Hardback
Forthcoming
Deep Unlearning:The Rise of AI and the Radicalization of a Tech Idealist
A blistering critique of the current AI wave, and what needs to be done, from a leading radical insider.
Part autobiography, part manifesto: Timnit Gebru is one of the fiercest critics of silicon valley's current dominance of Artificial Intelligence. As a true insider who has worked for some of the major players in the field, as co-lead on the Ethics in AI team at Google, she exposed the racism, sexism, and unscientific practices pervading Silicon Valley, demonstrating how current AI systems perpetuate bias against marginalized communities.
The book traces her journey from refugee to prominent AI researcher, culminating in her high-profile firing from Google in 2020 for co-authoring the "Stochastic Parrots" paper warning about large language models like ChatGPT. She challenges those currently in control and questions the ideologies beneath the hype. She critiques how billionaires like Sam Altman and Elon Musk pursue "AGI" (artificial general intelligence) as a "machine god" while exploiting labour, consuming massive resources, and centralizing power—all in the name of the new technological age.
In response, she offers an alternative vision of what AI can be and who owns it: a community-rooted, distributed system that serves actual human needs. It is the offer of a technology for all, that truly benefits everyone.
Reviews
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The epic story of one of our fiercest AI bullshit detectors and truth-tellers. Page after page brims with razor-sharp insight, biting humor, and a righteous impatience with the godlike hubris of gatekeepers, tech makers, and intelligence hustlers who fancy themselves prophets of our collective future. Gebru refuses the detached posture of the analyst who treats injustice as if it were merely an intellectual puzzle. She names names. Deep Unlearning is an invitation to shed the myths we have been handed about technology, intelligence, merit, and progress, and to recover the courage to tell the truth about the worlds we are building. It is a summons to live our values, ten toes down.
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Gebru vulnerably and generously shares her experiences, from childhood onwards, as a curiosity-driven scientist initially fighting to be included and then eventually fundamentally challenging the structures of tech spaces, across academia and industry. Where western, ‘enlightened’ hegemony holds up only those who haven't been marginalized (or can hide it if they have) as most able to access truth about the world, Gebru powerfully shows us that science and technology grounded in community and lived experience are what brings hope for a future in which we can all flourish.
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Gebru's journey from tinkerer to thinker, from circuit maker to circuit breaker illuminates a path for those of us who want to think otherwise, to futures grounded in ancestral knowledge and empowered by new technology. Her story helps us envision a digital world that serves those who need it most, instead of the privileged few.
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From precocious child to teenage refugee to unflinching AI leader, Timnit Gebru tells her story unvarnished for the first time. What makes Gebru so remarkable is her fearlessness in the face of power and her tirelessness in asking ‘if not me, then who?’ in fighting for the powerless. It has made her one of the boldest thinkers and doers of this era, forging new futures where AI is no longer a synonym for extraction but a technology of hope.