There’s nothing humane about algorithms being used to make life judgements and the A’ Level grade fiasco should be a lesson to us all

Regrettably, at the time of a National Crisis, it seems that the only thing original about the Johnson Government, is its ability to repeatedly mess things up.

I would like to be able to say that they have a legitimate excuse for doing everything that they have done since the Covid Pandemic came into view. But they don’t.

Whilst many still believe it right to support the Government because that’s what you should do, the real story and the different truths that have ridden shotgun with the creation of this chaos will come to light, either when the public files are opened or this stupid political clique is replaced by people who know what politicians are actually supposed to do.

Of all the mistakes Johnson and his cronies have made so far, the one that illustrates the abject disconnect from all forms of decision-making-responsibility, that is endemic within this political culture, is that of using an algorithm to produce grades for our 18 year old, end-of-school students, who inevitably see their A ‘Level grades as a pivot point where the success or failure of their entire lives is mapped out.

Before school closures that were neither necessary and certainly weren’t thought through, the GCSE and A ‘Level exams process in the UK was already arbitrary in the extreme, overlooking the reality that many students are not academically inclined and of those who appear to be, some will never be masters of exam technique.

But to then completely dehumanise the process and use an algorithm to make decisions when another flawed political choice meant that exams in the summer of 2020 could not be completed, is injustice of an extraordinary kind.

Algorithms are great for working with numbers and sifting data of a numerical or quantitative kind. But they are next to useless where qualitative data or the real idiosyncrasies and circumstances of life and human existence are concerned.

The only shortcut this route was ever going to provide was one treating all A ‘Level Students as if the history or chronology of the events leading them here; what they did and how they did it, was identically the same – not to mention anything already discussed above.

Yes, the Universities application and offer process is constrained by numbers every year. But Covid and the ridiculous steps that the Government has already taken meant this was never going to be a ‘normal’ year, and factors such as foreign student numbers no longer being as certain as ‘normal’ would have meant there are vacancies that our commercially focused Universities need to fill to make the sums add up – no matter the usual grades requirements involved.

There is no algorithm that can fairly explain or make account for the peculiarities of any individuals circumstances. It is both lazy and distinctly harmful to surrender human decision making to a machine when that machine can only ever account for the level of detail or data that it was programmed with.

Parents are naturally beside themselves right now and many have good reason to be. Young people who were about to break free of the perceptual barriers and ties of their background have been binned just because our politicians are not up to the job and incapable of thinking in a different way.

But the real travesty beyond that we can only hope public pressure will force Johnson to fix, is the reality that algorithms are already playing a massive part in the formal electronic or -online’ relationships that we have everything. From our use of social media, to how our job applications are managed – giving recruiters an irresponsibly easy time to check that boxes are ticked, but nothing more.

Algorithms and the people who use them to cut corners to make business processes ‘more efficient’ to cut costs, are not only playing a massive part in the dehumanisation of relationships that has accompanied the internet age. They are also rejecting people whose circumstances a computer code will inevitably overlook, whilst denying the benefit of added value to businesses that were always a major consideration of the employing managers before the created quasi sectors of HR and Recruitment evolved – and still would be if they realised what a con and all-round injustice these algorithms and employing the services of the people who use them involve.

This corner cutting is pernicious and whilst the improvement in technology to improve the user and end user experience is always something that we should aspire to, it should not necessarily mean that the advances are used to cut costs and jobs if that is what it can do.

The quality of the relationship with people, the product and the all-round experience will always be compromised if not lost by prioritising Tech above all things.

Money or cost-saving should never be the basic law governing business, when everything that we do in any business is ultimately always and universally about people and thereby the human relationship.