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.

Comments

Skynet!

[Freischutz]

Skynet is real! ... and it runs a hedge fund? Bit disappointing if you ask me.

Re:Skynet!

[mark_reh]

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?

Re:So the Singularity occured, AI rule established

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought SkyNet was supposed to originate from the defense industry. Shoulda known that that isn't where the true evil lies ...

Manna?

[Daemonik]

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.

Re:Manna?

[ZecretZquirrel]

This just demonstrates the function equivalence of management to burger-flipping.

Go up yours skills!!

[Billly Gates]

If they got passed highschool and got educated and decided to better themselves they wouldn't have been replaced by automation. They have no one to blame but themselves as a hedge fund manager is a job for highschool kids that anyone can do. It was never meant to support a family

Re:Go up yours skills!!

[Ol Olsoc]

If they got passed highschool and got educated and decided to better themselves they wouldn't have been replaced by automation. They have no one to blame but themselves as a hedge fund manager is a job for highschool kids that anyone can do. It was never meant to support a family

Well done.

Or three programmers get 300% raises

[raymorris]

The programmers are creating a system that makes business decisions. That means one of two things:
A) "The program" decides to give the programmers big raises
B) The programmers are incompetent

I know if *I* were programming such a system, the system would "know" that I'm extremely valuable.