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Comment by Alex3917 | Hacker News Reader

This immediately brings to mind the history of scientific racism, specifically with craniometry being used to 'prove' that certain races are inferior. I realize this probably isn't what they're doing, but the fact that they're giving themselves permission to store facial data for later analysis seems questionable given the context.

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This is not racism. It's a tool that could be used for racial discrimination but that's not the same thing. It's like saying a knife is murder.

> This immediately brings to mind the history of scientific racism, specifically with craniometry being used to 'prove' that certain races are inferior.

I can't imagine why...? That would be like seeing a freeway and instantly thinking of the Nazis.

US corporations have a multi-hundred year history of using thinly veiled proxies for race as part of their hiring practices. This continues to this day, including in the tech industry.

It's not exactly that far fetched to think that someone might someday think it's a good idea to start applying some of those new AI APIs to the candidate interview videos just to see what happens. In fact given enough time and enough departments/companies, it frankly seems more likely than not.

Especially given that we already have AI scouring GitHub looking for people to recruit. Assuming it's not already happening, it seems unlikely that there won't be startups applying AI to hiring interview videos within the next couple years.

> US corporations have a multi-hundred year history of using thinly veiled proxies for race as part of their hiring practices. This continues to this day, including in the tech industry.

That's a pretty serious accusation, one that could spark a lot of successful lawsuits against those companies -- especially in the current political climate in the states they tend to be located in. Do you have any specific evidence to back it up?

Google won't you apply to work there without giving your college GPA, despite the fact that all the academic research, and also their own internal research, shows that GPA doesn't correlate at all with job performance.

C.f. what Malcom Gladwell has to say about this here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gLQC3EzDGr4

That... that's your evidence that Google are a bunch of racists? Because they want to know how well applicants did in college?

Okay, then. Good luck with the lawsuits.

Well, INAL, but maybe that actually might be a good standing for a disparate impact suit. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disparate_impact

Using GPA as a screening measure when members of a racial demographic routinely preform more poorly due to socioeconomic factors, it starts to look more like a proxy for race.

I don't think Google is asking for GPA anymore. Not for experienced hires, anyway. I can imagine they might still ask it for interns and college hires, where it's relevant. But they didn't ask me two years ago (I was seven years out of university at the time).

I can't imagine why...?

In the news right now: http://motherboard.vice.com/read/new-program-decides-crimina...

If some corporation did want to be racist (which has not been established), they'd hardly need fancy face-analysis technology to do it. They could, you know, just look at the applicants.

Blatant old-fashioned racism would be very obvious - new fangled data science racism is more insidious.

How is a computer looking at the applicant data, including their faces, more insidious than humans looking at it? In either case the company could claim they were totally not paying attention to skin color.

You should check out the history of IQ testing particularly in the US. On paper, it seemed to be a perfectly objective way to determine an individual's intelligence. But correlating the data, it was later shown to disadvantage blacks and that is why IQ testing for jobs is now illegal.

Again, how would this prevent the company from just looking at the applicants with their eyes and discriminating against the ones they don't want?

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