The Algorithm | Hardcover

The Algorithm: How AI Decides Who Gets Hired, Monitored, Promoted, and Fired and Why We Need to Fight Back Now

Format: Hardcover
Pages: 336
Date of Release: 2 January 2024

A powerful and eye-opening investigation into the hidden impact of artificial intelligence in the workplace, The Algorithm by Hilke Schellmann exposes how AI systems are increasingly shaping hiring, employee monitoring, promotions, and layoffs—often without transparency or accountability. Winner of the Anthem Award and named a Financial Times Best Book of the Year 2024, this groundbreaking work reveals how algorithms are quietly transforming the future of work and human rights.

Drawing on extensive investigative journalism, Schellmann uncovers how companies use AI-powered recruitment tools, personality profiling systems, facial-expression analysis, voice recognition software, and employee surveillance technologies to make critical workplace decisions. Through real-life stories, whistleblower accounts, and hands-on testing of AI systems, the book reveals how employers collect and analyze personal data, including online behavior, emotional responses, mental health indicators, and productivity patterns.

The book also highlights the dangers of algorithmic bias, discrimination, and privacy violations, showing how flawed AI systems disproportionately affect women, people of color, and vulnerable workers. Exploring themes of workplace surveillance, digital ethics, machine learning, data privacy, and civil rights, Schellmann argues for stronger protections, transparency, and accountability in an AI-driven world.

Timely, accessible, and deeply researched, The Algorithm is essential reading for anyone interested in artificial intelligence, the future of jobs, tech ethics, workplace technology, digital privacy, and social justice. Perfect for readers of investigative nonfiction, business technology, AI policy, and books examining the intersection of technology and society, this urgent exposé challenges us to rethink how humans should be treated in the age of algorithms.

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