The Algorithm

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.