Member

I point to a case in the US—it is an ongoing case, so these are only claims at the moment—against a financial software company that used third-party vendor screening software. The claim was that this discriminated against deaf and non-white individuals. It was an AI-based video interview program, which might seem a little strange to Members of your Lordships’ House, but when I talk to young people today seeking work, they are very familiar with it. One individual in this case was an Inuit person, who spoke with an accent, and others were deaf or hard of hearing speakers. In this case, the employee requested human-generated captioning as an accommodation. That was denied by the software—not by a person but by the software—and the interviewer rejected this applicant on the basis of her communication style. I keep coming back to this in your Lordships’ House. This is not intelligence; it is crunching big data. There is no actual understanding of the real situation of the person before us.