AI Ethics Book Store
Curated list of our recommended books. Buy via affiliate link to support us and independent book stores!
Our Picks for Black History Month
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Rest Is Resistance
In Rest Is Resistance, Tricia Hersey, aka the Nap Bishop, casts an illuminating light on our troubled relationship with rest and how to imagine and dream our way to a future where rest is exalted. Our worth does not reside in how much we produce, especially not for a system that exploits and dehumanizes us.
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Marsha
Marsha, a legendary Black transgender activist, embodied both the beauty and the struggle of the early gay rights movement. Her work sparked the progress we see today, yet this is the first definitive record of her life. Marsha didn’t wait to be freed; she declared herself free and told the world to catch up.
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Imagination: A Manifesto
Ruha Benjamin’s Imagination: A Manifesto is her proclamation that we have the power to use our imaginations to challenge systems of oppression and to create a world in which everyone can thrive. This book is for anyone who is ready to take to heart Toni Morrison's instruction: "Dream a little before you think."
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Abolition. Feminism. Now.
Abolition. Feminism. Now. is a celebration of freedom work, a movement genealogy, a call to action, and challenge to those who think of abolition and feminism as separate political projects. This book features illustrations documenting work of grassroots organizers embodying abolitionist feminist practice.
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Black Women Writers at Work
Through candid interviews with Maya Angelou, Audre Lorde, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Margaret Walker, Sherley Anne Williams, and others, the book highlights practices and critical linkages between the work and lived experiences of Black women writers whose work laid the foundation for many who have come after.
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My Mother Was a Freedom Fighter
Aja Monet is a surrealist blues poet, musician, and cultural worker whose poems sing to us of love, gender, justice, and spirituality. My Mother Is a Freedom Fighter is her ode to mothers, daughters, and sisters, the tiny gods fighting to change the world. Powerful, poetic meditations on motherhood, sisterhood, spirituality, solidarity.
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Black Skin, White Masks
Few modern voices have had as profound an impact on the black identity and critical race theory as Frantz Fanon, and Black Skin, White Masks represents some of his most important work.
This book is the unsurpassed study of the black psyche in a white world.
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Dark Matters
In Dark Matters Simone Browne shows how contemporary surveillance technologies and practices are informed by the long history of racial formation and by the methods of policing black life under slavery, such as branding, runaway slave notices, and lantern laws.
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The Three Mothers
Berdis Baldwin, Alberta King, and Louise Little were all forced to contend with the prejudices of Jim Crow as Black women. These three extraordinary women passed their knowledge to their children with the hope of helping them to survive in a society that would deny their humanity from the very beginning.
Books on Technology, Patriarchy, & Feminism
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Reconstructing Feminism Through Cyberfeminism
Through Cyberfeminism looks at how technology may either support current power relations or provide disadvantaged people with a chance to question and disrupt them.
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The Patriarchs
For centuries, societies have treated male domination as natural to the human species. How would our understanding of gender inequality look if we didn’t assume that men have always ruled over women?
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Programmed Inequality
In Programmed Inequality, Mar Hicks explores the story of labor feminization and gendered technocracy that undercut British efforts to computerize.
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Feminism for the 99%
Feminism shouldn’t start—or stop—with seeing women represented at the top of society. It should start with the 99%.
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Burn It Down!
A landmark collection spanning two centuries and four waves of feminist activism and writing, Burn It Down! is a testament to what is possible when women are driven to the edge.
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Invisible Women
Examining the home, the workplace, the public square, the doctor's office, and more, Criado Perez unearths a dangerous pattern in data and its consequences on women's lives.
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Data Feminism
Illustrating data feminism in action, D'Ignazio and Klein show how challenges to the male/female binary can help challenge other hierarchical (and empirically wrong) classification systems.
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Hidden Figures
True story of black female mathematicians at NASA whose calculations fueled America’s greatest achievements in space. A powerful history essential to our understanding of race, discrimination in America.
Books that Demystify AI & Algorithms
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Algorithms of Oppression
In Algorithms of Oppression, Safiya Umoja Noble challenges the idea that search engines like Google offer an equal playing field for all forms of ideas, identities, and activities.
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Weapons of Math Destruction
Mathematician and data scientist Cathy O’Neil reveals that the mathematical models being used today are unregulated and uncontestable, even when they’re wrong.
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Automating Inequality
In Automating Inequality, Virginia Eubanks systematically investigates impacts of data mining, policy algorithms, and predictive risk models on poor and working-class people in America.
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The AI Con
In The AI Con, Bender and Hanna offer a sharp, witty, and wide-ranging take-down of AI hype across its many forms. Bender and Hanna show you how to spot AI hype, how to deconstruct it, and how to expose the power grabs..
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The AI Mirror
Shannon Vallor makes a wide-ranging, prophetic, and philosophical case for what AI could be: a way to reclaim our human potential for moral and intellectual growth rather than lose ourselves in mirrors of the past.
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Race After Technology
From everyday apps to complex algorithms, Ruha Benjamin cuts through tech-industry hype to understand how emerging technologies reinforce White supremacy and deepen social inequity.
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Unmasking AI
Unmasking AI goes beyond the headlines about existential risks produced by Big Tech and shares the story of how Buolamwini uncovered what she calls “the coded gaze”—the evidence of encoded discrimination and exclusion in tech products.
Books that Reveal Dark Secrets of Silicon Valley
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Empire of AI
When AI expert and investigative journalist Karen Hao first began covering OpenAI in 2019, she thought they were the good guys. Hao presents the fullest picture of AI and its impact we’ve seen to date, alongside a trenchant analysis of where things are headed.
