Slashdot Mirror
RBS Cuts Hundreds of Jobs As FCA Approves 'Robo-Advisers' (thestack.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) has announced that it will be switching customer advice services over to automated 'robo-advisers' as it cuts 220 face-to-face positions. Given the green light from UK regulator, the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) this week, the bank agreed that the move would lead to cheaper, more accessible financial advice. Those customers qualifying for personalised advice will now need to have at least £250,000 (approx. $350,000) to invest. Following the FCA's recommendations, it is expected that other UK banks will soon introduce similar 'robo' services.
Majority of people are financially illustrate [...]
I'm sure the new robo advisors will provide crayons for customers to draw pictures while their pockets are picked clean.
If anyone should be scared by this kind of automation, it's the developers of Firefox.
I think the first generation of automation to replace them will just take the Firefox UI and make random changes to it. It will remove widgets, move others around, add random widgets, and so forth. A possible enhancement would be for the automated process to randomly break extensions in some way.
It's the second generation of automation that I think is really worrying. It will just check out the Chromium source code, change all "Chromium" string values to "Firefox", generate a large random number as the version number, perform a build, and offer it up as the latest version of Firefox.
My suspicion is that the third generation of automation will be much like the second, but it will be able to randomly mark bug reports as WONTFIX or WORKSFORME.
The most interesting thing is that most Firefox users won't even know that the automation has taken place! It will be business-as-usual for them.