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."

Comments

Blind hiring

[Anonymous Coward]

We have sexist hiring now. What about all those blind hiring trials that ended up hiring more men... and then got cancelled and the result buried ASAP.

So we do have sexist hiring now... just not the kind feminists want to talk about.

Re:Blind hiring

[Anonymous Coward]

People aren't equal. Social science is rife with poor statistics, awful controls, unrepeatable experiments and outright fraud. The Nordic countries have tried this experiment and demonstrated conclusively that when you remove barriers, biology maximises and women avoid science and maths.

Add all that lot up, and feminists have to either admit they are completely wrong or slander and insult anyone who dares point out reality.

P.S. Blind hiring demonstrated that we discriminate against men and in favour of women - by any/all of the measures that feminists routinely employ. It's tell you want to ignore them when they aren't in your favour.

Re:Blind hiring

[denzacar]

On the other side of that...
If you are forced to talk to a bot at an interview - might as well keep on looking for a job.

Cause a company won't use a bot on account of a "more just" hiring process.
They'll use a bot cause it is cheaper and more efficient to buy or rent a software tool than to hire another human tool.
Which is what they are looking for. Disposable tools, needed to solve their current problem. Not employees.
They want things, not people.

Also, it indicates that the company is held afloat on bullshit and buzzwords.
Cause it's clearly not running on the strength of its teams - or someone running a team or working in a team would be interviewing you, to see how you fit into their team.
Unless the teams and the company are also run by chatbots. In which case at least the daily meetings would be more productive.

TRANSLATION:

[Anonymous Coward]

Translation: The sick freaks of the left are concerned that AI's will not be front-loaded with the politically-correct amount of anti-white bias, as defined by shrieking fascist moron SJW's.

It's absolutely ridiculous and dehumanizing

[ZorinLynx]

I know somebody looking for a retail job. She would walk into stores and ask if they're hiring, only to be directed to a website where you have to fill out some massive 100 question test and hope that your name is picked by some algorithm for the manager to call and arrange an interview.

She must not fit the computerized profile that the tests are looking for, because she rarely got called back. It's been a frustrating and dehumanizing experience.

My mother said that when she was looking for retail jobs in the 60s and 70s, it was easy as hell. See a "Help Wanted" sign, walk inside, talk to the manager, have a quick interview, and if they liked you, you were hired. You didn't even need a freaking resume. It was a much more sensible experience.

I work in IT and I think computers are neat and have changed the world in many ways for the better. But holy shit have they totally fucked up other things.

Re:It's absolutely ridiculous and dehumanizing

[ooloorie]

My mother said that when she was looking for retail jobs in the 60s and 70s, it was easy as hell.

We have let in 20-30 million low skilled workers since then. That's why the supply of low skilled workers is high and exceeds demand.

Another reason for computerizing these hires is to remove the possibility of bias and to comply with regulations. Companies don't want to be accused of civil rights violations, illegal questions, or sexual harassment, and computerized interviews avoid that.

But holy shit have they totally fucked up other things.

This isn't the fault of computers, it's the fault of progressive government policies that backfired.

You want one-on-one interviews? Reduce the supply of low-skilled workers and reduce the stifling regulations and legal risks that surround hiring.

Re:It's absolutely ridiculous and dehumanizing

[AmiMoJo]

These forms are often used to actively discriminate, because their operation is opaque and it is extremely difficult to prove anything when the computer says no.

For example, they often ask what your highest level of education is. Never mind if you have decades of experience and professional certifications, if you didn't get an undergraduate degree you get instantly declined. That can make it very hard for people who have the skills but didn't go the traditional university+debt mountain route. You can't even write a cover letter to get your foot in the door.

Re:It's absolutely ridiculous and dehumanizing

[ooloorie]

These forms are often used to actively discriminate, because their operation is opaque and it is extremely difficult to prove anything when the computer says no.

You are probably right: these forms are probably used to avoid being accused of racial discrimination and to meet diversity quotas and affirmative action goals. That is, they actively discriminate, precisely in order to ensure that they are complying with the law.

For example, they often ask what your highest level of education is. Never mind if you have decades of experience and professional certifications, That can make it very hard for people who have the skills but didn't go the traditional university+debt mountain route.

If you have decades of experience, you have referrals; you don't need to answer computerized questions or forms. If you have neither a degree nor referrals, you are indeed not interesting to most companies.

