Cleanse?

“Did you see my purse?” Ella said frantically. “I’m late for work,” she added. Sofia looked up groggily from her bed. She could not infer anything from Ella’s hand gestures. “Madha qultu?” Sofia asked.

Ella gave Sofia’s forehead a lighthearted knock and handed her a pair of bulky black earpieces from the bedside table. She repeated her earlier question. The TranslateBuds-Pro-Gen3 started translating as soon as Sofia plugged them into her ears. However, Ella’s voice sounded husky and mannish: “Hal ra’ayt haqibati? ta’akhart ean aleimli,” it said.

Sofia sighed with exasperation and took the Buds out of her ears. Still struggling with Females and Arabic, even after the latest update, she thought. She held the buttons at the back of the Buds to reset them to English and put them back on. Ella, who had kept rambling about her missing purse, now sounded her usual self through the Buds to Sofia. “Please tell me you know where my purse is,” she pleaded.“La lam ‘ar mahfazatak,” Sofia finally responded and put the blanket over her head.

Annoyed at the lazy reaction, Ella opened her mouth to say something back. But she stopped herself. She knew Sofia had been working extremely hard to find a job for the last two weeks. She had heard Sofia typing away at her laptop till 4:30 in the morning.

Ella finally found her purse under the living room couch. She started to say goodbye to Sofia but then thought better of it and quietly slipped out. She hurriedly got in her car. “Oh, God! I’m so late,” she muttered to herself. She started driving and said, “Sentry, play music.” Gospel music started bleeding out through the car’s speakers. “Stop!” she snapped. It always annoyed her when the computer assistants picked up on irrelevant details. Just because I mentioned God doesn’t mean I’ve converted to Christianity, she thought. She asked Sentry to play a specific song instead. That’s better. As the calming music surrounded her, Ella’s mind drifted to the predicament Sofia was in.

It all started when Sofia got laid off two weeks ago. When Sofia, a magazine writer, was replaced by WriterBot360, it came as quite a surprise. Sofia had believed her job required creativity and an understanding of the human experience that a machine would not be capable of. Sofia, who had always been a workaholic, had started to look for another job right away. She had sent her resume to hundreds of companies but hadn’t heard back from any of them. Frustrated but not defeated, she had even revised her resume multiple times. However, all HR departments were now using NLP software as filters, and no firm was willing to interview someone who didn’t make the ‘Cleanse’ cut. Moreover, these softwares had become increasingly strict about sorting quickly through an ever-growing pool of candidates and countering a rising number of fake resumes.

Ella finally reached her office building and got out of her car. She had been working as the head of HR recruitment at a Tech magazine, and she was very familiar with using NLP in hiring. She was very fond of these softwares as they made her so efficient at her job. Of course, she didn’t dare say this in front of Sofia, who had, of late, become increasingly vocal about her distrust of these programs.

Ella walked across the parking lot to the main door. She cleared her throat and exclaimed pretty loudly, “Open!” She expected to hear a familiar click followed by the door smoothly sliding open. But the door stubbornly stood silent and still. “Open!!” she was almost screaming now, her annoyance barely concealed. The door didn’t budge. She let out an exasperated sigh and knocked on the voice authentication system- a clunky metal box that had replaced a beautifully carved door knob. This time the door started sliding, and a small gap opened. Steve, the security guard, popped his wrinkled face through the gap. He immediately authenticated Ella and smiled. “Sorry, the black box is running an update,” he explained and opened the door all the way.

Ella walked to her desk and checked her emails. The spam folder had 1200 new emails. These spams keep getting more bold and creative every day! She was glad the new spam filter they had installed last month was doing its job. One of the spam emails caught her eye. The sender claimed that a code had been found to fix her diabetic gene. The gene mutation lab she visited must have had a data leak. Ella sighed. She thought of her neighbor Mary who had become paralyzed after she had had an AI-driven gene correction procedure for myopia. Despite the many possible side effects, the advertisements for these AI gene transformation procedures were everywhere. Thank god the spam filter is catching these, she thought.

She opened the ACT-resume-screener app. She was greeted by a flashing red bubble of 80 rejected resumes under the heading “writers.”She didn’t even bother to scan the list. She just sweep-scrolled all the way to the bottom and pressed the red button that said “Cleanse.” A window popped up and asked, “Would you like to send rejection emails?” Ella kicked back her rolling chair and clicked YES.

A progress bar popped open. The names of the rejected candidates started flashing through the screen as the program sent an email to each one of them. Ella absent-mindedly stared at the screen, waiting for all the emails to be sent. One of the names caught her eyes, and her mind snapped into focus. Sofia Ahmed Abadi.

Ella hurriedly paused the program. She clicked on Sofia’s name, which opened her resume. The screener app highlighted the keywords that matched the job requirements in green. These were primarily concentrated in the “experience” section of the document. In the biography section then a cluster of another color, red. These were the words that had triggered the rejection. As Ella read through these words, her heart sank. “This is not what I wanted you to do!” she screamed at the app. Almost in disbelief, she again read the words accentuated in bright red- Female. All Women’s College. Arabic.