Would you rather get fired by a human or an algorithm?

From American public media, this is Marketplace Tech.

I'm Megan McCarty-Karino.

Artificial intelligence is revolutionizing how we work, and how we lose work.

You know, not just those chatbots that are coming for human jobs, yeah, we see you.

But also software that can determine which employees should get a pink slip when companies

decide to downsize.

Whether any employers used algorithms to conduct layoffs in recent months has been a topic

of much speculation — none have disclosed it — but in a recent survey of 300 HR leaders

by Captera, a tech review platform aimed at business, 98% of those HR leaders said they

would rely on software and algorithms to reduce labor costs in a recession.

Brian Westfall is the author of that report.

He says, compared to the last recession 15 years ago, HR has become a lot more data-driven.

So we asked our HR leaders, you know, how much are these layoff decisions going to be

driven by data versus gut instinct?

And 46%, most often they said, it's going to be an equal divide.

But I think at the end of the day, being data-driven is a good thing.

It can help HR departments make decisions based on evidence instead of unconscious biases.

Just the big red flag, right, is we want HR departments to proceed with caution because

if they're using bad data or just not understanding how that data is being used by an algorithm

to make these decisions, that's where bad things can come to play.

Tell me more about how these algorithms actually work, what kinds of data might be considered.

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