“Could a Smart Device Catch Implicit Bias In the Workplace?” asks the title of a Northeastern University press release that includes this tidbit: “Employees who perceive bias are nearly three times as likely to be disengaged at work, and the cost of disengagement to employers isn’t cheap — to the tune of $450 billion to $550 billion a year.”
Now, “bias” here means sexism and other types of irrational group prejudice. And personally, when I hear that someone is the victim of sexism, my response is usually not, “Well, sure, that’s worrisome for her. But first, what is this costing the corporations on the bottom line?” It’s just not how I think about the problem.
Not so for the good people of Northeastern University. Their exciting news is that their researchers are “embarking” on a three-year project funded with money from the U.S. Army Research Laboratory to fight bias and sexism in the workplace in the most Orwellian possible way. What an adventure it will be:
“The vision that we have is that you would have a device, maybe something like Amazon Alexa, that sits on the table and observes the human team members.”
Why?
“Despite the growing adoption of implicit bias training, some in the field of human resources have raised doubts about its effectiveness in improving diversity and inclusion within organizations.”
You don’t say.
“But what if a smart device … could tell when your boss inadvertently left a female colleague out of an important decision, or made her feel that her perspective wasn’t valued?”
Less circuitously put: They are trying to build an artificial intelligence surveillance robot that listens in to workers’ every conversation and even tracks the “physiological signals shared between members of a team.” It will intervene and report when it finds “microaggressions,” such as one member being “dominating.” Brooke Foucault Welles, one of the grantees, said she “really loves the idea of building a system that both empowers women with evidence that this is happening so that we can feel validated and also helps us point out opportunities for intervention.”
Somehow, the notion of conscripting a droid paramilitary force onto the female side of the alleged war of the sexes seems to keep cropping up. Regular Word of the Week readers may remember the GD-IQ: Spellcheck for Bias censor-bot developed by the Geena Davis Institute to robo-read movie scripts for unacceptable viewpoints according to whatever the programming says that means. And before that, I covered Catalyst, a program that changes workplace instant messages in real time if they are deemed to contain sequences of words considered problematic by the unthinking silicon computer brain, since apparently sexism is a matter of word choice, not attitude.
Victor Hugo is said to have remarked that all the armies in the world are not so strong as an idea whose time has come. Somehow, bafflingly, the woke thought of surveillance robots checking in on workers about the way their communication strays from a preset algorithmic idea of appropriate communication is an idea whose time has now come. I would have thought the Left still retains enough of its old rock ‘n’ roll anti-authoritarian streak to know that Army-funded surveillance robots meant to optimize corporate profits by surveilling and controlling workers isn’t progress. Hell, I would think any adult human being knows that bias and offense and domination are things that take some of those ineffable human qualities such as contextual awareness and wisdom to recognize, not things we can program a computer to call us out on. Fooled again.
