Did you know that Artificial intelligence alarmists warn that machine learning will end up destroying humanity – or make humans redundant but imagine what if AI tools simply do a bad job. 

Artificial intelligence is being used, on a massive scale, to decide who gets hired, fired, and promoted. Through whistleblower exclusives, leaked internal documents, and astonishing real-world practices, reporter and professor at New York University, Hilke Schellmann reveals, after five years of investigating, exposes the secret rise of AI in the world of work. Testing them herself, the tools that are widely used by employers in hiring, firing, and management. She discovers that many algorithms making these high-stakes calculations do more harm than good, and traces their origins to troubling pseudoscientific ideas about people’s true essence.

Bots increasingly dictate which job ads we see online, which CVs recruiters read, which applicants make it to a final interview, and which employees receive a promotion, bonus – or redundancy notice. In this world of algorithms that define who we are, where we excel, and where we struggle, recruiters and managers have many reasons to turn to AI to sift impossibly large piles of CVs and fill posts faster, to help them spot talented people, even when they come from an atypical background, to make fairer decisions, stripping out human bias, or track performance and identity problem staff.  Schellmann suggests several of the systems may do more harm than good, like the video interviewing software that finds her to be a close match for a role, even when she replaces her original, plausible answers with the parroted phrase “ I love teamwork” or speaks entirely in German.

She interviewed experts who have audited CV screening tools for potential bias- and found them liable to filter out candidates from certain postcodes, a recipe for racial discrimination, to favour particular nationalities, or to view a liking for male-dominated pursuits such as baseball as a marker for success. Also there are some cases of high performers selected for redundancy or automatically cut out of the running for jobs for which they were qualified, purely because they had done poorly in apparently irrelevant online tests used to score candidates.

She played some high-speed pattern-matching, personality tests which apparently help recruiters to identify those likely to fail or excel in as role, as the software won’t recognise these are more difficult for anyone who has children or had a disability. If AI is a system designed primarily to fill a vacancy faster it will not pick the best candidate.

Unless developers intervene, job platforms serve more adverts to the candidates often men, who are most aggressive in replying to recruiters and applying for senior positions regardless of experience. Machine learning can amplify existing bias in ways that are hard to spot, even when developers are on the alert. Algorithms identify patterns among people who have done well or badly in the past, without any capacity to understand whether the characteristics they pick up on are significant.

Shellmann’s book gives tips for jobseekers to use bullet points to avoid ampersands in your CV to make it machine-readable and people who see employer is watching them keep emails upbeat. She also suggests regulators, on how to make sure AI tools are tested before they come to market. At minimum lawmakers could mandate transparency on the data used to train AI models, and technical reports on their efficacy.  Ideally, government agencies would themselves vet tools used sensitive areas such as policy, credit rating or workplace surveillance.

In a world of severe job insecurity, workplace algorithms are on the brink of dominating or even threatening us – if we don’t fight back.

The Algorithm: How AI Can Hijack Your Career and Steal Your Future by Hilke Schellmann, Hurst £22/ Hachette Books $30, 336 pages.