and corporations."
—Meredith Whittaker, president of Signal, co-founder of the AI Now Institute
"Exposes the hidden consequences of our existing AI technologies."
—The Times
"A penetrating look at how we’re allowing artificial intelligence to infiltrate all parts of society, from policing, welfare, justice and health, to the point where whole lives are being altered – often ruined – by systems that hardly any of us understand."
—The Daily Telegraph
"The power of this book lies in the rich stories it tells of individuals . . . Drawing on interviews from around the globe, this highly readable and deeply important book exposes AI’s sordid underbelly."
—The Guardian
“Given the topic’s ubiquity, it is refreshing when a new perspective comes along. And Code Dependent is just that, making it a must-read for those struggling to reckon with the AI Revolution.”
—New Scientist
"Through a series of vivid, dramatically diverse tableaus, Murgia does indeed situate AI in the rough and tumble of human society. What she often finds is the sheer messiness that ensues when you take powerful technology away from technical labs and think-tank ethical frameworks and mix it with, well, everything else: human ambition, superstition, inequalities resilience, resistance."
—Literary Review
Kirkus Reviews
★ 2024-03-08
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.
