[zeidrich]

Hiring who you want is agency and power. Being powerless hurts, and giving us less agency makes us more powerless.

Applying to a position to a human similarly gives us agency and power. It's a bit of competition. If we pass or fail, it's based on how we did at the interview.

We give these things up, and that harms us. One of the big fears about Communism in the post war era was that the Party would dictate what you did for work and how you would get paid. This fear came from this loss of agency, but communism still had support in some situations because of the idea that at least in this case everyone would get paid.

Algorithmic hiring at its extreme would lead to the same loss of agency in the hiring and applying process. The algorithm would be the one that dictated whether you would get a job, and if your ability to get future jobs are dictated by your past jobs, and your past jobs are dictated by the algorithm, you are powerless. If you're really interested in computers but you worked a few summers doing mechanical work in college because that was the work that was available, well, maybe you're better qualified to be a mechanic now, so you'll never get an opportunity to work on computers. Maybe it is strictly better for the mechanic shop to hire you than get a new junior mechanic, and maybe it's strictly better for the company to hire a person who has more experience in IT.

But what if the person that they hire for IT actually wants to be a mechanic, they just had jobs doing IT work? In the same way, the company keeps you on as a mechanic because you've got experience, and it's still better for the company to hire someone like him for the IT position.

This might be more efficient for companies. But is it better for people. My question is really, how do you define 'better'?

It's certainly easy to say that it's more efficient. But cold efficiency is the stuff that scared us in the cold war, luckily Communism failed to really take hold because that cold 'efficiency' was actually inefficient and people were starving. However, implementing it in a Capitalist society is even worse, because you get all of the bad that comes with a cold uncaring hand dictating your fate, it probably IS going to be efficient, and you've got no promise that the people left behind after this efficient system is done allocating all the labor that's necessary will be cared for. How will an algorithm rate a person who is 25 and has been unemployed since college? They'd certainly be a high risk compared to someone who has been working steadily. Bottom of the pile. What if that person has been unemployed because the algorithm filtered them out of jobs just because at the time other applicants were better or more suited for the task?

As humans, we can take a chance on people like that. We might even know that they're not the perfect person for the position, but maybe we'll have "a good feeling" about them. We might make a poor hiring decision, but we might elevate a human because of it at the expense of company profits.