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Consumers Trust Robots For Surgery Over Savings, Research Finds (bloomberg.com)
An anonymous reader shares an article: Andy Maguire faces a challenge: tasked with upgrading HSBC's digital-banking systems, he has discovered that customers are twice as likely to trust a robot for heart surgery than for picking a savings account. "I do find it slightly odd," said the chief operating officer of Europe's largest bank, referring to its survey of more than 12,000 consumers in 11 countries published this week. Just 7 percent of respondents would trust a robot with their savings, versus the 14 percent willing to submit to a machine for heart surgery. "You think, gosh, one would've imagined the world had moved on further or was moving faster than that," Maguire said in an interview. While consumers tend naturally to trust medical professionals, the "bar is pretty high" for banks dealing with people's money, he said. Banks around the world are spending billions of dollars to bolster creaking computer systems in a push to ward off startup competitors and cut long-term operating expenses. But consumers and regulators are holding them to ever-higher standards of security and convenience, driving the cost of overhauls higher and potentially eroding any savings.
Would that be because the hospital has no good ulterior motive to direct the robot to screw up your surgery, but a bank may very well have ulterior motive to direct your funds to an account that benefits them more than it does you?
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But consumers and regulators are holding them to ever-higher standards of security and convenience, driving the cost of overhauls higher and potentially eroding any savings.
Boo-hoo! We can't just ignore good security practices and pocket the money! Those nasty unfair consumers and regulators!!!
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Could it be because banking is the penultimate rent-seeking behavior? Nah.
It's about motives.
I trust a surgeon is motivated to save me. A robot assisting him will therefore be working in his and my best interest.
A bank is not motivated to save me money- their whole purpose is to extract money from me. Therefore a robot assisting them cannot be trusted to have my best interests in mind.
If the robot screws up during your heart surgery you will most likely be dead.
If the robot screws up your bank account you will most likely be broke but still alive and have to go through the torment of proving you had money.
People love their Money more than Life itself.
If you call a bank for help with random consumer matter X, on average they are wrong about how their own system works maybe 30-60% of the time.
The only "higher standard of convenience" in the last few years is the ability to easily deposit checks via the average phone. Which is only useful for the few cases where people still send you checks.
Real lawyers write in C++
Among other things, there's a pretty clear understanding that robots serve useful purposes in surgery. We know that human beings have limitations of how steady of a hand they have, and how small of an object they can manipulate. Mechanical operations requiring a lot of precision are one of the key reasons to deploy robotics and automation!
When you're talking about a computer system that's supposed to recommend the "best savings account" option for you? That's far more dubious.... I think almost ALL of us have seen dozens of web sites making similar promises. Just fill in your information here, and we'll get you the cheapest quote on auto insurance, or find you the best deal on a skilled repairman for your problem, or ? In reality, they just market your personal contact info around to a group of participating businesses paying to get the referrals -- and there's no guarantee at all you're getting the "best deal" by using those sites.
As for the other comments made? Yeah, the "bar is pretty high" when it comes to expectations about security for the money a bank handles for us! I'm not even sure what planet some of these people are on in the banking industry, if they're frustrated by the fact that there are "ever higher standards" for convenience and security? Here in the U.S. at least, they've been expecting us to use all of our credit cards with the weak and *regularly* compromised security of card data sitting on a magnetic strip for FAR too long. By and large, they've been so clueless about building useful/functional web sites for banking that they tend to just outsource the projects to people building buggy, cookie-cutter banking sites. This causes issues like prompting for additional authentication each time, because they can't properly handle that you're connecting from the usual IP address at home or at work and clicked to "remember it" for future use. Most smaller banks and credit unions that say they can do Apple Pay are still unable to do that elegantly either. I usually get stuck waiting on hold for 45 minutes plus, trying to get someone to complete the initial "verification" process when I set a card up in it. And just recently, we ran into the "interesting" scenario where our 11 year old kid with an iPhone decided to try to add grandma's credit card to it. She didn't get past the verification step and when we caught her trying to do it, we took the card away and told her she couldn't do that. A week later? We get a written notice from the bank informing us that someone attempted to add the card to Apple Pay but it was declined. Well, guess what? The card is now in her Apple Pay wallet and *working* - despite that!
I guess most of us are also twice as likely to trust a human for heart surgery than for picking a savings account.
Why would you ask a surgery robot what bank to choose?
love is just extroverted narcissism
The "robots" that are used for surgery aren't robots. They are waldos. There is a human directly controlling the device.
A hospital run robot for surgery can be trusted to try and save your life.
A bank run robot to pick accounts can be trusted to try and take your money
Suing a hospital for malpractice is a lot easier than suing a bank for losing your life savings.
The other part of it is that finance is, by necessity, a connected adversarial environment, so there's a lot of incentive for people to game banking robots. That's basically what high speed trading is about. There's not a lot of incentive for people to mess with surgical robots... I'm sure some might do it for kicks, but there's not a lot of money in it.
Log in or piss off.
Surgery is a science. We know exactly where everything is and what needs to be done. So we can program it ahead of time and trust the machine to do exactly what we already know is right.
But investing is an art. Ask 3 economic professors what to do and you will get FOUR different answers. In fact, the only thing we generally agree on is that humans tend to overdo things, economics wise.
Which means if we program a computer, it will do exactly what we told it too, which means it will overdo something.
I would trust a robot to operate on me, but not to pick all of my investments.
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You are inferring a sentiment that the quoted passage does not imply.
People don't "naturally" trust medical professionals. It's learned behavior acquired in societies where we see decades of the medical profession being policed and bitch slapped when they step out of line by more than a medium amount ... and also see decades of the financial profession getting away unscathed after literally causing global catastrophes.
