The Line I Won't Cross

There's a line I've drawn for myself, quietly. Technology can help a decision get made faster and more fairly. It should never be the thing that makes the decision.

There's a line I've drawn for myself, quietly, without announcing it to anyone. It's this: technology can help a decision get made faster, more fairly, more consistently. It should never be the thing that makes the decision.

I didn't arrive at this from theory. I arrived at it from watching what happens when the line gets crossed — when a system decides someone isn't worth a human's time before a human ever looks at them. Somewhere in a queue, a person who genuinely deserved a second look never got one, and nobody will ever know, because the whole point of automating that decision was to avoid the friction of a person having to look.

I understand the appeal. After fifty calls in a day, I understand it more than most. It's faster. It scales. It doesn't get tired by the two-hundredth resume the way I do by call thirty-five. But speed and scale were never the thing I actually cared about fixing. What I cared about was fairness, and fairness without a person somewhere in that loop is just a nicer word for a shortcut.

I remember a specific evening — tired, half my calls still pending — thinking how easy it would be to just let something decide for me who's worth calling back and who isn't. The thought lasted about ten seconds before it felt wrong. Not because it wouldn't work. Because I know exactly what it feels like to be on the other side of a silence like that, waiting for someone to just look.

So the line stays simple, even when it's inconvenient: a person makes the final call. Every time. Not because I distrust what a system can do up to that point, but because the moment someone's future tips one way or another deserves a human who can be held accountable, who can be wrong in a way that gets corrected instead of repeated at scale.

Slower, maybe. I've made my peace with that trade.