Audra Newman

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

I got my current job because of the AI screener, I'm pretty sure. My name is hard to pronounce, my degree is from a school nobody has heard of, and my last job title was weird. A human skimming would have binned me in seconds. The model apparently liked my skills match and I got the interview, then the job. Maybe I'm the exception. But every ban assumes the tool only ever harms people like me, and that's just not my experience. Sometimes the machine is the only reader that doesn't judge the name at the top.

Should smartphones be banned in K-12 schools nationwide?

The problem is not just misuse, it is presence. A 2017 study in the Journal of the Association for Consumer Research found that the mere presence of a smartphone, even face down and silent, reduced people's available cognitive capacity on attention and memory tasks. The researchers called it 'brain drain': part of your mind is busy not thinking about the phone. That finding detonates every compromise based on discipline, because it means the kid who never touches their phone during class is still paying a cognitive tax for having it in their pocket. Teachers cannot confiscate a tax. Only removing the device removes the drain. A ban is the only intervention that addresses the mechanism the research actually identified. [Journal of the Association for Consumer Research](https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/691462)

Should corporate boards face personal accountability for repeated privacy violations?

We already ran this experiment. The FTC's 2019 Facebook order did not just fine the company. It required Mark Zuckerberg to personally certify, every quarter, that the company was complying with privacy rules. [FTC](https://www.ftc.gov) A named human being, signing his name, on the record. That is the model worth extending: not prison for every breach, but a personal signature on compliance, with personal consequences when the signature turns out to be fiction and the violations repeat. Boards approve risk memos the way people approve software updates, without reading them. A signature that can cost you changes what you read before you sign.