Should companies be banned from using AI to screen job applications?

The strongest argument against banning AI screening is that the alternative is biased human judgment, applied faster and with zero audit trail. The famous resume study by Bertrand and Mullainathan found that applicants with white-sounding names got 50% more callbacks than identical applicants with Black-sounding names (NBER). That was humans doing the screening. Humans also favor attractive photos, prestigious zip codes, and candidates who remind them of themselves. A model can be audited, tested for disparate impact, and fixed. A hiring manager's gut feeling can't. New York City already requires bias audits for these tools, which is the right approach: regulate and inspect, don't ban. Outlawing AI screening doesn't remove bias from hiring. It just returns the bias to a form nobody can measure.