Convincing a human to hire you is hard enough. Can you imagine trying to convince a computer? Artificial intelligence is now being used to automate the screening of job candidates, evaluating cognitive ability, vocabulary, and even emotional intelligence. This new “hiretech” promises to weed out the bad applicants and flag the good ones by analyzing not just the substance of answers to interview questions, but also the manor in which you respond – your cadence, your word choices, your tone, your speech patterns, and perhaps even your facial expressions and body language. What could possibly go wrong? We’ll discuss this and more today with John Davisson from the Electronic Privacy Information Center.

John Davisson is Senior Counsel at EPIC. John works on a variety of appellate litigation and Freedom of Information Act cases. John first came to EPIC in 2015 as a clerk in the Internet Public Interest Opportunities Program. He has previously clerked at Levine Sullivan Koch & Schulz, served as a student attorney in the Civil Rights Section of Georgetown’s Institute for Public Representation, and interned at the Appignani Humanist Legal Center. John is a 2016 magna cum laude graduate of Georgetown University Law Center, where he was managing editor of the Georgetown Journal on Poverty Law & Policy, a Georgetown Law Fellow, and an NGO observer to the 9/11 military commission at Naval Station Guantanamo Bay. He worked as a journalist before entering the law and earned his B.A. at Columbia University. John is a member of the New York and District of Columbia bars.