The Algorithm
How AI Can Hijack Your Career and Steal Your Future
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, journalist Hilke Schellmann reveals the secret rise of AI in the world of work. Testing them herself, 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.
Interviewing experts, developers and ordinary workers, The Algorithm offers fascinating and alarming truths. From software analysing interviewees’ facial expressions and tone of voice, to video games assessing their performance, to ‘personality profiles’ built from candidates’ social media, almost all major employers use AI in recruitment. Programmes track their staff’s activity, group dynamics and physical health, identifying who is productive, a bully, worth long-term investment, or likely to quit. But can we trust them?
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.
Hilke Schellmann is an award-winning investigative reporter and journalism professor at New York University. She has reported for HBO, NPR, The New York Times, The Guardian and The Wall Street Journal, where her team investigated how AI is changing our lives. Her PBS documentary, Outlawed in Pakistan, won an Emmy.
