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.
