| Some comments are focusing on this exacerbating aggregate phenomena like diversity stats and wage gaps. This is true and a huge negative. But that's not the only thing we should be worried about. Far more damaging would be the dystopia that these "cognitive surveillance" products will bring upon us. It claims to micro-analyze facial expressions, intonation, non-verbal signals while the candidate is interviewing. This is vile, hostile interaction in my opinion, and it is startling to see that companies like Vodafone, Intel, and Oracle are their customers [1]. At best, this is a way to sweep unaccountable decision-making under the carpet of "the software said so".
Quite likely, though, is that such products will make society a living hell for everyone until these practices are entrenched in the industry and it is too late to roll it all back. The creators of these products are not stupid, they made a conscious choice to grab low-hanging fruit (now that they have the technology available) and enrich themselves while making the world a worse place. Let's not kid ourselves that the consequences of their actions did not occur to them. As a research student in DL/AI, I realize this may make things marginally worse for my career, but right here is the reason we should regulate AI usage _now_: not Skynet, but these attempts to "disrupt" social norms for no stated reason other than "progress" and "efficiency".
We should keep some technologies out of the public sphere and make it vocally clear that they are unacceptable, lest we end up with a world where everyone is wearing google glasses and you have no way to maintain a personal facade because some combination of blood flow and facial muscle twitch betrays your thoughts. Your only argument against this stuff should not only be that it has X bug or that it's execution isn't sound due to Y bias. We must oppose such things on principle, I would rather kill myself than live in some sort of Black Mirror-esque dystopia where this is mainstream. [1]: https://www.hirevue.com/customers |
Is your objection to the use of those things in general, or just to the use of an AI instead of a human to evaluate them?
I'm curious because these things are just, I think, the components that go into demeanor and humans routinely use demeanor to judge how much trust to put into what someone else is saying.
In fact, one of the main reasons that witnesses in a criminal trial in the US testify in person in front of the jury is so that the jury can see their demeanor and use it to judge credibility.
I'm pretty sure almost every human interviewer uses demeanor evidence, albeit not consciously. Short of eliminating face to face interviews I doubt that there is a way to stop such judging because it is almost completely unconscious.