The robots that come for our jobs will also help us get fired

For those who take a sadistic pleasure in searching for evidence that we’re headed towards a dystopian future where humans are ruled by their robotic overloads, consider this possible nightmare scenario: Artificial intelligence doesn’t just come for your job , but will also intervene you also dismissed.

AI has already infiltrated multiple parts of the HR process, from hiring to onboarding to training and assessment. It’s not hard to believe that in an efficiency-obsessed sector like technology, tools to streamline decision-making are now finding their way into layoffs. The conditions are ripe: last month’s tech job cuts of nearly 42,000 were the second-highest on record for the industry, according to data from outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas.

One of the reasons we know there’s a movement to automate some of the so-called “workforce reductions” is because hiring executives have admitted it: A report by Capterra, a arm of technology industry research firm Gartner, found last month that 98 per percent of HR leaders surveyed said they would rely, at least in part, on software and algorithms to reduce labor costs in a 2023 recession.

Algorithmic management is nothing new for hourly workers. For example, in 2021, Bloomberg News reported that Amazon.com tracked the every movement of its Flex delivery drivers, some of whom were fired via automated email when the company’s algorithms decided workers were about to fall over at work. The deluge of information Amazon collects about these independent contractors allows algorithms to evaluate performance, but the amount of data also makes it easier for AI advocates to argue that these tools are necessary; There are far too many inputs for a human to possibly interpret.

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Office workers have escaped such intense scrutiny until recently, in large part because the data to track them in the same way did not exist. But that’s changing with the increasing popularity of the Workforce Productivity Score and the growing inclination and ability to closely monitor not just whether employees are at their keyboards, but every keystroke and mouse click.

To be clear, I’m not suggesting that hiring managers will simply push a button and a bunch of pink slips will pop out (and with it a whole host of legal and reputational problems), although it’s almost guaranteed someone will try. The greater likelihood is that AI will help narrow the pool and provide a first pass before a human is involved – similar to what is happening now in the hiring process.

This may seem like the holy grail for HR managers, a chance to remove the emotion from layoffs and shift the blame and bad feelings from humans to machines. But we know that AI doesn’t work that way. As the edict says, bad data in, bad data out. And there’s plenty of evidence that the data companies already rely on for employee reviews is far from perfect.

Brian Westfall, an analyst at Capterra, told me that while 70 percent of HR leaders say they would use performance metrics when making layoff decisions, a higher percentage say they consider changing performance ratings because they feel that the process is flawed. Even the HR executives in the Capterra study, who said they would rely on software and algorithms to reduce labor costs in a 2023 recession, were wary of the technology. Only half said they were completely confident that these tools would provide unbiased recommendations, while 47 percent said they were perfectly fine using those recommendations to make firing decisions.