Prof Sandra Wachter, a senior research fellow in AI at Oxford University, says: "I would be very worried if people said that using AI in recruitment only has benefits. "All machine learning works in the same basic way - you go through a bunch of data, and find patterns and similarities. "So in recruitment, looking at the successful candidates of the past is the data you have. Who were the chief executives in the past, who were the Oxford professors in the past? The recruitment algorithms are going to pick out more men. "The risk is that if you don't put in strong tests, women and people of colour are overlooked." To help firms and other organisations avoid bias in their AI systems, not just for recruitment, but for all their business operations, Prof Wachter wrote a paper on the issue last year. Subsequently, her proposals have been adopted by Amazon.
Andrea Murad, ‘The computers rejecting your job application’, BBC