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World's Largest Hedge Fund To Replace Managers With Artificial Intelligence (theguardian.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: The world's largest hedge fund is building a piece of software to automate the day-to-day management of the firm, including hiring, firing and other strategic decision-making. Bridgewater Associates has a team of software engineers working on the project at the request of billionaire founder Ray Dalio, who wants to ensure the company can run according to his vision even when he's not there, the Wall Street Journal reported. The firm, which manages $160 billion, created the team of programmers specializing in analytics and artificial intelligence, dubbed the Systematized Intelligence Lab, in early 2015. The unit is headed up by David Ferrucci, who previously led IBM's development of Watson, the supercomputer that beat humans at Jeopardy! in 2011. The company is already highly data-driven, with meetings recorded and staff asked to grade each other throughout the day using a ratings system called "dots." The Systematized Intelligence Lab has built a tool that incorporates these ratings into "Baseball Cards" that show employees' strengths and weaknesses. Another app, dubbed The Contract, gets staff to set goals they want to achieve and then tracks how effectively they follow through. These tools are early applications of PriOS, the over-arching management software that Dalio wants to make three-quarters of all management decisions within five years. The kinds of decisions PriOS could make include finding the right staff for particular job openings and ranking opposing perspectives from multiple team members when there's a disagreement about how to proceed. The machine will make the decisions, according to a set of principles laid out by Dalio about the company vision.
I thought SkyNet was supposed to originate from the defense industry. Shoulda known that that isn't where the true evil lies ...
Funny, I thought Manna was supposed to start at the burger flippers. Oh well! They've already got these paranoid little hedge fund monkey's judging each other throughout the day, sounds like hell on earth. Couldn't happen to nicer slime bags.
The goal is technology that would automate most of the firmâ(TM)s management. It would represent a culmination of Mr. Dalioâ(TM)s life work to build Bridgewater into an altar to radical opennessâ"and a place that can endure without him.
At Bridgewater, most meetings are recorded, employees are expected to criticize one another continually, people are subject to frequent probes of their weaknesses, and personal performance is assessed on a host of data points, all under Mr. Dalioâ(TM)s gaze.
Bridgewaterâ(TM)s new technology would enshrine his unorthodox management approach in a software system. It could dole out GPS-style directions for how staff members should spend every aspect of their days, down to whether an employee should make a particular phone call.
I think the Wall Street story (here gets you past the paywall once) is obsessing over the micromanagement side of the thing and missing the big picture.
This is among the first examples of someone using AI to try to maintain strategic and organizational integrity of an organization after their death. While there's a good chance this just fails utterly (particularly with the obsession on micromanagement and dysfunctional business dynamics), it does lead to a potential problem or opportunity down the road when many of these things have been set up with conflicting interests. There have been many examples through history of powerful people trying to create an enduring legacy through creation and propagation of something throughout time. These endeavors often fail merely because successors have different interests and high levels of incompetency, leading eventually to dissolution of the thing.
Here is a possibility to create something enduring, a machine capable of surviving long durations and implementing its creators' will long after their deaths. Here, the alleged goal is retention of a particular business culture, but who knows what else has been tossed in? There could be all sorts of covert purposes and priorities, some introduced by the patron and perhaps, some introduced by other parties?
Then there's the matter of what happens in the distant future, if this approach turns out to be successful without a corresponding improvement in human longevity? Either it's the only one of its kind, and we have a build up of economic power not subject to the usual restrictions of human lifespan or we have multiple powerful parties in permanent conflict with each other.
This need not be universally bad. For example, an AI could be set up to further environmentalism or poverty elimination goals just as easily as it could a particular business's interests.
this was posted on hacker news a couple days ago and I still have the tab open.
In the comments you will find a link to this, which are Ray Dalio's "Principals" which were lauded on HN for some reason.
I didn't make it that far reading them. There are 200 of them some with subsections. It seems like a lot of managerial jerking off from one.
If we're going to do sci-fi references, why leave out Asimov? Terminator was a throwback to the kind of pulp robot-run-amok stories that Asimov almost single-handedly made obsolete.
I've always thought that one consistent point in Asimov's robot stories that that robots are morally superior to humans -- at least if by "moral" you mean "principled". Ethics are literally baked right into Asimov's robots.
A robotic COO could be programmed to serve shareholder interests in a way a human COO could not be. It could also be programmed to be law abiding to within its ability to interpret what the law requires. Perhaps most importantly, it won't have an inbuilt tendency to rationalization and wishful thinking. Of course you still can't trust the bastards that programmed the thing, but it will serve somebody faithfully, to the best of its abilities.
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I call bullshit on this. While, all in all, most people living in the industrialized world in the last sixty or seventy years have the highest standard of living of any humans, that is really a statistical statement. That doesn't mean kings of the past lived in poverty, which is, of course, a moronic statement that only an ignoramus could make. People like Caesar Augustus, Charlemagne and just about any given Pope lived in splendor that would still amaze today (look at Versailles to see how Louis XIV thought a king should live).
The chief advantage most of the poor in the West have is that health care is a lot better, so I'll give you that, although for certain groups of poverty-stricken, life expectancy still hovers somewhere around where it did for their ancestors two or three hundred years ago. But other than that, they tend to have the same dismal nutrition of their ancestors, and in some ways much worse because the poor tend to consume a lot more pre-processed meals, meaning the levels of salts and carbohydrates they're consuming are far higher than people of the past, leading to health problems more unique to the 21st century.
But really, to claim the poor of today live better than the kings of yesterday is so astonishingly stupid a claim that I have to imagine you're either trolling or a fucking moron. In either case it doesn't reflect well on you at all. And if you don't think poverty doesn't exist in the West, go down to any inner city, where the mentally ill and the addicted tend to gravitate towards since society seems to have little desire to help them, and tell me you're not looking at people whose condition would likely have even shocked a 12th century serf.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
First step: stop believing in the nonsense you've been told about the economy. "The economy" will work better with automation. It always has.
The problem is with distribution of wealth. Right now we have this quaint system developed during one of the nastier periods of human history where we give all of it to a few people and everyone else does what those people say in exchange for whatever the "bosses" think they deserve. You're absolutely right, we're going to have to come up with some better way.