One of those "I'm glad I'm old" moments
by digby
This is a world I'm glad I don't have to navigate --- privatized Big Brother:
When Jessie Battaglia started looking for a new babysitter for her 1-year-old son, she wanted more information than she could get from a criminal-background check, parent comments and a face-to-face interview.
So she turned to Predictim, an online service that uses “advanced artificial intelligence” to assess a babysitter’s personality, and aimed its scanners at one candidate’s thousands of Facebook, Twitter and Instagram posts.
The system offered an automated “risk rating” of the 24-year-old woman, saying she was at a “very low risk” of being a drug abuser. But it gave a slightly higher risk assessment — a 2 out of 5 — for bullying, harassment, being “disrespectful” and having a “bad attitude.”
The system didn’t explain why it had made that decision. But Battaglia, who had believed the sitter was trustworthy, suddenly felt pangs of doubt.
“Social media shows a person’s character,” said Battaglia, 29, who lives outside Los Angeles. “So why did she come in at a 2 and not a 1?”
Predictim is offering parents the same playbook that dozens of other tech firms are selling to employers around the world: artificial-intelligence systems that analyze a person’s speech, facial expressions and online history with promises of revealing the hidden aspects of their private lives.
The technology is reshaping how some companies approach recruiting, hiring and reviewing workers, offering employers an unrivaled look at job candidates through a new wave of invasive psychological assessment and surveillance.
The tech firm Fama says it uses AI to police workers' social media for “toxic behavior” and alert their bosses. And the recruitment-technology firm HireVue, which works with companies such as Geico, Hilton and Unilever, offers a system that automatically analyzes applicants' tone, word choice and facial movements during video interviews to predict their skill and demeanor on the job. (Candidates are encouraged to smile for best results.)
But critics say Predictim and similar systems present their own dangers by making automated and possibly life-altering decisions virtually unchecked.
The systems depend on black-box algorithms that give little detail about how they reduced the complexities of a person’s inner life into a calculation of virtue or harm. And even as Predictim’s technology influences parents’ thinking, it remains entirely unproven, largely unexplained and vulnerable to quiet biases over how an appropriate babysitter should share, look and speak.
There’s this “mad rush to seize the power of AI to make all kinds of decisions without ensuring it’s accountable to human beings,” said Jeff Chester, the executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy, a tech advocacy group. “It’s like people have drunk the digital Kool-Aid and think this is an appropriate way to govern our lives.”
Human beings have developed highly sophisticated methods of evaluating other humans in person-to-person interactions that far outstrips anything a computer can do. Judgments about humans based on some AI reading of facial expressions is automatically inferior to human evaluation. How gross. Not to mention that there is a group of people who are very adept and fooling everyone including machines and even themselves: sociopaths.
If people are worried about how their employee interacts on social media they can look at it. It's public. If they feel their behavior would reflect badly on the company or reveals some attitudes they don't want around their kids, that's fine. But to let some "program" determine what it means is ridiculous as is the absurd idea that social media reveals a person's "character." It might reveal their character on social media but social media is not real life. I would assume everyone has figured that out by now but apparently not.
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