Young people await European AI regulation

The European Commission has just proposed new rules and an action plan to promote excellence and trust in artificial intelligence (AI). In its press release of April 21, 2021, it highlights the need for strict regulation to address the risks of this technology.

This pioneering global initiative, which still has to be adopted by the Parliament and member states, demonstrates the strategic importance of addressing the issue of AI's impact on society and the ethics of its use.

In the professional world, AI is investing the majority of professions but also the relationship between employees and company. Recruitment is a notable example, and its practices, when they make use of AI, are rightly considered high-risk in the Commission's proposal.

In the age of talent management, recruitment is one of the first points of contact with the company for young graduates. If they trust artificial intelligence to create their network of friends or find their soulmate, what about when it comes to finding their first job, which they hope will be a vector of development and a source of meaning?

To answer this question, the EDHEC NewGen Talent Centre surveyed 1,536 business students on their vision of the impact of AI in the business world, and more specifically, their views on the use of algorithms in corporate recruitment processes. Their answers and testimonials shed a more nuanced generational light than one might expect from the young people we call "digital natives".

AI, a conditional source of progress

First of all, the students surveyed have a vision of the impact of AI on the world that evolves over the course of their studies. While they are rather divided at the start of their course, their opinion is more favorable at the end of their training (in Master 2), where three quarters of the students questioned think that the advances enabled by this technology are positive.

They are cautious, however, and point to the need for supervision of practices. Only "if AI is properly controlled can it be a source of progress". AI must be kept under control and regulated.

On the other hand, those less convinced by AI fear a loss of humanity to robotization: "AI will replace the least skilled jobs". They fear that it will have an impact not only on jobs, but also on the individual's autonomy and ability to think: "AI takes too much of the burden off people, to the point of making them less capable, more dependent", they fear "machines overtaking man, and humans losing their ability to think, or even their intelligence".

They associate this risk of taking control over hitherto human intelligence and activities with a dehumanization that undermines social bonds and can go so far as to unbalance society.

While they believe AI is disrupting all fields, more than a quarter of young people, both women and men, rate the most significant changes in healthcare, where it is enabling safer diagnoses, the robotization of certain surgical procedures and greater efficiency in medical data processing.

Perception of AI in recruitment

As described above, AI can play many roles in a multitude of business sectors. In the world of recruitment, AI is set to play an increasingly prominent role, whether to provide a less biased assessment of job candidates, or to facilitate the sometimes lengthy process of recruiting new staff.

But how is its use perceived by the new generations, do they see it differently from recruiters or jobseekers already on the job market? To find out, we collected data from these target audiences, asking them whether they found it ethical to use AI in the various aspects of recruitment, using a 5-level scale ranging from not at all ethical to very ethical.

As far as students are concerned, they are rather less favorable to the use of AI in recruitment processes. Overall, only one young person in five is in favor. However, their opinion is nuanced according to the recruitment practices in which AI is used.

As shown in the table below, our results show that AI analysis of documents submitted by candidates is much better accepted than analysis of attitudes, voice or non-verbal expressions, whatever the populations surveyed.

This result is worth noting, as it confirms the acceptance of AI being useful for tasks upstream of the process, while reticence remains when it comes to using it in private relationships or to assess more personal aspects of an interview, such as facial expression. This completely echoes their previously described reservations: young people are less favorable to artificial intelligence as soon as it interferes with social interactions and threatens to disrupt them.

Support for the use of AI in recruitment increases with age, except when it comes to analyzing social networks, where, whatever their age, they are strongly reluctant to have their personal content deciphered by algorithms.

Perception of the job market

We thought it would be interesting to see whether this vision of the younger generation is confirmed for people on the job market. To this end, we questioned 305 jobseekers and recruiters on the same issues of AI ethics in the different phases of recruitment. The results show a perception fairly similar to that of students, except for the analysis of social network content. In this case, jobseekers and especially recruiters are more likely than students to be convinced of the ethical nature of AI.

That said, we also detect differences between jobseekers and recruiters (see table below). Recruiters have a more positive perception of AI ethics than jobseekers, especially with regard to its use to analyze documents sent by candidates, to analyze the content of their social networks, as well as to analyze body language during job interviews.

The European project to regulate artificial intelligence as a source of progress, centered on people, sustainable, safe, inclusive and trustworthy, removes the reservations expressed by the younger generations and creates the legislative framework needed to avoid the abuses they feared, whether in everyday life, in recruitment processes or in the "Man-Machine" balance.

This article is republished from The Conversation under Creative Commons license. Read the original article .

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