When HSBC gets put out of business after the next time they launder billions in criminal funds, then we'll talk about starting to trust the financial industry.
With very few exceptions, everybody want your heart surgery to succeed. There isn't much to gain by messing you up.
Money is different. As far as your savings account is concerned, it is a zero-sum game. The money you lost is money someone else gained, and vice versa. So there is a lot of incentive to mess up with your robot.
It is easier to trust a robot when everyone is trying to make it better than when thousands of smart people are trying to turn it against you. It is possible to trick humans too but because humans are more diverse and adaptable, the return on investment is better when attacking robots.
...is that people know technology in hospitals is held to high levels of accountability for reliability. If the banks are complaining that the demand for higher standards is driving prices up too much, maybe they just don't understand why people trust surgical robotics more than their unlicensed, uncertified, proprietary software.
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For a whole bunch of straightfoward reasons, most but all of which are raised in other comments on this thread, this is entirely obvious. Well, aside from that there's a whole 7% would trust some opaque bank-built-and-motivated system to act in their best interests and also be duly safe and secure (but then again, there's always a fraction who doesn't read news or understand it. (c.f. Fox 'news' addicts) )
So the really puzzle is different: Does Mr Andy Maquire ("the chief operating officer of Europe’s largest bank") honestly "find it odd"? I only see three realistic possiblities: (1) yes, he does, since he's a moron and/or oblivious but has somehow, nevertheless, reached a senior position in a big bank, or (2) no he does not, he's lying because it's what his PR flaks told him to say, or (3) yes, he does, because he expected everyone to be stupider than that and is surprised at their intelligence at seeing through this. But I can't see any particular evidence to decide between these three. None of them would want me to bank with HSBC though.
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The aerospace and medical device industries have done a stellar job of building reliable products. The ITcloud/app fields have not come close to that level of quality.
When responding to questions like these, people subconsciously factor in how much a situation is likely to apply to them. Almost nobody thinks they will need heart surgery, and it follows that they'd be more liberal/trusting in their responses. Almost everybody can imagine the problems a robot-controlled savings account would cause them personally. We are not objective.
It's not about lack of trust in robots here.
Consumers trust medical doctors and healthcare professionals/researchers to design and commission surgical robots generally in good faith.
They equally certainly expect banks to try to rob them at every turn while cutting every possible security and safety corner and then try to escape liability by any possible means.
Who do you think is really gonna make the best robots? They should have asked the users who's robots they'd trust more to manage their bank accounts. I guarantee the answer would surprise you.
That a banker would find it hard to understand why this is so demonstrates how out of touch banks are with the rest of the human race. Its because you've proven yourselves UNTRUSTWORTHY !
I'm asleep through the whole thing and there are doctors operating and watching very carefully and robotic tools are more accurate. If I have a problem with a bank, I get to cuss out a machine for 20 minutes before a human picks up and gets to deal with an already extremely disgruntled customer. On top of which, we have the nightmare of a cashless economy heading our way in most of the world in the next few years; that means your complaints go to human in India if you're lucky, except they are getting rid of most of there cash too just like in South Korea and Japan. Will AI be smart enough to pull a Burnie Madoff?
This is the same HSBC that was convicted of knowingly money laundering for Columbian Drug Cartels, Rate fixing as part of the LIBOR scandal and the same kind of thing in Switzerland. That HSBC?
i wonder why someone wouldn't trust them?
I hear this all the time from bank IT folks.
"Oh the hardship that I am not allowed to use deep learning!"
Deep learning just doesn't cut it if you need accountability. On the other hand they could do all they wanted, and more, if they understood how to apply Bayesian networks and probabilistic graph theory.
Someone is unlikely to waste time hacking the robot that is mending my body to kill me. Ripping me off for cash however is a huge motivator. Really... this person is surprised? I really don't want this person guiding my financial investments.
I'm not surprised, actually. With the medical profession, there is at least the concept of "first, do no harm" while the banks generally go with "hey, whatever we can do to rape your wallet, shall be done."
"A government is a body of people usually -- notably -- ungoverned." -Shepherd Book
I "trust" my bank as far as I can throw them. Hell, at least the Mafia admit to being criminals.
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This speaks much more about the level of trust (or more precisely the lack thereof) in the banking system then of technology
If the survey had HSBC plastered all over it the same way the summary and article reads, then of course they'd list it at under a robotic surgeon. HSBC is one of the most untrustworthy and unethical banks out there. Test this with someone more reputable and you may get different results.
This is an apples/oranges comparison when you consider the standards that medical equipment is held to vs. say an ATM. Yes, I'd trust something that was certified to preform heart surgery much more than I'd trust something put out by Skank of America or Shitibank.
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There is NO robot that performs heart surgery.
Heart surgeons and other surgeons use devices that augment and enhance THEIR skills, reducing tremors, providing smoother actions, providing magnifications, etc. Even though the marketing dweebs throw the word robot around, it's NOT a robot in any sense of the definition people usually think of and you definitely are not trusting "a robot".
Everything is driven by the surgeons actions. It's the difference between jumping in Google's Self Driving car and being driven around by Michael Schumacher.
Nobody puts a box over your chest and pushes a fucking button to do the surgery.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
It's not the tech that I don't trust, it's the banks. The best tech in the world won't make the banks more ethical.
Overall, medical things have regulation that protects the consumer (patient). Banking, not so much. The financial industry has gained control over the regulators, and so there is nothing preventing the financial institution from robbing you blind with nothing more than a "caveat emptor"