Is the Algorithm Plotting Against Us?

I’ll admit, I approached this audiobook with fatigue. Another AI thinkpiece? But *Is the Algorithm Plotting Against Us?* grabbed me in the first chapter with a story about a self-driving car’s fatal hesitation—not because the AI was ‘evil,’ but because its training data *omitted* a scenario so obvious humans never thought to include it. That’s Wenger’s genius: he doesn’t vilify algorithms; he exposes the *human* blind spots baked into them. The narration by Tristan Wright elevates the material—his voice has this uncanny ability to sound both clinical (when parsing code) and darkly amused (when recounting how a loan-approval AI started rejecting applicants named ‘Felix’). The production is crisp, though I’d dock half a star for the occasional overuse of dramatic pauses before revelations; it’s effective once or twice, but by hour five, it starts to feel like a podcast gimmick. Where the book truly shines is in its refusal to abstract. Wenger doesn’t just tell you bias exists; he walks you through the *exact* dataset quirks that made a facial-recognition tool 100x more likely to misidentify Black women, then ties it to a wrongful arrest. The pacing stumbles slightly in the middle during a deep dive into aviation-safety protocols (fascinating but dense), but it roars back with a finale that reframes ‘algorithm transparency’ as a *power struggle*—not a tech problem. My biggest critique? The lack of solutions. Wenger excels at diagnosis but leaves listeners hanging on prescriptions, which might frustrate action-oriented listeners. Still, if you’ve ever scrolled past an ad that *uncannily* knew your mood or wondered why your GPS rerouted you into a lake, this audiobook will haunt you in the best way.