Artificial: C14 I meet Matt at the bus stop.

Monday and I'm waiting at the bus stop. I'd been told that the crowds of tourists thinned in September, but I can see little evidence of it. I spot Simon and who I take to be Matt Nicholson coming forward. 

"Hey Oliver meet Matt and vice-versa," says Simon stepping back to let us greet one another.

 

"You are both newbies here and have travelled from the same town in Ireland," I can see Simon is enjoying this. The bus arrives and together with around a dozen or so others we file on and take seats. Simon joins Matt and I sit in a third seat across the gangway from the two of them. The noise of the bus makes conversation across the gangway difficult, so I settle down to read whilst the other two chat animatedly. I can see Matt has the same wonder that I exhibited all of a week ago when I joined Brant.

 

We soon enter the Brant campus and then Simon bids his farewells as he gets off at an earlier stop. I cross over the gangway to sit next to Matt and we carry on toward the Research block. 

 

"You'll be held up there," I explain, "It will probably take a couple of hours to process you and then someone will collect you from the entrance area, probably Amy van der Leiden. She's the boss of our team and protects us from the wilder excesses of Brant Corporate," I explain.

 

Matt smiles, "The corporate electromagnet can be switched on at any time." 

 

I laugh, "Yes we are all ruled by spreadsheets and corporate magnets."

 

There is a hiss as the driver pulls up and opens the doors at the front and middle of the bus. 

 

"Good luck!" I whisper to Matt.

 

"Thanks," he replies, pulling a small day sack from the overhead space on our bus.

 

Weirdly, I didn't see him again until the next morning, when he looks the worse for wear. He'd been out on his first evening with Schmiddi and Rolf and had maybe tried a little too hard with the local beers. Simon found some tablets to give him, for what must have been a monster headache.

 

I spent Tuesday with Rolf, working out some new sensor designs, whilst Matt spent the day with Juliette Häberli. They seemed to spend a lot of time talking about cats. Matt's evening extended into one with Juliette and I noticed how quickly they had become good friends.

 

I could tell that Matt was quickly comfortable with the Geneva life. I'd had to have some me-time at the end of the first week, but Matt seemed to be ready for whatever came his way. 

 

But at the end of the week, he completely disappeared.  From Saturday morning until Monday. Simon was uncontactable and I wondered whether Simon and Matt were somehow involved in something together. 

 

The next Monday we had a big team meeting in the Research Lab to compare notes about last week and then to begin to prepare a series of experiments for the new week. I was somewhat dismayed to hear everyone in the lab discussing the defective components in the makeup of the Cyclone helmet. 

 

Amy cut in, "Yes; that is the difficulty. Kjeld Nikolajsen wants us to push to get the Human to Computer link designed and is not prepared to listen to arguments about parts of the system being defective. He thinks that any kinks can be ironed out later in the design and marketing process."

 

Schmiddi spoke again, "I was looking at the reports from Selexor. They seem to have a good PR firm. Harry Stensen, Selexor’s chief technology officer, said that the criticism of Createl is uninformed and that most AI researchers have a limited understanding of the psychology behind how workers think and behave."

 

Schmiddi continued, "Stensen compared the Createl algorithms’ ability to boost hiring outcomes with medicine’s improvement of health outcomes and said the science backed him up. The system, he argued, is still more objective than the flawed metrics used by human recruiters, whose thinking he called the 'ultimate black box.'"

 

We all watched Schmiddi reading his report on his laptop, “ 'People are rejected all the time based on how they look, their shoes, how they tucked in their shirts and how ‘hot’ they are,' Stensen told The Washington Post. 'Algorithms eliminate most of that in a way that hasn’t been possible before. The AI doesn’t explain its decisions or give candidates their assessment scores, which Stensen called 'not relevant.' 

 

Rolf asked, "Wasn't Stensen the man who said, 'When 1,000 people apply for one job, 999 people are going to get rejected, whether a company uses AI or not.' ?"

 

Juliette added, "Yes, in the literature for my psychology work I see increasingly regular quotes that these inscrutable algorithms have forced job seekers to confront a new interview anxiety.

 

"An example, from right here at Brant: Lilja Jussila, a University of Connecticut senior studying math and economics said she researched Selexor and did her best to dazzle the job-interview machine. Lilja answered confidently and in the time allotted. She used positive keywords. She smiled, often and wide."

 

Juliette continued, "But when she didn’t get the job, she couldn’t see how the computer had rated her or ask how she could improve, and she agonised over what she had missed. Had she not looked friendly enough? Did she talk too loudly? What did the AI hiring system believe she had gotten wrong?"

 

"So what were the reasons?" I asked.

 

Juliette remembered, “Lilja said that maybe one of the reasons she didn’t get it was that she spoke a little too naturally. She didn't use enough big, fancy words. It's like not 'playing the game'.”

 

"I remember the case," said Amy, "It made it to the top because we were really desperate to hire someone with Lilja's skill-set. My theory was that it was simply her international Finnish-sounding name that threw her out."

 

Schmiddi added, "Selexor said its system dissects the tiniest details of candidates’ responses — their facial expressions, their eye contact and perceived “enthusiasm” — and compiles reports companies can use in deciding whom to hire or disregard."

 

He was still reading from the laptop report, "Job candidates aren’t told their score or what little things they got wrong, and they can’t ask the machine what they could do better. It's claimed that it would be the first stage of gaming the system. Human hiring managers can use other factors, beyond the Selexor score, to decide which candidates pass the first-round test."

 

Rolf added, "The advertising says that Selexor employs superhuman precision and impartiality to zero in on an ideal employee, picking up on tell-tale clues a recruiter might miss. Here:"

 

He handed out a flyer advertising Selexor. It was a photocopy of a page from Winners magazine:

 

Selexor

 

Selexor’s prospects have cemented it as the leading player in the brave new world of semi-automated corporate recruiting. It can save employers a fortune on in-person interviews and quickly cull applicants deemed below the standard. Selexor says it also allows companies to see candidates from an expanded hiring pool: Anyone with a phone and Internet connection can apply. 

 

Armanis Winterhall, Selexor’s chief industrial-organisational psychologist, told Winners magazine the standard 30-minute Selexor assessment includes half a dozen questions but can yield up to 500,000 data points, all of which become ingredients in the person’s calculated score.

 

The employer decides the written questions, which Selexor’s system then shows the candidate while recording and analysing their responses. The AI assesses how a person’s face moves to determine, for instance, how excited someone seems about a certain work task or how they would behave around angry customers. 

 

Those 'Raw Response Units,' Winterhall said, can make up around a third of a person’s score; the words they say and the 'audio features' of their voice, like their tone, make up the rest.

 

'Humans are inconsistent by nature. They inject their subjectivity into the evaluations,' Winterhall said. 'But AI can data analyse what the human processes in an interview, without bias. And humans are now believing in machine decisions over human feedback.' 

 

Now we were getting somewhere. Coming into my specialism. Artificial Intelligence and Augmented Reality.