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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.
2016: Ray Dalio commissions AI to make business decisions in his place.
2017: Business AI makes business decision, finds Dalio a jerk, fires him.
There are two ways to take control of the planet. You can destroy all opposition (and their possessions, factories, etc.) or you can get most of the money. You don't even need that much of it, especially if the population is stupid, as we saw in the last election. Look how little it took to take over the US. How much more will be needed to take the rest of the world?
This just demonstrates the function equivalence of management to burger-flipping.
It's the typical blather of the rich and shameless. All the bad things were just luck and all the good things were just their innate superior abilities and hard work.
Fact is, anyone can grab the brass ring if they can afford multiple tries, but most people are lucky if they can afford even a single try.
Nicolas Taleb, Fooled by Randomness great book
sigs are for losers (except to point out that sigs are for losers)
I got a weird call from a recruiter about a position at this place about 5 years ago. They had just finished a very profitable year, and I've been doing the type of mathematical modeling they find very interesting for over 15 years. What made the call weird was how much the recruiter felt the need to "explain" the company to me in our initial conversation.
He knew he had a turkey on his hands and had obviously found it difficult to place savvy people at Bridgewater in the past. They ask that everyone read Dianetics before any initial phone interviews. Oh did I say Dianetics? Sorry, I mean the "Principles". Anyway, I'm the type of guy to do his homework so I read them. They were sophomoric, so I wasn't interested in jumping into the fecal morass Bridgewater seemed to be. They were not even talking about particularly competitive compensation packages!
Of course nearly everything has a price. I told them I would want a $5MM upfront signing bonus to work there (10 years' compensation for someone like me), no strings attached. They didn't call back.
Years later that excellent WSJ article came out, making me glad they didn't pony up! I might have enjoyed interviewing there though, just to say snarky things to they faces.
Given all their flaws, I think this AI automation will go exactly as well as you think it will. Couldn't happen to a nicer company.
(Posting AC for obvious reasons)