Alma

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

My brother stutters. He is a brilliant backend engineer, the kind who finds the bug everyone else walked past. He failed three video interview screenings where the AI analyzed his speech patterns, because disfluencies get scored as low confidence or poor communication. He passed every technical round he ever reached with an actual human. Think about what that means. A disability that has zero bearing on writing code became a filter, applied before any person evaluated his work. The vendors say their models don't penalize speech differences. The vendors also won't show anyone the model. When the accommodation process requires you to disclose a disability to a machine just to get a fair score, the machine is the barrier. Ban it.

Should voting be mandatory in the United States?

My grandmother voted in every election from 1964 until she died in 2019, and she made sure everyone at Sunday dinner knew it. She grew up in Mississippi when her parents couldn't vote at all, and she treated the ballot like a family heirloom. When people tell me they sat an election out because both candidates were terrible, I hear how foreign that sounds next to her. I don't think you fix that with a scolding. You fix it with a rule. Jury duty is mandatory and nobody calls that tyranny. We accept it because justice needs ordinary people in the room. Democracy needs the same thing. A fine you could pay with the change in your car is just a reminder that the thing isn't optional, that it belongs to all of us, and that showing up is the floor, not the ceiling, of citizenship.

Should AI-generated films be eligible for major awards like the Oscars?

Adrien Brody won Best Actor after it emerged that AI had refined his Hungarian dialogue in The Brutalist, using voice-cloning tools to fix vowels the dialect coach could not. [eWeek](https://www.eweek.com/news/brutalist-movie-oscars-ai-david-cronenberg/) Sit with that. A performance that was literally part software took the industry's highest acting honor. If AI-assisted performances are eligible, the line does not hold at a little polish. It ends at a fully synthetic Best Actor, applauded by a room of people whose jobs the same technology is eliminating. Awards are supposed to measure human craft. The moment the trophy can go to an algorithm's vowels, the category is a costume contest for code.