There’s a ton of great small scale things we can do with machine learning, and even LLM.
Unfortunately, it seems the main usages will be crushing people down even more.
“oooo books he must be really smart”
That shit works IRL too. Why do you think therapy practices often have themselves positioned in front of a wall of books? Not that it’s a bad thing; it’s good for outcomes to believe your therapist is competent and well educated.
One of my favorite examples is when a company from India (I think?) trained their model to regulate subway gates. The system was supposed to analyze footage and open more gates when there were more people, and vice versa. It worked well until one holiday when there were no people, but all gates were open. They eventually discovered that the system was looking at the clock visible on the video, rather than the number of people.
Just an expensive timer.
That reminds me of the time, quite a few years ago, Amazon tried to automate resume screening. They trained a machine learning model with anonymized resumes and whether the candidate was hired. Then they looked at what the AI was looking at. The model had trained itself on how to reject women.
“Bias automation” is kind of an accurate description for how our brains learn things too.
The base assumption is that you can tell anything reliable at all about a person from their body language, speech patterns, or appearance. So many people think they have an intuition for such things but pretty much every study of such things comes to the same conclusion: You can’t.
The reason why it doesn’t work is because the world is full of a diverse set of cultures, genetics, and subtle medical conditions. You may be able to attain something like 60% accuracy for certain personality traits from an interview if the person being interviewed was born and raised in the same type of environment/culture (and is the same sex) as you. Anything else is pretty much a guarantee that you’re going to get it wrong.
That’s why you should only ask interviewees empirical questions that can identify whether or not they have the requisite knowledge to do the job. For example, if you’re hiring an electrical engineer ask them how they would lay out a circuit board. Or if hiring a sales person ask them questions about how they would try to sell your specific product. Or if you’re hiring a union-busting expert person ask them how they sleep at night.
I’ve just started doing practical interviews. I basically get really young people with little overall experience and I just want to know if they can do common technical tasks.
So one question is to literally have them explain how to tighten a bolt. One person failed.
To be fair, that’s a very open ended question. I mean, what kind of bolt are we talking about? A standard lag bolt? If so you don’t tighten it! That’d be a trick question! You tighten the nut. Same thing applies with car wheel bolts. Tricky tricky!
Is it a hex bolt that also has a cross head? How tight are we talking?
I’m just going to assume bolts of lightning and Usain Bolt are off the table.
