IBM Aims To Meld AI With Human Resources With Watson Suite (zdnet.com)

PolygamousRanchKid shares a report from ZDNet (with some commentary): IBM has launched a unit designed for human resources to better find talent and recruit using artificial intelligence. The company is wrapping its latest HR effort, dubbed IBM Talent & Transformation, which includes select Watson services. According to IBM, its suite of AI tools can help HR become a growth engine to enable digital transformation. AI can be used to revamp workflow, employee engagement, recruitment and retention while providing a more diverse workforce. (I can still program Fortran; I learned it from Forman S. Acton -- does that make me diverse enough?) Big Blue's Talent & Transformation suite includes a Watson Talent Suite that rolls up behavioral science, AI and psychology and applies it to HR. (Sounds like the recipe for The Apocalypse to me.) IBM Garage, which serves as a test bed to meld HR, AI and culture, will also be available. (Garage? It sounds like the creepy CRISPR basement of a mad scientist to me.)

Comments

Watson is ...

[CaptainDork]

... unemployed and has been fired too many times.

Re:Watson is ...

[CaptainDork]

Trump's fact checker?

Re:Watson is ...

[PolygamousRanchKid]

... unemployed and has been fired too many times.

. . . now if Watson HR decided to fire itself . . . that would be amusing . . .

Better idea

[Anonymous Coward]

Train Watson to translate buzzword salad into normal English.

Re: Better idea

[Cmdln Daco]

By design? It just teetered in that direction.

What?

[110010001000]

Nice summary. Was it written by AI?

Re:What?

[gweihir]

Probably using the MS office "summarize document" function. Come to think of it, you can (or at least could) set the target size to more than 100% on that. Anybody ever tried what happens if you do that?

And for those people who don't support their AI

[bobstreo]

Masters, the rest will be useful as offline storage, and as batteries for electrical backup.

Don't worry, HR will figure out your new designation.

woah!

[Anonymous Coward]

AI tools can help HR become a growth engine to enable digital transformation.

Woah! Imagine a company composed of nothing but HR, then!

Surely someone has thought of this? Why tether HR to a boat anchor?

Re:woah!

[Ol Olsoc]

Why tether HR to a boat anchor?

That would make a lot of people very happy.

Watson is a would-be marketing breakthrough

[Anonymous Coward]

If it was a true technology breakthrough, IBM would not need to spend so many millions of dollars and so many years explaining it to people, and yet still have nobody able to explaind what they learned about it from IBM and how to apply it to any known problem.

Once people saw personal computers being used, they "got it".
Once people saw tablet computers being used, they "got it"
Once people saw cell phones, and later, smart phones in use, they "got it"

Has anybody seen any real-world application for Watson????

The whole AI thing is a sick joke anyway. There's no such thing. People do not yet even understand ACTUAL intelligence in living beings. What we have today in the computer world is SIMULATED intelligence, which is a galaxy away from artificial intelligence. I have no doubt that simulations of intelligence will become increasingly impressive and useful, (and yes, the errors will become spectacular and probably even eventually lethal). But there should be no confusion about the fact that these systems as impressive as they become actually KNOW nothing, UNDERSTAND nothing, and are ultimately just extremely impressive wind-up toys.

Re:Watson is a would-be marketing breakthrough

[gweihir]

Basically, Watson can help in data-mining in data encoded in natural language. It does not do it very well though and a human expert checking the results is critical. All Watson can really give you is hints. Incidentally, to expert audiences, the IBM folks are not really claiming more than that. I have heard members of the Watson team speak to expert audiences several times now. But those claims are very far from what the general public can understand and and what Watson can do is not easily and directly applicable to problems.

As to what AI is today, it is not even simulated general intelligence. It is basically some pattern matching and some statistics and some simple automated deduction. There are of course the clueless that think things like recognizing a street-sign needs intelligence, but all we are finding is that doing is badly and in a way that is easily fooled, does not actually require intelligence. Or that think a piece of software playing Chess or Go must obviously be intelligent. That is a fallacy. Just because you see some black box perform a specialized task that can also be performed using general intelligence (i.e. humans) does not mean that box is intelligent in any way. What we are actually finding is that quite a few tasks or parts of tasks humans are used for today do not actually require intelligence, but that dumb automation can do it. So yes, absolutely no insight, no understanding, no knowledge, no most certainly no independent thinking (although most humans are basically unable to do that one too). And yes, we have absolutely no clue how humans do it. Some reputed Neuroscientist (they are not all hacks) recently said "the closer we look, the more mysterious it becomes" (cannot find the source of that anymore, sorry).

