New app scans your face and tells companies whether you’re worth hiring
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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.
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.
I understand the idea of doing probablistic inference about people based on their demeanor. We do it all the time with our minds, indeed many aspects of society and culture are built around non-verbal communication.
I'm okay with how things currently are, because we are innately capable of learning behavior policies for social interactions, while preserving a lot of cognitive privacy. In other terms, you can consciously control your demeanor (as the word is currently understood).
I afraid of inferences drawn from sub-conscious demeanors and involuntary information leaks.
Normal humans will not be able to tell if someone is nervous or afraid or angry just by looking at them, if that someone wants to maintain a pokerface. But it is entirely possible to read someone's pulse by recording a video of their skin, thus taking away some privacy of the mind [1].
We haemorrhage a lot of information all the time. As far as I know, current polygraph tests are trash, but I would be unsurprised if some characteristic features were to be found in a video+audio stream of someone's face that would estimate with good accuracy and precision that they were lying.
We all lie. To others and to ourselves. Within limits, lying is an integral part of healthy life. A world where I cannot casually lie is not one where I can live in; cognitive privacy is important.
Sounds a lot like redlining to me[0][1].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/24/upshot/how-redlinings-rac...
"The era of blind faith in big data must end" | TED Talk |
https://www.ted.com/talks/cathy_o_neil_the_era_of_blind_fait...
"Algorithms decide who gets a loan, who gets a job interview, who gets insurance and much more -- but they don't automatically make things fair. Mathematician and data scientist Cathy O'Neil coined a term for algorithms that are secret, important and harmful: "weapons of math destruction." Learn more about the hidden agendas behind the formulas."
...
"Algorithms are everywhere. They sort and separate the winners from the losers. The winners get the job or a good credit card offer. The losers don't even get an interview or they pay more for insurance. We're being scored with secret formulas that we don't understand that often don't have systems of appeal. That begs the question: What if the algorithms are wrong?"
The comparison of how humans think and human intellect in general with poorly understood applied computational statistics really has gone too far.
Now, if you mean to say that humans themselves have biases and "wrong" behavior, that's a different matter.
Let the lawsuits begin.
There are a thousand reasons why this is probably a garbage system. And chances are, it's just another AI-hype-driven thing to sell to ignorant companies/"decision-makers" who should be out of business already.
> Goldman Sachs, Under Armour, Unilever, and Vodafone are also among the companies that have used the platform.
Maybe the biggest question we should ask is what does this solve? What problem is this trying to solve? And once we figure that out, ask ourselves... is that the problem we should be solving? Is it the best way to solve it?
This company should remove this product from the market immediately. How this passed off as a good idea all the way through the product development cycle is beyond me.
It sounds like you are assuming that businesses are supposed to act like a single human with ethics and a moral compass should. I agree with your conclusion but to ponder how this passed off as a good idea is silly. If I could come up with software to sell to businesses to replace a huge amount of their recruiting cost (people, time, operational cost) wouldn't I be inclined to do business with them?
Consider a company global company, when you look at hiring at scale it becomes easy to justify streamlining the whole process.
I still find it like a bad direction to go but what do you expect?
0: Think of the plague
Fortunately for US-based companies, the quarterly earnings-per-share cycle creates so many decision changes within a year that a system like this wouldn't survive more than two years max. And that's about the tenure of the average employee, so it will wash out. Meanwhile, a boss will get a bonus for implementing it, and the vendor will make some cash. All is well, right?
Can you imagine putting a scientist through this process? A janitor? No way.
This kind of thing just provokes my bias towards only allowing recruiters, HR, etc., to handle processing paperwork, like clerks, and leaving the real decisions to the departments that have to work with the people who get hired. Something like this would be laughed out of the building where I work.
PS: Just imagine all the shallow correlation biases a deep learning net will discover. People with red hair? Nope. People with insufficient bilateral symmetry? Nope.
As society moves forward, we must not accept that just because a tool is based on AI that it is not flawless or biased.
Judging someone's competency based upon their face and its expressions is not much. more accurate than a witch test, even without the consideration of differing cultural norms and behaviors. Will American firms discriminate against Russians because they don't smile as much?
While there can be very much debate over the long term value of an AI based filter, at least the filter here includes much more than just "your face".
Honestly, I only clicked it to see if they were really just viewing a still image of your face and then trying to determine if you would be a good hire. I knew better.
But even if I am right in this theory, this only gives you one part of the person. Because the environment and the own decisions of a person shapes them. For example, even if a person if the perfect fit for the job position based on the analysis, and the analysis is right, the succeed of that person also depends in the attitude. If the person has developed a natural laziness over the life it wont be productive at the job. And the opposite can be true, a less genetical predisposed person which has work hard during all the life could be a much better match for the job.
EDIT: when I said the skills are encoded in genes and also expressed in body traits it doesn't mean gender or race, it could irrelevant things as the length of the fingers, or the way you walk.
Also, your example of laziness is classic thinking yourself out of quality employees: laziness is good for identifying waste and inefficiency and for creating scaling automation. So it's not even clear if "laziness" is interesting without context to businesses.
Of course, it could also entail lack of work ethic.
Care to back up this claim?
> I don't really see distinctive features amongst bipolar or schizophrenic people...
What you don't see them doesn't mean they are not there. It could be something subtle. If one change in chromosome leads to a lot of mental and physical changes it could mean things like people with better maths skills grows faster the nails. And I repeat, this is a theory for me that still needs to be probed or at least more data. But I wouldn't discard it so fast. What this company is doing is going somehow in this direction. What do you think about the company of the article?
Yes, because the prospective employer should be evaluating my job performance skills instead.