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The Big Nine
In this book, Amy Webb reveals the pervasive, invisible ways in which the foundations of AI -- the people working on the system, their motivations, the technology itself -- is broken.
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Atlas of AI
Drawing on over a decade of research, award-winning scholar Kate Crawford reveals how AI is a technology of extraction: from the minerals drawn from the earth to the labor of low-wage information workers to the data from every action and expression.
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The Nerd Reich
When Silicon Valley says it is ‘‘moving fast and breaking things, “the world interprets the chaos as a necessary cost of innovation.
Gil Durán reveals something far more sinister: a decades-long campaign to replace elected governments with corporate rule. -
Careless People
Sarah Wynn-Williams tells the wrenching but fun story of Facebook, mapping its rise from stumbling encounters with juntas to Mark Zuckerberg’s reaction when he learned of Facebook’s role in Trump’s election.
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Your Face Belongs to Us
In this riveting account, Hill tracks the improbable rise of Clearview AI, helmed by Hoan Ton-That, an Australian computer engineer, and Richard Schwartz, a former Rudy Giuliani advisor, and its collection of billions of faces from the internet.
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How Silicon Valley Unleashed Techno-feudalism
How Silicon Valley Unleashed Techno-feudalism tears apart the Silicon Valley consensus to reveal the new economic order, in which capital has abandoned production to focus on predation.
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Dying for an iPhone
Drawing on vivid testimonies from rural migrant workers, student interns, managers and trade union staff, Dying for an iPhone is a devastating expose of two of the world's most powerful companies:
Foxconn and Apple.
Books on Silicon Valley, Capitalism, & Techno-Fascism
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Blood in the Machine
Today, technology imperils millions of jobs, robots are crowding factory floors, and artificial intelligence will soon pervade every aspect of our economy.
How will this change the way we live? And what can we do about it?
The answers lie in Blood in the Machine.
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How Silicon Valley Unleashed Techno-feudalism
Today, algorithms are everywhere, but digital monopolies push us towards the feudal logic of rent, dispossession, and personal domination. How Silicon Valley Unleashed Techno-feudalism reveals the new economic order, in which capital has abandoned production to focus on predation.
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The Nerd Reich
The Nerd Reich explains the origins, strategies, and ambitions of Silicon Valley’s war on democracy for the first time.
From San Francisco’s weaponized elections and secret billionaire projects to the White House, Durán exposes how the world’s richest men are building a new political order.
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Chokepoint Capitalism
By analyzing book publishing, news, live music, music streaming, screenwriting, radio, Giblin and Doctorow show how powerful corporations build “anti-competitive flywheels” designed to lock in users and suppliers, make markets hostile to new entrants, force workers to accept unfairly low prices.
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A People's Guide to Capitalism
Despite efforts of mainstream commentators to convince us otherwise, many of us have begun to question why this system has produced such vast inequality and wanton disregard for its own destruction. This book offers answers to exactly these questions on their own terms.
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Technofeudalism
Technofeudalism says Yanis Varoufakis, is the new power reshaping our lives and the world, and is the greatest threat to the liberal individual, to our efforts to avert climate catastrophe—and to democracy itself. It also lies behind the new geopolitical tensions, especially the New Cold War between the United States and China.
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The Architecture of Modern Empire
The Architecture of Modern Empire is a searing reckoning with the mechanics of power, in all its forms, and the role of imagination and creative expression in envisioning a radically different world. This newly reissued and expanded edition, featuring interviews from 2001 to 2022 with Roy.
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Gilded Rage
In Gilded Rage, New York Times bestselling author Jacob Silverman takes us inside the surreal, high-stakes world of Silicon Valley. This is the story of the political awakening and radicalization of a cabal of tech billionaires and their descent into ideological extremism.
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Brotopia
Brotopia reveals how Silicon Valley got so sexist despite its utopian ideals, why bro culture endures even as its companies claim the moral high ground, and how women are speaking out and fighting back. Emily Chang shows us how to fix Silicon Valley’s toxic culture--to bring down Brotopia, once and for all.
Books on Redesigning AI & Technology for the Common Good
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Resisting AI
Dan McQuillan calls for us to resist and restructure AI by prioritising the common good over algorithmic optimisation. His book provides an analysis of AI’s connections to current political and social currents, from global austerity to the rise of far right.
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Blood in the Machine
Today, technology imperils millions of jobs, robots are crowding factory floors, and artificial intelligence will soon pervade every aspect of our economy. How will this change the way we live? And what can we do about it?
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How Silicon Valley Unleashed Techno-feudalism
Tech industry has not delivered on its promise of an era of freedom and prosperity. How Silicon Valley Unleashed Techno-feudalism tears apart the Silicon Valley narrative to reveal a new economic order focused on predation.
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The Nerd Reich
When Silicon Valley says it is ‘‘moving fast and breaking things,’’ the world interprets the chaos as a necessary cost of innovation.
Gil Durán reveals something far more sinister: a decades-long campaign to replace elected governments with corporate rule. -
Enshittification
The internet has degenerated into “platforms” that rose to dominance because they delivered convenient and delightful services efficiently and reliably. Enshittification is a Big Tech disassembly manual, a road map for the seizure of the means of computation.
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Redesigning AI
Redesigning AI asks what can be done to redirect AI for the good of everyone.
Leading off a forum, economist and best-selling author Daron Acemoglu argues that though the challenges are dire, the future is not inevitable. -
Resisting Borders and Technologies of Violence
The organizers, journalists, and scholars are charting a new path forward, employing creative tools to subvert the status quo, organize globally against high-tech border imperialism, and help us imagine a world without borders.

