Fortune reports that employers are starting to use AI for initial interviews, and that this is driving some job seekers away:

While Rausch withstood multiple AI interviews, Borchardt couldn't even sit through a single one. The 64-year-old editorial professional says things went downhill when the robotic interviewer simply ran through her résumé, asking her to repeat all of her work experiences at each company listed. The call was impersonal, irritating, and to Borchardt, quite lazy. She ended the interview in less than 10 minutes.

"After about the third question, I was like, 'I'm done.' I just clicked exit," she says. "I'm not going to sit here for 30 minutes and talk to a machine ... I don't want to work for a company if the HR person can't even spend the time to talk to me." [bold added]

The reaction is understandable, and rational up to a point.

The "interview" described above reminds me of online job applications that are little more than time-consuming exercises in cutting-and-pasting from the resume one is already sending in -- and which will presumably be parsed and dumped into a database already. Except, that since speaking is even slower, applicants stand to lose even more time providing information ... again.

On the other hand, the bots are a new technology, they're not all this bad, and they're saving hiring managers time, so they're likely to become the new normal.

Even so, job interviews -- even with AI -- are still conversations. As we see above, laziness or thoughtlessness can manifest in how the interviewer uses the technology. As frustrating as a lousy bot might be, take heart in knowing that the screening still happens both ways.

-- CAV

Celebrating the Enlightenment in Boston

The post OCON 2025: A Week of Ideas in the Birthplace of American Independence appeared first on New Ideal - Reason | Individualism | Capitalism.

 

The above is a starved Israeli that Hamas kidnapped almost 2 years ago. Hamas didn’t just release the video this is taken from; they flaunted it. In a staggering act of projection, the creatures in Hamas imagine that these images will show the world how powerful they are. In their deluded consciousness, showing that you can create living skeletons brings respect.

They imagine that the Western world has their inhuman psychology. If this were 10 years ago, I’d be confident that they have miscalculated. Is there enough basic humanity left in the West to change minds as to who is the villain here?

The early signs were troubling. Some Facebook venues (e.g., Norway) removed the pictures of the two emaciated victims of Hamas. They did not remove the fake pictures of “starvation” in Gaza (children with diseases who were presented as though their wasted away condition were due to starvation).

A quick check of NBC news online revealed that it showed only the least revealing of the photos of this man, and that was shown only very briefly.

CNN originally showed many minutes of grisly video footage of the human skeleton, Evyatar David, but now the media is not showing hardly any of this important video.

The New York Times online shows only the one frame that follows.

So, the new Party Line has been established. The New York Times and Reuters are implicitly blaming Israel. The line is: the horror won’t stop until Israel gives in to whatever Hamas demands. The suffering will continue, they tell us, until Israel surrenders.

October 7th is out of sight. The crimes of Hamas against their own citizens are either ignored or blamed on Israel. Whatever Hamas does is just a fact of nature. In Objectivist terminology, Hamas’ bloodthirsty acts are “metaphysically given”—unalterable, unjudgeable facts, like the law of gravity. But Israel has choice, so it is accountable.

They would never say it out loud, but to such people October 7th did not deserve Israel’s retaliation because the Gazans could not do otherwise. Gazans, apparently, have no free will. They are no more to be judged and held accountable than is a flood. Both the flood and Gazan atrocities are inescapable absolutes to which the rest of us must adjust. Including Israel.

In one of the cruelest inversions of language, “genocide” is the charge hurled at those defending themselves against those who lust for genocide and for generations have been killing Jews wherever they can get at them.

A culture committed to wiping out Jews for the crime of being Jews, a culture teaching the holy crusade of killing “infidels” in all the schools from kindergarten on up, a culture whose government plans and executes an incursion into Israel to kill every Jew they can, to torture and rape, to burn peaceful Jewish settlements to the ground, to carry off Jewish boys, girls, and children and starve them until they are Auschwitz-style skeletons—that is not genocide. No, genocide is fighting back.

To people following the Party Line, whatever Israel does is wrong, unjust, depraved. How else can you read such things as the following from an Israeli “protestor”:

“We tried everything — military pressure, displacing people, blocking food, conquering areas, eliminating Hamas commanders — none of that brought all of the hostages back,” Ms. Zangauker said. “The one thing we haven’t tried is a comprehensive agreement in exchange for ending the war.”

A comprehensive agreement in exchange for even a cease-fire has been (wrongly) sought for months, if not years. What this protestor must mean is: surrender. Give Hamas whatever it wants, because that’s the only way to get the hostages back and “end” the war.

This abject, cowardly act wouldn’t end the war, of course. No surrender of the good to the evil can ever work.

Former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir named it:

“If the Arabs put down their weapons today, there would be no more ‎violence. If the Jews put ‎down their weapons ‎today, there would be no ‎more Israel.”

That is not a quip. That is the literal truth. How does the anti-Israel lobby process that fact? I cannot imagine.

The Times, which hammers out the center-Left line on all concrete issues, devoted its coverage to Israelis who were outraged . . . about Israel’s not giving in to Hamas’ demands.

But ordinary, even left-leaning, Americans are not likely to buy into blaming Israel for Hamas’ inhuman treatment of these Israeli hostages. The horrifying video will likely add to the growing split between the Left and those Americans who think for themselves.

And they are the ones who count.