AI Is A Bigot When It Comes To Hiring

Increasingly, who gets interviewed for what job is determined by algorithm. Before your resume is seen, or even glanced it, by a human, it is first vetted by some mechanized system. The problem? Algorithms are not people, they are not particularly flexible, and they may...according to some observers...be biased.

There’s an interesting article on this very topic in a recent issue of Business Insider, “Here's why an AI expert says job recruiting sites promote employment discrimination” by Tyler Sonnemaker. In it, Sonnemaker interviews data science consultant Cathy O'Neil and she says that “discrimination in hiring starts with job advertising sites like LinkedIn, Monster.com, Facebook, and ZipRecruiter.”

In particular, she notes, job advertising sites are looking chiefly at demographic data. That means that people who fall out of fairly narrow confines of age and ethnic group may be rejected out of hand.

Now, full disclosure follows. I have myself -- I think-- been subjected to just exactly such automated bias. I’m a white male, so I’m privileged, but I’m also over sixty years old, and my background is rather odd--I’ve got multiple liberal arts degrees but my job experience is in journalism. This is kind of hard to explain when you’re filling out little forms online.

So, while I can’t prove it, I think I have been rejected for jobs by algorithms which took one look at my age and another at my tangled employment history, and just deleted my application without ever passing it to an actual human.

This is not a good thing, I think, and not just for me. Corporations need to let real people decide who they want to hire and work with, and to make hiring decisions based on human interactions.

Otherwise they may miss important talents, while rushing forward to hire only the most bland, the most processed, and the most mediocre employees.

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Want a free book? Check out With Luther, Tourists, and God in Santa Fe. It's partly a travel log and partly a meditation on people who actually make a difference in life. Oh, and it is lavishly illustrated by yours truly. It’s on Gumroad as a PDF about 52 pages long. So give it glance! 

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Michael Jay Tucker is a writer and journalist who has published material on topics ranging from the Jazz Age to computers. (Among his small claims to fame is that he interviewed Steve Jobs just after that talented if complicated man got kicked out of Apple, and just before the company’s Board came begging him to come back.)



This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

So you say you want a revolution?

So you say you want a revolution?

Okay, here's what you do.

Step one: CEO pay is now genuinely breathtaking. As everyone knows, the average corporate chieftain (at least in America and to a lesser degree in Europe) earns many, many hundred times what their mid-level employee does. At the moment, boards of directors and stockholders are willing to put up with that because the former have close connections with the CEOs in question and the latter (particularly the smaller ones) don't have a lot of say in the matter.

But, suppose, you went out and gathered up and codified almost everything that a CEO needs to know to run a corporation. It wouldn't be that hard. In a sense, MBA programs have been trying to do exactly the same thing for years.

Okay, then, you take that information and roll it up as online databases, "expert-systems," "knowledge engines," and all the rest of it. Then, go out and license IBM's Watson or some other natural language technology and make that your user interface.

In short, you would then have a system with which almost anyone…anyone at all!... possessing a basic understanding of business could manage the biggest, badest, multi-national corporation on the planet.

Right, now envision the board of directors doing the math: pay multiple zillion-dollar salaries for a rock-star CEO, or offer $100K or so to some middling sort who may or may not even have an MBA.

Pretty soon, even the most incestuous board is going to get tempted…



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Now…Step Two.

This is harder. It may not even be possible. But consider it…

Make the same system cheap enough to run on every PC on the planet. Make it available to everyone. Make it possible for any human being to have the same skills as the most talented (read "obscenely overpaid") executive on the planet.

Then sit back.

And watch it all change.

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Onward and upward...