ANTHEM AWARD WINNER •
NAMED A FINANCIAL TIMES BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR 2024
AI is on the brink of dominating our lives, threating our privacy and human future—if we don’t take action now. In
The Algorithm, Emmy‑award winning
Wall Street Journal and
Guardian contributor Hilke Schellmann delivers a shocking and illuminating exposé on one of the most pressing civil rights issues of our time: how AI has quietly, and mostly out of sight, taken over the world of work.
Schellmann takes readers on a journalistic detective story, meeting job applicants and employees who have been subjected to these technologies, playing AI-based video games that companies use for hiring, and investigating algorithms that scan our online activity to construct personality profiles— including if we are prone to self -harm. She convinces whistleblowers to share results of faulty AI -tools, and tests algorithms that analyze job candidates’ facial expressions and tools that predict from our voices if we are anxious or depressed. Schellmann finds employees whose every keystrokes were tracked and AI that analyzes group discussions or even predicts when someone may leave a company. Her reporting reveals in detail how much employers already know about us and how little we know about the technologies that are used on us.
The Algorithm tells an even bigger story with Schellmann discovering faulty algorithms and systemic discrimination of women and people of color, which may have already harmed thousands of job seekers and employees. It advocates to go beyond these tools to more thoughtfully consider how we hire, promote, and treat human beings—with or without AI. As Schellmann emphasizes, we need to decide how we build algorithmic tools in any industry and what protections we need to put in place in an AI-driven world.
Hilke Schellmann is an Emmy-award winning investigative reporter and journalism professor at NYU. Her work covering artificial intelligence has been published in
The New York Times,
The Guardian, the
MIT Technology Review, and
The Wall Street Journal, where she led a team investigating how AI is changing our lives. She has also reported for NPR’s Planet Money podcast on fake online reviews and her investigation for VICE on HBO was a finalist for a Peabody Award. Her PBS Frontline documentary
Outlawed in Pakistan premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and was honored with an Emmy award.
"Hilke Schellmann is an Emmy award-winning investigative reporter, Wall Street Journal and Guardian contributor, and journalism professor at NYU. In "The Algorithm," she investigates the rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the world of work. AI is now being used to decide who has access to an education, who gets hired, who gets fired, and who receives a promotion. Drawing on exclusive information from whistleblowers, internal documents, and real-world tests, Schellmann discovers that many of the algorithms making high-stakes decisions are biased, racist, and do more harm than good. Algorithms are on the brink of dominating our lives and threaten our human future-if we don't fight back. Schellmann takes readers on a journalistic detective story, testing algorithms that have secretly analyzed job candidates' facial expressions and tone of voice. She investigates algorithms that scan our online activity, including Twitter and LinkedIn, to construct personality profiles a la Cambridge Analytica. Her reporting reveals how employers track the location of their employees, the keystrokes they make, access everything on their screens, and, during meetings, analyze group discussions to diagnose problems in a team. Even universities are now using predictive analytics for admission offers and financial aid"--
