Alienation

Category: Social and Cultural Issues

Artificial intelligence and analytics impose themselves as a barrier between one person and another, or between one person and necessary access to jobs, services, and other social, economic and cultural needs. Consider the case of a person applying for work where analytics-enabled job applicant screening is being used. However, "La difficulté, pour les candidats pris dans les rets de ces systèmes de tris automatisés, est d'en sortir, c'est-à-dire se battre contre les bots, ces gardiens algorithmiques, pour atteindre une personne réelle capable de décider de son sort (The difficulty for candidates caught in the nets of these automated sorting systems is to get out of them, that is, to fight against bots, those algorithmic guardians, to reach a real person capable of deciding on their exit)" (Guillaud, 2020).

The process can be depersonalizing and demeaning. For example, Jeffrey Johnson describes recent experiences with such systems. "He got emails prompting him to take an online test seconds after he submitted an application, a sure sign no human had reviewed his résumé. Some were repeats of tests he'd already taken. He found them demeaning. 'You're kind of being a jackass by making me prove, repeatedly, that I can type when I have two writing-heavy advanced degrees,' Johnson said, 'and you are not willing to even have someone at your firm look at my résumé to see that'" (Keppler, 2020).

The eventual consequence may be disengagement and alienation. "Will Hayter, Project Director of the Competition and Markets Authority, agreed: ' ... the pessimistic scenario is that the technology makes things difficult to navigate and makes the market more opaque, and perhaps consumers lose trust and disengage from markets'" (Clement-Jones, et.al, 2018:para 52).

Examples and Articles

A.I. and Humanityâ€™s Self-Alienation
"Alienation in the twenty-first century plays a disruptive and destructive social role. It is simultaneously concrete and abstract, determined by immediate social activity and experienced as a kind of shadowy, ineffable form of social domination." Direct Link

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