Its All Recruiting

If you want to learn something truly fascinating that you might not have considered before, go to your favorite search engine and look up the phrase, "big data is a civil rights issue." As you scan through the search results and glean tidbits of data from the descriptions, or skim the various articles, you will no doubt see that the world is sitting on a powder keg of outrage. Algorithms and automation threaten to divide my country more profoundly than any political unrest around civil war statues, rumors of Russian collusion or fake hate crimes ever could. Indeed, when it comes to racial disparity in terms of opportunity or various life advancements, nothing is more injurious than the unintended consequences of machine learning. When I consider the effects on society and the labor market, I shudder at the pending reality of it all. Just over a year ago, I wrote an article on big data and speculated on the societal implications. I called it “This is Why Big Data is a Civil Rights Issue.” Now, in this podca