I doubt there’s a large corporation out there that hasn’t been pitched at least a dozen or so AI tools for HR. From vetting resumes to hiring to promoting to firing to predicting the likelihood someone will quit, there’s an AI tool for that.

But HR usually doesn’t know how to vet these systems. Nor does the standard procurement process. And businesses almost never have a process by which HR or procurement can hand these things over to internal AI ethical risk experts.

What’s more, the idea that we can have independent parties “audit” the algorithms for bias is a gross oversimplification of what needs to happen.

I talk about all this and more with Hilke Schellmann and Mona Sloane, Ph.D., both of whom know way more than I do about the ways AI stands between people and the jobs they need.

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Hilke Schellmann is an Emmy-award-winning journalism professor at New York University and a freelance reporter holding artificial intelligence accountable. Her work has been published in The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, The New York Times, and MIT Technology Review, among others. She is currently writing a book on artificial intelligence and the future of work for Hachette.

Mona Sloane, Ph.D. is a sociologist working on design and inequality, specifically in the context of AI design and policy. She is a Research Assistant Professor at NYU’s Tandon School of Engineering, Senior Research Scientist at the NYU Center for Responsible AI, a Fellow with NYU’s Institute for Public Knowledge (IPK) and The GovLab, and the Director of the *This Is Not A Drill* program on technology, inequality and the climate emergency at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. She is the principal investigator on multiple research projects on AI and society, and holds an affiliation as postdoctoral scholar with the Tübingen AI Center at the University of Tübingen in Germany where she leads a 3-year federally funded research project on the operationalization of ethics in German AI startups. Mona founded and runs the IPK Co-Opting AI series at NYU and currently serves as editor of the technology section at Public Books. She holds a Ph.D. in Sociology from the London School of Economics and Political Science. Follow her on Twitter @mona_sloane.

Ep. 14 - Should We Care About Data Privacy?

Ethical MachinesBy Reid BlackmanJul 27, 2023