Re: It's absolutely ridiculous and dehumanizing

[PopeRatzo]

Unemployment is the lowest in 67 years.

Unemployment was lower during the Clinton administration, which I'm pretty sure was less than 67 years ago.

See September of 2000, for example:

http://www.macrotrends.net/137...

And that the three main measurements of unemployment, the official overall, the U5 and the U6.

Re:It's absolutely ridiculous and dehumanizing

[burtosis]

Free college for all would solve the low skilled worker crisis for 1/3 the cost of a single petty war we carry out on nations who never attacked us or are guilty of anything but having natural resources.

Re:It's absolutely ridiculous and dehumanizing

[edtice1559]

Although your comment is quite valid in that the markets for various low-skilled labor do have an effect on each other, very few low-skilled immigrants work retail where English/Spanish language skills are fairly important. They may stock the shelves, though. Most low-skill immigrants work physically demanding jobs that natives won't take like meat processing and agriculture.

Re:It's absolutely ridiculous and dehumanizing

[ooloorie]

There is also just straight up laziness. Retain management jobs that list a degree as a requirement because they can't be bothered to determine if you can do basic arithmetic or check your reading comprehension.

Yes, they can't be bothered, because hiring itself takes time and money, and hiring managers have better things to do than to look for people who are qualified despite having inferior credentials.

Re:It's absolutely ridiculous and dehumanizing

[ooloorie]

Free college for all would solve the low skilled worker crisis for 1/3 the cost of a single petty war we carry out on nations who never attacked us or are guilty of anything but having natural resources.

Free college doesn't turn low skilled workers into high skilled workers.

Re:It's absolutely ridiculous and dehumanizing

[ooloorie]

What are these horrible, scary regulations that you speak of? Name some.

Regulations that make it illegal to ask questions about children, marital status, gender, ethnic origin, etc. Legal practice that gets companies sued simply for not hiring enough minorities.

Oh, fuck you

Thanks for the offer, but I prefer my men a little smarter than you are.

Re:It's absolutely ridiculous and dehumanizing

[DNS-and-BIND]

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.

Re:It's absolutely ridiculous and dehumanizing

[blind biker]

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.

This why we shouldn't live together ...

[Pinky's Brain]

White men program it, so it can't be fair ... god fucking damn hypocritical sexist, racist twat.

PS. I have no problem with the sexist and racist part, I think everyone should have complete freedom of association, I only take exception with the hypocrisy.

Re:This why we shouldn't live together ...

[Pinky's Brain]

"because most programmers are white men, these AI are actually often trained using white male faces and male voices"

Re:This why we shouldn't live together ...

[AmiMoJo]

Actually, we do. Studies have found that even having a female dominated HR division still tends to favour men in most instances. Counter-intuitive if you are the kind of person who assumes genders will "stick together" and are inherently biased in favour of their own, but anyone familiar with the past century of academic work on the subject will be unsurprised.

Re:This why we shouldn't live together ...

[JaredOfEuropa]

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.

Merit based employment is not racism

[Karmashock]

the robots in many cases aren't even aware of your race or gender so how are they going to select against your race and gender?

They're clearly NOT deciding on that factor as they literally can't because they're literally not given that variable most of the time.

What they decide upon are your qualifications. Now if the most qulaified people tend to be from group X or Y then that isn't racism to predominantly hire people from those groups. Statistically if you limit the population being examined to those with the qualifications there is no statistical variance in hiring patterns. You only see a statistical variance if you IGNORE qualifications. Which is idiotic because the entire point of setting an AI on hiring people or hiring someone to hire people is to have them filter the people hired based on relevant criteria.

What these "robot HR is racist" arguments ultimately are requesting is lottery based hiring. Where in random people in society are randomly hired for given jobs indifferent to qualifications.

Harrison Bergeron by Kurt Vonnegut is a dystopian society where this concept was applied to its logical conclusion. Everyone is forced to be equal. The clever are made to be stupid so they enjoy no advantage over the stupid. The strong are made to be weak. The graceful are made to be clumsy. The beautiful are made to be ugly. Employment in everything is determined by literal lottery. Total chance. Everything from the police to the president to your doctors to whatever.

It is a nightmare society.

The robots are not racists. The plaintiffs are equalitarian intersectional communists in most cases. The sort of people that advocate bad ideas that if applied lead to the society starving to death.

