Earlier this month, Lina Khan, chair of the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC), wrote an essay in The New York Times affirming the agency’s commitment to regulating AI. But there was one AI application Khan didn’t mention that the FTC urgently needs to regulate: automated hiring systems. These range in complexity from tools that merely parse resumes and rank them to systems that green-light candidates and trash applicants deemed unfit. Increasingly, working Americans are obligated to use them if they want to get hired.
In my recent book, The Quantified Worker, I argue that the American worker is being reduced to numbers by AI technologies in the workplace, automated hiring systems chief among them. These systems reduce applicants to a score or rank, often ignoring the gestalt of their human experience. Sometimes they even sort people by their race, age, and sex, a practice…
