My AI ethics reading list
These are the books, papers, and people who have shaped how I think about AI, and who think hardest about power, human dignity, and the people too often left out of the room.
It’s deliberately not a “neutral” list. I’ve foregrounded women of colour, Indigenous, queer, and disabled scholars, and voices from the Global South, because so often they saw the harms first and named them most clearly. It spans what the hype leaves out, too: AI’s environmental cost in energy, water, and minerals, and the hidden data labour it runs on. Read widely, argue with it, and pass on its suggestions. Book buy links support independent sellers — Readings (AU) and Bookshop.org (US).
Books
Algorithms of Oppression by Safiya Umoja Noble (2018)
How search engines encode racism and sexism, especially against Black women, under a veneer of neutrality.
Race After Technology by Ruha Benjamin (2019)
Names the “New Jim Code”: how tools that look objective quietly reproduce racial hierarchy.
Viral Justice by Ruha Benjamin (2022)
Part memoir, part manifesto: how small, everyday choices can compound into systemic change.
Unmasking AI by Joy Buolamwini (2023)
The founder of the Algorithmic Justice League on discovering the “coded gaze” and fighting it.