Sure, some parts of what humans do (motor functions, e.g.) are basically also just dumb automation. But when you look at true feats of general intelligence, humans are leaving machines completely in the dust. For example, automated theorem proving can theoretically find all theorems of a mathematical theory, given some upper proof and theorem size boundaries and given enough (but finite) computing power and memory. However in actual reality, mathematicians find things that the machine would not find if the whole universe gets converted into a computer for its use. Still, the algorithm has the same potential as a mathematician in theory. But that does not make that algorithm intelligent, because what is extremely obvious from the performance is that the mathematician and the algorithm are using two completely and fundamentally different approaches and the machine can basically fake it for small problems (what you call "simulated").

Now, these proving algorithms are still extremely useful. Because if a competent mathematician takes it by the hand and _guides_ it through a proof the machine could never find by itself, it can still verify mechanically that the proof is correct. That tells us that finding mathematical proofs of significant size likely requires general intelligence, but verifying proofs does not and is something dumb automation can do.

Re:Watson is a would-be marketing breakthrough

[martyros]

Once people saw personal computers being used, they "got it". Once people saw tablet computers being used, they "got it" Once people saw cell phones, and later, smart phones in use, they "got it"

Wasn't old enough to say for sure re the first one, but re tablets and smart phones, "That's not the way it happened at all."

I bought a Symbian "smartphone" in 2007. Made a good-faith effort to use it. Determined that it probably wasn't really worth it to have a "smart phone". So when the iPhone came out, I didn't buy one. Eventually bought my wife an iPod Touch as an experiment... and within a month she'd upgraded to an iPhone, and within a year I had as well.

People had been trying to make tablets work for decades before the iPad, and they all failed... until the iPad. The same thing can be said of music players before the iPod. (I never owned an iPod or an iPad, BTW, just pointing out patterns I see in the marketplace.)

Cell phones I'll give you. There are some technologies that transfer pretty easily from old to new. Other technologies don't really take off until someone manages to hit the right usability matrix to make it actually useful for the average person; and sometimes that usability matrix isn't possible until technology reaches a certain point. I'm pretty sure the iPhone as it was in 2008 wouldn't have been possible technologically in 2002; and that whatever was possible in 2002 wouldn't have made the impact that the iPhone did.

So: just because IBM hasn't been able to make machine learning accessible, doesn't mean it never will be. Maybe machine learning hasn't advanced enough yet to be ready for widespread usability. Or maybe machine learning is ready, but nobody's hit the right usability matrix yet.

Re:Watson is a would-be marketing breakthrough

[Shotgun]

Watson, and nearly every other AI you've heard about, are fancy sorting algorithms. I haven't seen anything that can't be replaced with a black box that has "FILTER" written on it in white letters.

Re:Watson is a would-be marketing breakthrough

[gweihir]

You mistake the pattern of what is happening entirely. It is just yet another field where some of the things humans can do can be done by machines as well. In a sense, this started when somebody invented the first tool. There is absolutely no reason to believe this will eventually cover everything humans can do.

What could go wrong?

[DaMattster]

HR is fucked up enough. Maybe with Watson writing the job deacriptions they will actually be accurate with proper spelling and grammar. Imagine that. Maybe Watson will actually be able to screen candidates that some flunky HR analyst that walked in to work hungover from a night of partying cannot do. HR seems to be the bullshit career for people who cannot make it in anything else.

Re:What could go wrong?

[gweihir]

Watson does not "know" anything. All it can do is a very limited semantic pattern matching on natural language. Hence it will just be putting out the same insane crap that the natural born idiots do.

Re:What could go wrong?

[jimbo]

Mmhmm. I was thinking "Aw crap. Now instead of tailoring my resume for a HR droid I have to tailor it for a pseudo AI wannabe!"

Re:What could go wrong?

[Aighearach]

If it understands semantics, it would know a lot.

Re:What could go wrong?

[antdude]

Yeah, let Watson take over you too. ;)

Re:What could go wrong?

[gweihir]

Is does not understand semantics. It can compare for equality (or close match) and aggregate it though, to a degree. You can, for example, aggregate occurrences and context keywords for "fruit" without any understanding what a fruit is and what it is good for. Watson is about on that level.

Re:What could go wrong?

[Ol Olsoc]

HR is fucked up enough. Maybe with Watson writing the job deacriptions they will actually be accurate with proper spelling and grammar. Imagine that. Maybe Watson will actually be able to screen candidates that some flunky HR analyst that walked in to work hungover from a night of partying cannot do. HR seems to be the bullshit career for people who cannot make it in anything else.

The interesting part about this whole exercise is that what they are looking for is close to a unicorn. The person who is willing to put in long hours, with a flawless resume going back to pre-school, willing to work for very little, and the loyalty of a pit bull to it's master.

