If you’ve got your ear to the ground in the tech world, you realize that companies are laying people off right and left – even giants with great track records for employee satisfaction, like Google.

They want you know they’re not asking AI to pick which employees stay and which go, though. 

It was laid-off employees who first began to wonder whether or not “mindless algorithms” were to blame – ones that could be programmed to not violate any laws in the process.

Google denies the claim, though 98% of human resources leaders in America are more than willing to let AI be the bad guy in the future.

This is even though less than half of them are confident the tech will make the right choices.

They already use AI and algorithms to find the “right person” for the “right project,” so this would simply be using similar tech for the inverse purpose, says Joseph Fuller, a Harvard Business School professor of management practice.

“They suddenly are just being used differently, because that’s the place where people have a real inventory of skills.”

Brian Westfall, an analyst at a software review site, worries that racism could unintentionally come into play, especially if the AI started taking more into considerable than performance.

“You can kind of see where the snowball gets rolling, and all of a sudden, these data points where you don’t know how that data was created or how that data was
influenced suddenly lead to poor decisions.”

Personally, I doubt the downsides will stop companies from giving it a try.

But maybe they’ll prove me wrong.