If you get around in the world of artificial intelligence professionals you have run into anxiety about where it might all take us. Are we presently creating our future A.I. overlords? If so, how do the choices of the moment determine the details of that future? LinkedIn is a great place to observe some ways we are already there. In particular, many LinkedIn users are on the site with a view on a new job and much of that process has become robots talking to each other.
When you edit your profile there is now an option to let LinkedIn auto-generate the "About" section. I have read a great many LinkedIn profiles myself, and while I think it is great that we are all similarly so "passionate" it is pretty obvious that lots of people are leveraging this feature. It seems a little silly, but the text of this part of your profile probably makes a difference on the margin when a recruiter is looking for a person with a particular skill or background. Long story short, a natural language processing (NLP) robot is reading your resume, deciding how to represent you to the search algorithm (another, perhaps more primitive robot), and these robots are having an implicit conversation about what recruiters you may end up talking to.
In the next leg of the pipeline, if you resume ends up in a pipeline at one of the large corporations that tend to dominate LinkedIn, then it is probably in the hands of robots again. It has been very common to algorithmically filter resumes to minimize what humans need to read (hopefully in the service of efficiency), and the name of the game for more sophisticated job seekers in some fields is, essentially, about writing in a way that is congenial for robots.
Thus, if LinkedIn is part of your journey to finding a job, you are really interacting quite a bit with a sort of decentralized Skynet Human Resources. An algorithm reads your history and puts forth some text on who you are, another algorithm reads it and vets which human beings need to learn about you. If you end up applying, you will go through another layer of robot vetting at the potential employer. Of course you still need to do the interview, but a lot of your journey there is actually about pleasing robots.
