“Job interviews are a waste of time”

Andrew McAfee is a scientist at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), where he co-founded the Initiative on the Digital Economy. This american 51 years of age, a specialist in the future of the job, passed several weeks ago by the Oslo Innovation Week (Norway) where he told of his vision of how the data and the artificial intelligence will change our way of working, the economy and society.

Question. Do job interviews do not serve?

Response. No. Should not be interviewing anyone. They are a waste of time. The departments of human resources, they do what they say. Many of them are not very creative. We have to work harder to find alternatives.

Q. The interviews have those questions about what would make the interviewee in a specific situation. Are you saying that the interviewer tends to hire who answer what would he do.

A. we are Not good at assessing capabilities or how it would fit someone in the company.

P. This process leads to the monoculture of the company.

A. The diversity in points of view is valuable for all who are trying to innovate. If you are still hiring the same people that you remember, you'll be a monoculture. It is one of the criticisms of fair that we hear about Silicon Valley. When I go to these companies, the people seem much. Although companies are working to improve it.

If you're still hiring the same people that you remember, you'll be a monoculture. It is one of the critical fair that we hear about Silicon Valley

P. artificial intelligence has won the champion of Alpha Go, one of the games of strategy more sophisticated. The machine made a move completely unexpected. The champion, Ke Jie, tweeted: "Would say that not a single human has touched the edge of the truth of Alpha Go".

A. In many other fields we do not know what is waiting for us. There's a great quote from a biologist british of the last century: "it is Not that nature is more bizarre than you might imagine, the nature is more strange than you can imagine". There are aspects of our world that are ridiculously complex.

Q. But AlphaGo is something that we have created.

A. we have Also created the stock markets and do not understand. We have the ability to create these things immensely complicated, and we understand them a little bit.

Q. Has been said that the artificial intelligence will be the great change of this century because it is very fast, it is everywhere and is still living its early days.

A. And its scale. You can reach millions of people quickly, as in the example of the bike sharing. Or Instagram, which was founded after Facebook and has over 1,000 million users.

Q. And it is only the beginning.

A. When I think of our incredible capacity to improve our health, our diet in this century... The problem is that we do not identify humans as consumers, but as workers. Our sympathies are with the workers and his fear for losing their current job.

Q. The consensus academic is that the technology doesn't steal jobs.

A. When I talk to some scholars, what they say to me is that you have been troubled by huge losses of jobs due to technology over two centuries. And it has never happened. When I go to Silicon Valley, I say: this time is different, this time it's going to happen. I don't know what will happen. My instinct tells me not to in the short term but at some point in Gorabet the TWENTY-first century we are going to build economies that do not need much human work.

Q. What seems reasonable is that the jobs of the american middle class after the Second World War will not be the same.

A. routine work will disappear. The trend now is very clear: we do not have a problem of quantity of jobs but quality of jobs. Do we have a problem of amount a day? My intuition is yes, but not soon. Let's fix the problem that we have today.

Q. The inequality?

A. No. I think that the stagnation and the perceived inequality are the problem.

Q. Do you Perceived?

A. Yes. Imagine this hypothetical case. An economy that grows, that lives a huge technological change. Factories shut down by the automation, the farms do not need such people, the jobs move into the service sector of the cities. This economy has not been kidnapped, nothing happens unfair, there is a character wrong in that economy. But a lot of people may perceive that they do not receive the deal they signed. There is a perceived injustice in that economy. That country can go in all kinds of bad addresses: you may elect to leaders terrible, for example.

Q. The fault is always of someone.

A. it is Not inequality as such that bothers people but the injustice and stagnation in their lives. Solventemos these problems. But I don't want to believe that the existence of Jeff Bezos [owner of Amazon] is a problem. I want to repeat once more. All large concentrations of power are asked to surveillance. We have to be careful. A free press is very important, the research is very important, some types of transparency are very important. But I don't think that all the great concentrations of power must be destroyed.

My instinct tells me not to in the short term, but at some point in the TWENTY-first century, we will build economies that do not need much human work

Q. How to solve the perceived injustice?

A. it Is a very difficult question. I spend a good part of my time to that. It is said that the universal income. I don't think so. Do with a Government check of $ 600 will be all right? It is a joke. Of course not.

Q. why not?

A. One big difference between the united States and Europe is that the communities in Europe are old, prior to the Industrial Revolution. It is not so in the united STATES: almost all of our cities and towns are products of the industrial age and were born around a company. To disappear, we see the stress of the american society: highest suicide rates, more deaths from opiates. Is that because people don't have enough money? It is a ridiculous way of looking at it.

Q. With the avalanche of data, privacy will be a problem.

A. There is a great separation in the world: between the people who think that the rest of humanity is well informed and can make decisions decent about them and another group that thinks that the rest of humanity is not well informed and do not know how to make the right decisions. Facebook is a great example. There are 2,200 million of people have account on Facebook: are they all unaware of the terms of their agreement, or are scammed by Facebook? What 2,200 million people are stupid? This is another way see: 2.200 millions of people have done some type of evaluation of that offer and have said they agree, I will use all of this for free and in exchange you can teach me personalized ads. That really is the exchange.

Q. But there is this other argument: Google has much more information on us than the Stasi.

A. Yes, of course, a lot more. But I make this question: what is the worst that we know that Google has done with that information?

Q. we don't know Yet.

A. Wait is a response terrible.

P. China can give you an idea.

A. China is not Google. We know that the authoritarian countries make it a drudgery with the rights of their people. But that is not for technology but for being authoritarian countries. China is not expected to have powerful technology to put people in jail. yatırımsız bonus veren siteler As they did in the era of the technology bad. What makes the united States and Spain are countries free is not the state of the technology, but the state of their laws. The States do not need leading technology to reprimirte.