A Good Use for Artificial Intelligence?

In the 1967 film, To Sir, With Love, Sidney Poitier played Mark Thackeray, an idealistic high school teacher who guided rowdy teen-agers living in a London East end slum.

Not surprisingly, for something so experimental, Artificial Intelligence (AI) doesn’t always do a good job.
According to Google: “Food Network developed a skill for Alexa-enabled devices, providing show information, schedules, and featured recipes.”
(That sentence doesn’t even make sense!)
However, as a result of AI, the recipes (and episodes) have become much harder to locate on the Food Network.
Also, the recipe PDFs are sometimes maddeningly incomplete because of formatting problems!
AI obviously needs a lot of oversight!

In another context, could AI do a better job than human H.R. personnel, to hire skilled professionals, than it does in monitoring websites like the Food Network?

In the United States, it’s estimated that black people earn (on average) at least 16% less during their lifetimes than white people do.
All ethic varieties of women earn (on average), 18% less than all ethnic varieties of men.

During the 1960’s, Bahamian-American actor Sidney Poitier starred in films in which he portrayed a police detective (In the Heat of the Night); a physician (Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner); and an educator (To Sir, With Love).
A section in the book Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, & Bucks (published in 1973), by Donald Bogle, calls Poitier a “Hero for an Integrationist Age,” and notes:

In all his films he is educated and intelligent. He spoke proper English, dressed conservatively, and had the best of table manners. For the mass white audience, Sidney Poitier was a black man who had met their standards. [Italics mine.]

Sidney Poitier films, up until the 1970’s,* were propaganda.
The studio goal was to convince Middle America to accept black men as policemen, teachers, and doctors, just as long as they weren’t too black.

In the 2006 film, The Devil Wears Prada, Meryl Streep played demanding Miranda Priestly (left), editor of one of the world’s most prestigious fashion magazines.

Stanley Tucci played Nigel (right), the magazine Art Director.

As early as the 1940s (when the majority of women still were stuck in low level jobs, or kept as “mere housewives”), movie audiences began to see movies in which actresses portrayed powerful business women.
The list includes Mildred Pierce (1945), Working Girl (1988), The Devil Wears Prada (2006), and The Proposal (2009).
In all of these films, the lead actress is a skilled female business woman.
However, these high-power women are always portrayed as far from successful in their private lives.

These films were movie studio propaganda.
The goal was to convince Middle America that it’s impossible to earn success as a business woman, and also be a successful wife and mother.

In the 2024 television comedy, St. Denis Medical, Joyce (the Executive Director of the hospital) is played by Wendi McLendon-Covy.

In the current TV comedy, St. Denis Medical, the focus is placed on female characters unable to enjoy a good life-work balance, more than on male medical professionals having this problem.
Wendi McLendon-Covey plays Joyce, the driven hospital executive director whose only female “friends” are drug company reps.
Allison Tolman plays Alex, who struggles with combining life as a workaholic supervising nurse, with being a wife and mother.
At one point in the storyline, Alex refuses her husband’s wish to have another child, and they opt for a vasectomy.

Don’t get me wrong.
I’m not judging St Denis Medical.
I love this mockumentary series, and I’m looking forward to the second season.
I’m not criticizing the show. I’m merely pointing out a viewpoint about social “norms.”

For a long time, Big Business has decreed that “alpha” men (micro-managers, screamers, attention hogs) were “ideal” managers.
Women have often imitated their alpha male mentors.
In recent years, this trend has shifted a bit.
Business books like Blind Spots, and Dare to Lead, offer the “new” theory that a “softer” form of management (empathetic, cooperative, emotionally intelligent) is a much more successful strategy in dealing with people.

I just finished Apprentice in Wonderland: How Donald Trump and Mark Burnett Took America Through the Looking Glass (2025) by Ramin Setoodeh.
It’s very clear, in this book, that the people who “won” were the candidates who pleased Donald Trump best.
It wasn’t a matter of how good their ideas were, or how skilled they were as business people.
It was just a matter of how much Mr. Trump liked them.

During the fourth season, Trump attempted to persuade the first black male winner (Randal Pinkett) to “share his victory” with a white female contestant.
To Trump’s immense surprise, the black Rhodes scholar refused to accept Mr. Trump’s “script change.” Despite winning the prize, and later working for Trump for a year, Pinkett was never wholly in Trump’s good graces again (because he had acted against the “Big Man’s” wishes).

In Buck and the Preacher, Sidney Poitier played a tough wagon master named Buck.

Poitier also directed the 1972 film.

Essentially, the theme of The Apprentice TV show (2004-2017) was that American Big Business, is a land of dominance, with people at the top lording over others, and terrorizing their subordinates.
(The Apprentice shows us the way Donald Trump wishes to run this country, not as a public servant, but as a CEO from another era.)

The goal of DEI in American business was to train employees, and encourage diversity in the workplace.
However, the dirty little secret is that this “bottom-up approach” didn’t create much real change.
Where real change is needed is top-down.
How do you convince department heads, to evaluate people based solely on their skill sets: not their skin color, not their gender, who they know, or how “well” they dress?

What would happen if we used a well-programmed AI (not Grok!) to hire employees, and to evaluate the salaries at companies?
This AI would just use information about skill sets and education levels, and not consider gender, or ethnic heritage.
Would we soon discover that some people were badly underpaid, while others were vastly over paid?
Would it quickly become apparent that giant disparities are based on gender, and whether employees are non-white?

Think of AI as a tool for improving fairness.
AI could tell the company where it had made mistakes, and then the company would make adjustments accordingly.
It might be a problem (at first) to reduce the out of whack salaries of CEOs, CFOs, Presidents, and Vice Presidents, but regular productive employees would earn a lot more.
Perhaps, if AI was allowed to make all hiring and salary decisions, companies would make less mistakes, as the years went on.

In the “The Ultimate Computer” episode of the original Star Trek, William Marshall played Daystrom, a brilliant scientist who has created a computer that can make its’ own decisions.

Of course, it all boils down to how AI is programmed.
We’ve all learned from Elon Musk’s Grok, “The Ultimate Computer” (Season 2; episode 24) episode of Star Trek, and Colossus: The Forbin Project (1970), how AI can be extremely destructive, especially when Ai is programed too closely to a human personality.

*During the 1970’s, Sidney Poitier began to branch out from playing “perfect” role models. He starred in such films as Buck and the Preacher (1972), Uptown Saturday Night (1974), and A Piece of the Action (1977).