Big Picture
- How artificial intelligence can deliver real value to companies. McKinsey (again). There is a growing difference in financial performance between early adopters and others.
HR’s View
- Expert doubles down robots still threaten 47% of U.S. jobs. Retail employment is likely to vanish. Full report here.
Execution
- Dating? A magic formula to predict attraction is more elusive than ever. The same with employment matching.
- How to handle a HireVue interview with an investment bank. While it doesn’t actually tell you how to handle a HireVue interview, the article repeats the company’s marketing claims. Among other things, it is unlikely that this system eliminates bias. That’s pretty much not possible.
Tutorial
- Neuroevolution: A different kind of deep learning. “Put simply, neuroevolution is a subfield within artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) that consists of trying to trigger an evolutionary process similar to the one that produced our brains, except inside a computer. In other words, neuroevolution seeks to develop the means of evolving neural networks through evolutionary algorithms.” The field is changing fast.
- Inside Facebook’s AI Workshop. They focus on getting tons of data and then experimenting as opposed to building a model and refining it over time. You can do this with tons of data. It’s harder when working with the impoverished data sets of HR.
- Reinforcement Learning: By experimenting, computers are figuring out how to do things that no programmer could teach them. “Reinforcement learning copies a very simple principle from nature. The psychologist Edward Thorndike documented it more than 100 years ago. Thorndike placed cats inside boxes from which they could escape only by pressing a lever. After a considerable amount of pacing around and meowing, the animals would eventually step on the lever by chance. After they learned to associate this behavior with the desired outcome, they eventually escaped with increasing speed.”
Quote of the Week
“The entrepreneurial activity unleashed by these developments drew three times as much investment in 2016—between $26 billion and $39 billion—as it did three years earlier. Most of the investment in AI consists of internal R&D spending by large, cash-rich digital-native companies like Amazon, Baidu, and Google.
For all of that investment, much of the AI adoption outside of the tech sector is at an early, experimental stage. Few firms have deployed it at scale. In a McKinsey Global Institute discussion paper, Artificial intelligence: The next digital frontier?, which includes a survey of more than 3,000 AI-aware companies around the world, we find early AI adopters tend to be closer to the digital frontier, are among the larger firms within sectors, deploy AI across the technology groups, use AI in the most core part of the value chain, adopt AI to increase revenue as well as reduce costs, and have the full support of the executive leadership. Companies that have not yet adopted AI technology at scale or in a core part of their business are unsure of a business case for AI or of the returns they can expect on an AI investment.” –
About
Curate means a variety of things: from the work of vicar entrusted with the care of souls to that of an exhibit designer responsible for clarity and meaning. At the core, it means something about the importance of empathy in organization. HRIntelligencer is an update on the comings and goings in the Human Resource experiment with Artificial Intelligence, Digital Employees, Algorithms, Machine Learning, Big Data and all of that stuff. We present a few critical links with some explanation. The goal is to give you a way to surf the rapidly evolving field without drowning in information. We offer a timeless curation of the intersection of HR and the machines that serve it. We curate the emergence of Algorithmic HR.
