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Your Next Job Interview Could Be With a Racist Bot (thedailybeast.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Daily Beast: Companies across the nation are now using some rudimentary artificial intelligence, or AI, systems to screen out applicants before interviews commence and for the interviews themselves. As a Guardian article from March explained, many of these companies are having people interview in front of a camera that is connected to AI that analyzes their facial expressions, their voice and more. One of the top recruiting companies doing this, Hirevue, has large customers like Hilton and Unilever. Their AI scores people using thousands of data points and compares it to the scores of the best current employees. But that can be unintentionally problematic. As Recode pointed out, because most programmers are white men, these AI are actually often trained using white male faces and male voices. That can lead to misperceptions of black faces or female voices, which can lead to the AI making negative judgments about those people. The results could trend sexist or racist, but the employer who is using this AI would be able to shift the blame to a supposedly neutral technology. Companies are also having people do their first interview with an AI chatbot. "One popular AI that does this is called Mya, which promises a 70 percent decrease in hiring time," reports The Daily Beast. "Any number of questions these chatbots could ask could be proxies for race, gender or other factors."
Sounds like the author doesn't know a great deal about this issue, which is real. The problem isn't training on or by white men. The problem is that the program is being trained to find good employees from the available candidates using whatever data it has at its disposal, regardless of whether any individual data point actually has any causal relationship with the candidate's fit. For instance: it knows that the majority of applicants from troubled neighborhoods score poorly, and it also was given (or even collected by itself) data on the demographics of such neighborhoods. It may then decide: "if skin tone > x, don't bother". Even without a causal relationship, that can still be a valid conclusion from a statistical standpoint, but it's one that we as a society deem "not ok". The problem is that such a rule wouldn't be programmed explicitly, it would be inferred form the data and it might not even be possible to find out if such a bias is being applied.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
That's NOT what companies want. Have you ever been a hiring manager? The vast majority of people coming out of colleges these days are totally useless in the work force; that's why so many of them (even with PhDs) are unemployed.
I have a B.A. and M.A., both in liberal arts. Both degrees are completely useless on the job market. As a hiring manager, I couldn't care less what degrees someone has. A person trained by the academic guild (and often very poorly, with little critical thinking) doesn't help me sell product, cut costs, or innovate against the competition.
College is a waste for 95% of people, and it has been propped up by student loans. The student loan debt bubble in the U.S. exceeds consumer credit card debt. It's going to implode spectacularly.
The people who are actually intelligent know enough to build skills rather than relying on college to get them a job or make a living.
Natives "won't take" such jobs because they're underpaid and dangerous, due to the massive number of illegals working for less than minimum wage. If industry had to pay prevailing wages and adhere to all US laws, magically people would appear out of the woodwork to staff those jobs.
If we actually have a shortage of workers, let Congress determine that this is so and make a guest worker program for them. Apply for the visa in Mexico City, enter America legally, employers pay fair wages, workers receive all US legal protections. Everybody wins. Well, except the shit industries that operate illegal, dangerous work environments, they'd lose. But fuck them.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Most low-skill immigrants work physically demanding jobs that natives won't take like meat processing and agriculture.
This is a logical fallacy repeated everywhere around the world, no doubt helped by those with money and power: physically demanding jobs would be gladly taken by "natives" if the pay were attractive. The main reason the pay hasn't been attractive, though, is because of low-skilled immigrant workers accepting lower pay for those jobs.
Logically, there is no actual reason for such jobs not to be paid well, especially if it's hard to find people willing to do them. Simple supply and demand. This is now changing because those jobs will be automatized/robotized, but up until very recently and in many cases still today, the only reason the jobs are paid poorly is because of a large supply of people willing to do them for less money.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.