Any group that votes for that deserves the consequences without mercy. And to be very clear... that happens properly anywhere and those able to do better will leave. You'll be left with an incompetent rabble that simply couldn't do better anywhere else. Poverty and failure is the best you can expect. Literally starving to death is quite likely. Cannibalism is not off the table.

Re:Merit based employment is not racism

[Karmashock]

So the argument is that its determining race based on address, name, previous employment history, and education history...

Explain this to me.

Are you saying it doesn't hire people from a certain neighborhood?

Are you saying the program is not hiring people based on their name?

Because either of those seems unlikely frankly.

Now, not hiring someone for lacking job experience is not racism or racial proxy data. Its merely a sensible criteria to hire someone. You want the best employees you can get. An experienced employee is generally better. No?

As to educational background... I'm a little confused about this one. Are you suggesting that hiring or not hiring someone using education data is racist? Because if it is... then why bother with education at all? We'll just hire anyone.

Do you want a doctor with no medical education? A lawyer with no law degree?

Because apparently hiring or not hiring someone on the basis of their education is apparently racist now.

Try again. They do not use address or name information to choose who to hire or not to hire. The algorithms have been examined actually. They have been demanded in court cases. And on examination they didn't do any of that.

What they did was look at job experience and education. Its a bot. Is your argument seriously that the program looks up a name and address, does a look up on the address to find out if it is in a demographically black or whatever area... and then just doesn't hire if it gets a hit?

Is that honestly your argument? Because that can be easily disproven and then you have to eat crow.

Here is the cold grim reality... The "ai" is just filtering on work experience and education. That isn't racist. And again, if you presume to say it is... then please accept medical treatment by this guy with no medical degree.

Everyone wants competent workers except people like YOU that neither care about other people having to deal with incompetent workers nor have the empathy to appreciate how annoying you'd find it if you were saddled with that same situation.

The evidence of your hypocrisy is that you wouldn't tolerate an incompetent worker IF they were serving you. Would you like an electrician with no training or a plumber with no training? How about a vet to take care of your sick dog that knows nothing about how to treat sick animals?

You wouldn't even tolerate it to treat your dog.

That is your "real" position. Everything else is pathetic virtue signaling and hypocrisy.

Clickbait

[liefer]

Stop posting these Reddit-level stories that are designed to get people riled up

Re:95% Certain

[Karmashock]

You missed the point.

Having problems at point of employment isn't a reason to hire you anyway.

Do you want a doctor that didn't get decent grades in medical school? Most people never go to medical school at all.. would you like a doctor that spent ZERO time studying medicine?

If you would prefer competent doctors then you desire merit based employment.

I'm not saying anywhere that I think we shouldn't try to help communities with problems. However, I think it is also racist to look at these communities racially. Rather you should focus on other more important factors.

Did they come from a single parent house hold? Did they come from a troubled neighborhood? Was there drug abuse in the house hold? Was there positive reinforcement of good study habits etc in the child's household.

These things ultimately determine if there will be problems. Not the race of the individual. To suggest otherwise is to presume that given races are inferior.

I made the point above that your position is actually inherently racist. You wish to classify people on the basis of race.

Are there f'ups from every race? Yep. Are there high achievers from every race? Yep.

Focus on what separates the one from the other and you might actually help people.

Focusing on race will help no one. You will doom those you presume to help to continuing poverty by not addressing the underlying problems in given communities that lead to failure. What is more, your entire concept requires that we hire empirically incompetent people to do jobs. Which you will hypocritically assign to other people or other jobs you don't care about whilst betraying your supposed values by requiring merit based employment when it might actually affect you.

I like that you tried to start your argument with an ad hominem.

Let me try one on you which would be only fair.

I think you're also white, spoiled, feel inferior to your peers, and are attempting to play these pathetically constructed moralistic games as some sort of ploy to claw your way up a social hierarchy.

People like you hurt the people you presume to defend. You're a parasite. You feed upon the suffering of others and use it to humble your opposition and aggrandize yourself. You have nothing positive to offer this situation. And your insecurity is likely very well deserved.

I want everyone to succeed and for society to work. You didn't even read my argument before you dogmatically responded to it. You are no better than the foaming fundamentalists of bygone times that would thump the cover of a book they couldn't even read.

See? I can play this game too... and I'm better at it.

F***k /. stop the SJW bullshit

[bongey]

Tired of the constant clickbait stories and titles, /. is no longer going to be a tech site eventually.

Colleges are going bankrupt

[Anonymous Coward]

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.