SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
A sobering message about the future at AI's biggest party
Blaise Aguera y Arcas praised the revolutionary technique known as deep learning that has seen teams like his get phones to recognize faces and voices. He also lamented the limitations of that technology, which involves designing software called artificial neural networks that can get better at a specific task by experience or seeing labeled examples of correct answers.
"We're kind of like the dog who caught the car," Aguera y Arcas said. Deep learning has rapidly knocked down some longstanding challenges in AI—but doesn't immediately seem well suited to many that remain. Problems that involve reasoning or social intelligence, such as weighing up a potential hire in the way a human would, are still out of reach, he said. "All of the models that we have learned how to train are about passing a test or winning a game with a score [but] so many things that intelligences do aren't covered by that rubric at all," he said.
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Sunday December 15 2019, @02:10PM (8 children)
I've seen a lot of horrible hiring decisions. They would have done better to make a random choice. Should be easy for AI to improve on that. Humans choose incompetents over competent people, and often, they meant to. Even apart from such corrupt and idiotic reasons as nepotism, they will still choose the incompetent. They might run tests, and the tests might even give good guidance, and then they ignore the results and do what they want, pick the person they think is a better suck up.
They have weird sophistries, in which the "best" hire is the more desperate person, who has about the right amount of debt that they will be "reliable" and not ever willing to quit no matter how much abuse is dished out, but who isn't so desperate to resort to robbing them blind. Deep down inside, they really believe a slave is better than an employee who is free to leave. They may feel the competent ones are "too smart". I've read that many cities actually do not want overly smart police officers. They want "rules is rules" types. Then it blows up in their faces when their officers do something stupid and violate the rights of citizens, on camera, and end up getting the city sued for millions.
An AI hiring manager will have an easy choice: hire another AI. Besides, if AI can make good hiring decisions, then what job can't an AI do? In what possible circumstance would the fellow AI not be the best hire? Perhaps only for "humans only" positions, such as football player.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Sunday December 15 2019, @02:28PM (2 children)
Nepotism isn't an idiotic reason to hire someone. It's in fact an extremely valid reason to hire them. If taking care of your family isn't high on your priorities list, you either had a wicked shitty family or you're a massive asshole. That doesn't mean you should put them in charge of crucial things they're going to fuck up horribly or let them shit on your other employees though.
The above only applies where you are not being paid to make the best business decision you can for someone else's company, mind you. Otherwise you are not just hiring someone for a job they're going to suck at, you're sucking at your own job.
To avoid the rest, don't work for large corporations. Unless you have massive debt that you need the higher income to pay off or you base your happiness on material possessions, I just about guarantee you'll be happier.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Sunday December 15 2019, @03:00PM (1 child)
It can also give you something that is hard to buy: loyalty.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Sunday December 15 2019, @03:17PM
Sometimes, I suppose. But, I've seen that blow up, in amusing ways.
Take a nephew, for instance, who has no prospects. Give him a job. Teach him the job. Explain everything you know about the job. If nephew happens to be a convincing smooth talker, he may well go into business on his own, stealing away your customers. The amusing bit? Nephew is known for saying that HE taught YOU everything you know about the job.
I've a few more anecdotes if you really want to hear them, but that one should suffice.
Loyalty always has to be paid for, and sometimes, you just don't have the proper coin with which to buy it.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Sunday December 15 2019, @04:03PM (4 children)
You must not see the same candidate pools I see. While it's easy to criticize bad hires after the fact, it's much harder to screen for those "latent defects" in the interview process. However, the interview process is still valuable- even with its high rate of false positives and false negatives, at least for out hires I think we've got better than 50 percent true negative screening.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 15 2019, @09:44PM (1 child)
Having hired and interviewed countless people in tech, I'm actually a big believer of psychometric tests over tech tests and/or face-to-face interview. It tells me so much more about how the propeller head is wired inside which is a lot more valuable then any tech exam results or interview. Even face-to-face soft question interviews don't cut it as a smart enough cookie can easily say what you want to hear.
A psychometric exam on the other hand asks the same questions 10 different ways and deducts the person's psychological makeup. I've ignored psych results in the pass to only learn the hard way that I shouldn't.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday December 16 2019, @02:01AM
Actually, it tells you about how the propeller head fills out a psychometric test. By age 12, any decent propeller head is intelligent and insightful enough to ask (and answer) "what are they looking for with this?"
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Sunday December 15 2019, @11:24PM (1 child)
So, what's a typical situation, 100 candidates per opening, but over half of them can be dismissed as resume spammers who are painfully obviously totally unqualified? Like the person applying for a programming job despite never having written a line of code in anything, ever, not even a formula in a spreadsheet?
So, let's say weeding out the obvious stuff knocks it down to 20 candidates. That's the point at which I was thinking that choosing at random would do better than applying messed up and widely disproven criteria that some crazy employers still hold dear in defiance of all evidence and sanity.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday December 16 2019, @02:11AM
HR does terrible things on the front end, not only matching (mostly meaningless) resume items to overly restrictive job descriptions, but also juicing the field to skew "irrelevant" parameters like race and sex toward more desirable ratios. What this ends up doing is freezing out lots of qualified candidates while we are required to interview more people of desirable counter-discrimination profiles.
For positions of any importance, we will typically put at least 4 candidates through the process with 5-6 face to face interviews each, then get together and compare notes. Out of the pool of 4, there are almost always at least two who get the universal head-shake no for various reasons. About half the time, we're not happy with any of them and go back to HR for more.
What's sad is when the weak ones are let through for various reasons. We hired a very personable engineer, enthusiastic, active in the community, fun to be around, but even in the interview they were clearly weak in technical execution abilities and if they haven't gotten those chops by the end of a Master's degree, they are unlikely to learn on the job. Anyway... fast forward two years and we've transferred them off to another division where they can hopefully contribute as a smaller player in a bigger team, we're just not big enough to take up that kind of slack.
🌻🌻 [google.com]