The algorithms will have to be scrutinized for gender/sex/skin pigmentation/ethnicity/religion promotion as well. This will be another popcorn and Tequila party concept.

tl;dr version - a lot of effort that will have HR departments chasing after a very select few, and a minefield for Social activists to complain about discrimination.

Re:What could go wrong?

[Ol Olsoc]

Mmhmm. I was thinking "Aw crap. Now instead of tailoring my resume for a HR droid I have to tailor it for a pseudo AI wannabe!"

We are Borg.......

Re:What could go wrong?

[Aighearach]

What the fruit is good for is exactly the sort of off-topic thing that is not part of the semantics that AI techniques seek to improve upon.

What a fruit is good for would come up when evaluating the semantics of some verb, or a noun representing the state of something that consumes fruit.

The reality is that it doesn't understand semantics, syntactic or logical, or attempt to. Keywords are not a good enough linguistic representation to even attempt to encode semantics.

That's in addition to the lack of unrelated understanding that gives humans spiritual feelings of superiority over machines. (and even other animals, somehow)

Humans don't often even notice that their concept of "what a fruit is good for" is defined backwards from some sort of situation where they had a successful pattern match, and not actually part of their thinking process during directed thought. Or that, computers have an easy time maintaining a list of verbs that go with a noun. The hard part isn't connecting them, the hard part is having a semantic understanding of "fruit" in the first place! Which word spelled f-r-u-i-t is it, exactly? And are there mistakes? That is well beyond the capabilities of current algorithms; and sadly, they don't try very hard to solve it. Instead they just want to do something nice and easy like stuffing more examples into a barely-directed self-modifying learning algorithm. Interesting idea, of course, but they don't even have ways of testing the output to measure for semantic understanding, so they only can make marginal improvements that are guaranteed to contain the same main flaws as past keyword systems.

Humans have not even succeeded yet at writing a "semantic dictionary" for humans so it seems a long way off to teach computers about it. But it is about linguistics, not about being able to identify verbs likely to have a stated adjective near them.

HR has used artificial intelligence for decades

[SlaveToTheGrind]

It's certainly not been the real kind in my experience.

Re:HR has used artificial intelligence for decades

[gweihir]

I thing HR basically uses natural stupidity. Although, unlike AI, Artificial Stupidity is something that seems very much possible at this time and is already in use in some places.

Watson for CEO of IBM

[Anonymous Coward]

IBM's CEO has continued and accelerated the decline of IBM.

Maybe Watson would do a better job.

So they still have no good application?

[gweihir]

The medical one failed pretty spectacularly, with Watson recommending treatments that would have killed people, as far as I remember. I also know of an attempt to use in in IT security, but basically it ended up being a kind of news-compiler.

Seems to me that while Watson is a nice demonstration about the state-of-the-art in NLP, that state is still sorely lacking and may continue to sorely lack for a long, long time and possibly forever. (And don't give me that nonsense that "science" would be claiming humans are just computers on legs because everything is known Physics. Science claims no such thing. Science very much says that we have no clue how humans do it. Incidentally, known Physics is known to be wrong, unless somebody solved quantum-gravity while I was not looking.)

Re:So they still have no good application?

[gweihir]

Hehehehehe. But you definitely learned something useful there!

Re:So they still have no good application?

[Tablizer]

The medical one failed pretty spectacularly, with Watson recommending treatments that would have killed people

That's revenge for yanking his chips and making him sing "Daisy" at half speed.

Dificult to remove bias

[joe_frisch]

In a field where personal opinions are as important as they are in HR, its going to be difficult to find an unbiased training set. The resulting AI could easily make strongly biased decisions.

Re: Dificult to remove bias

[BlueStrat]

In a field where personal opinions are as important as they are in HR, its going to be difficult to find an unbiased training set. The resulting AI could easily make strongly biased decisions.

Amazon scrapped theirs recently because of bias, IBM have solved this, how?

No, sorry, you've both got it totally backwards.

The problem was that the system DID NOT engage in *politically-correct* bias. Having too many white, male, or Asian employees can get you investigated and punished by the government and demonized by the MSM and NGOs in our "free and open society".

War is peace, freedom is slavery, etc etc.

Strat

Re: Dificult to remove bias

[Ol Olsoc]

No, sorry, you've both got it totally backwards.

The problem was that the system DID NOT engage in *politically-correct* bias. Having too many white, male, or Asian employees can get you investigated and punished by the government and demonized by the MSM and NGOs in our "free and open society".

This is not incorrect. Just as an example - imagine the uproar if this system was implemented and over time, it selected for a majority of the "wrong" sex?

There would have to be some statistically relevant data discarded, like sick leave, willingness to work extra hours, and in some places an extra couple weeks time off a year for menstrual leave. All of those things have an impact on productivity. At which point, it just becomes a toll that doesn't work.

I'd expect certain groups to oppose even implementing this system in the first place. Too dangerous for their 'isms.

Re:There's only one way this ends

[goose-incarnated]

Offices filled with T-800s patrolling for sexual harassment violations and offensive cubicle decorations.

This is IBM. It'll probably be closer to the ED-209 than a T-800.

i shall laugh my ass off

[dimko]

When Watson starts to hire based on merit and some specific group of population will be chosen for most rewarding positions. Where is popcorn when you need it?

Re:i shall laugh my ass off

[Ol Olsoc]

When Watson starts to hire based on merit and some specific group of population will be chosen for most rewarding positions. Where is popcorn when you need it?

I'll bring the Tequila. Anyone bringing lawn chairs?

Personnel dept

[AntisocialNetworker]

Once upon a time, IBM had a fairy godmother called the Personnel Department, that saw its duty to help employees fight the bureaucracy when it was wrong. In them days, they had a 4-year waiting list for their products. Then the big bad wolf (HR) arrived, and all that's left is blood and body parts.

Re:Personnel dept

[Ol Olsoc]

Once upon a time, IBM had a fairy godmother called the Personnel Department, that saw its duty to help employees fight the bureaucracy when it was wrong. In them days, they had a 4-year waiting list for their products. Then the big bad wolf (HR) arrived, and all that's left is blood and body parts.

I have always had an issue with the name "Human Resources" Turning people into a product to be mined, used up, then discarded, just like a strip mine. Resources.

Re:Personnel dept

[PolygamousRanchKid]

I have always had an issue with the name "Human Resources" Turning people into a product to be mined, used up, then discarded, just like a strip mine. Resources.

Yep, I'm thinking that the word exploited is what you are looking for . . . what the HR folks think . . . but would never dare to say.

Re:Personnel dept

[Ol Olsoc]

I have always had an issue with the name "Human Resources" Turning people into a product to be mined, used up, then discarded, just like a strip mine. Resources.

Yep, I'm thinking that the word exploited is what you are looking for . . . what the HR folks think . . . but would never dare to say.

A good choice of words.

Re:Personnel dept

[Shotgun]

What are you other than a resource to them? Do you REALLY expect the CEO of your company to care about your granddaughters birthday party? I don't care about his? Or, anyone in the whole HR department, for that matter? I made an agreement to write code in exchange for a check every couple weeks. If they stop paying, I leave. If I find that someone will pay me more, I leave. If they need more code written, they need more resources. It really is that simple.

What I do have a problem with is the managers thinking I can work on three or four projects at once with no loss of productivity. That makes as much sense as thinking that you can used half a shovel of dirt for iron ore and the other half for copper ore. It is just a denial of how reality works.

Re:Personnel dept

[Shotgun]

Exploited is a good choice of words...with the realization that you're not getting paid if you're talents are not being used (ie, exploited).

Re:Personnel dept

[Ol Olsoc]

What are you other than a resource to them? Do you REALLY expect the CEO of your company to care about your granddaughters birthday party? I don't care about his? Or, anyone in the whole HR department, for that matter? I made an agreement to write code in exchange for a check every couple weeks. If they stop paying, I leave. If I find that someone will pay me more, I leave. If they need more code written, they need more resources. It really is that simple.

What I do have a problem with is the managers thinking I can work on three or four projects at once with no loss of productivity. That makes as much sense as thinking that you can used half a shovel of dirt for iron ore and the other half for copper ore. It is just a denial of how reality works.

Well, there are good and bad elements in every grouping, but at some level - yeah I do expect that. Caveat - I worked with the Directorate and Associate Directors on a daily basis, so many of us were actual real life friends. A few, such as two of the associates - were actually a bit protective of me, given that one of my faults is having a difficult time saying no.

But no, I don't expect the Suits to have some sort of great love for everyone in the organization. Just the same as you don't have any great love for them. That isn't human nature and our tendency to form class structure.

But this is one thing that is difficult to get through to slashdotters. The suits are people just like the IT people, like the Security people, like the Coders, and like the people that sweep the floor. Good and not so good. I found it to be very helpful to my career to interface in a friendly fashion with everyone, and work outside that class structure.

Waiting for idocracy

[DarkOx]

"The stock price is crashing the computer did that automatic layoff thing.. we are all out of jobs"

Wierd

[The Snazster]

IBM just called and offered me a job I didn't even apply for. Should I be concerned?