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Wall Street's Research Jobs Are the Most Likely To Be Upended By AI (qz.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Quartz: Research analysts are the most likely employees on Wall Street to find themselves working with -- or being replaced by -- robots, according to a survey by Greenwich Associates. By next year, some 75% of banks and financial firms will either explore or implement artificial intelligence technologies, harnessing a variety of digital services to extract insights from mountains of data. While AI is probably near the peak of its hype cycle, several factors have helped it gain traction in recent years, according to Greenwich. Billions of images and documents are now available online for training computers to spot patterns and other high-level tasks. Advances in graphical processing units, which are adept at the kind of data crunching required by AI, are making sifting through daunting datasets much easier. The cloud has also made it cheaper for researchers and startups to boost their computing power to service sophisticated AI-enabled systems. AI makes sense for financial research, as machines can crunch reams of data more quickly than human analysts and, with the right data, identify obscure correlations and patterns.
Good
Problem with using AI in these scenarios is that it's really good at finding correlations in what you tell it to look at. So maybe it finds correlations between interconnected stock prices, or maybe futures and trading volumes, or the consumer price index and stock prices of certain retail stocks, things like that.
When everyone has AI's doing this, the margins get eaten up pretty quick, since everyone is getting the same results and takes the same positions.
The areas you make money on are finding the niche correlations. A nationalistic dictator takes over some African country and shuts down rare mineral exports causing a spike in prices. A geothermal plant in Iceland goes down, shutting down it's aluminum smelters and aluminum prices rise. Those are the things AI sucks at.
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
Charges filed.
Ah, it looks like the financial sector are going to explore the limitations of automated p-hacking. With p-hacking, the larger the data set, the greater the probability of identifying background noise as significant patterns. Without knowing what specific, clearly defined questions you want to answer, you've got no idea of what kinds of data will hold the answers you're looking for and so you end up answering irrelevant questions but thinking that these answers are somehow significant.
Debate is a form of harassment. Do not question my truth.
AI could put some stability back in the markets.
The real problem is that it will be sidelined until things crash.
But that won't be long.
Eventually they'll get us all.
Table-ized A.I.
As I understand from the summary, Wall Street (whatever that term is exactly involving) research seems to refer to collecting and analysing big amounts of data. I also understand that these analyses are quite simplistic, as far as otherwise AI (whatever they are exactly meaning with that) wouldn't be able to deal with it. So, my question is: how are they performing these tasks at the moment? Manually? Any even slightly knowledgeable (and/or with money to hire someone even slightly knowledgeable) person should be relying on software to perform virtually any simplistic enough data analysis action since quite a few years ago. Usually, people take only care of tasks which are too complex to be automated, perhaps generally or perhaps only under the given conditions in the sense of not being worth the effort/investment.
Either Wall Street is using very inefficient approaches/hasn't discovered software yet or this is a new blown-out-of-proportion ridiculous claim made by and for people whose knowledge about all this mostly consists in repeating a word which they are hearing a lot lately. I will not give my personal opinion regarding the most likely explanation by bearing in mind my previous experience with people/companies who might be considered part of what Wall Street represents or share its "values"/"knowledge". If I cared about any of this (which I don't), it would certainly be positive news for me because I am a programmer and, although some of the people systematically repeating terms like AI might not be completely aware about that fact, we are the ones giving birth to that ugly baby. LOL.
Custom Solvers 2.0 = Alvaro Carballo Garcia = varocarbas.
This is going to become a self-fulfilling prophesy: Wall Street gambling is about panicking before most others do. You have to be ahead of the main trends. If the trends are set by AI rather than actual humans doing investments for human-accessible reasons and evaluations, you might as well put your money in a casino: the underlying values become irrelevant compared to the market trends if all analysis focus on the available data instead of actual evaluation, and the available data is determined by the actions of AIs.
It will become too risky to buck a trend if every trend is going to be devastatingly thorough in spite of any tangible reason.
It would be more interesting to hear exactly what analyses they are, since it might give some fun ideas to the /. readership. But since it is a bit of a puff piece with a leading photo of a woman taking a selfie with a toy robot what do you expect? Guessing they have a clear training manual for their research analysts and they are able to automate 80% of that, then increase hiring of people who understand machine learning to improve that?
Using AI to recognize patterns is fine if you already know there is a pattern, like visual cues that guide a driver. Aside from obvious correlations between macro-indicators, it still is not determined that there are actual patterns in price movement of stocks, indexes or even currencies. Setting an AI to discover a pattern there might be the same thing as asking it to prove there is a god.
... that it's specialized upper end jobs that will be amoung the first to be replaced by AI/ML. Like, for example, ours. A buddy I did webdev with left the industry a few years ago and did an apprentice as a plumber for this exact reason. He can pick his employer.
Software development is being streamlined as we speak, and most of the work left to be done is mucking about with badly and very badly designed legacy systems and trying to migrate the whole shebang to something resembling a feasible concept running in the cloud that can be cloned, copyied, backuped, instanced and remodelled with a few mouseclicks or fingertaps.
As we move into a post scarcity economy, capitalism as we know it reaches it's end and bankers and traders are left by the wayside. That's generally a good thing, I think we can all agree.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Not likely to be really upended by AI, but rather there will be a different kinds of research jobs: AI research jobs (for humans)
Same mechanic thought-crimers at 75% of Wall Street Banks ? Same gamr-boi smarm, same typos, same oversight, same false cards, same loose extrapolation ... jeeez Lueeez ... what could go wrong ?
They can work on it all they like, it's a fundamental problem with AI that people have been working on for *decades* and haven't got much closer to.
That problem is context. AI is terrible at it. The problem is it only understands what you program it to understand. So it lacks "common sense" knowledge skills.
The classic example is Abraham Lincoln giving the Gettysburg Address. You can feed that information into an expert system - that Lincoln gave the Gettysburg address at such and such a time / place / etc...
It's simply registered as a fact. It has no other context. It doesn't understand even fundamental context - like that Lincoln was alive when he gave the speech. Or that when he was giving the speech his left leg was also there. Or that when he was in Gettysburg, he was NOT physically in the White House at that time. Or even that the speech was not broadcast on the radio, because radio wasn't invented yet. People have been trying to teach AI these concepts for years with middling-at-best results. As for understanding the meaning of the speech itself? Not even *close* to that level of sophistication.
So how do you expect an expert system to understand that when certain political parties that have certain beliefs on how economies should be managed get into power in certain countries, certain trade policies will have certain changes done to them affecting certain sectors of the economy? We can barely teach an AI what a human is.
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
Sorry, the current level of AI won't but stability in the markets. What they're talking about here is basically trend detection, and that increases instability. To increase stability you need to focus on bubble detection, but nobody makes a lot of money that way. It can prevent loss of money, but the loss it prevents is "other people's money".
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
This is a joke, right? obviously you did none of these things.
Please, journalists, stop calling AI robots and robots AI.
Of course it's a joke. We all know that #CrookedHillary doesn't know how to program AI... she had trouble enough with her email. I'm surprised she figured out how to post to /.
All of the gaming of investments when it comes to equity investing has more risks than people get. Right now the market is ridiculously expensive. P/E's are all in fairyland unless dead-money no-growth picks.
example: http://www.nasdaq.com/symbol/cop/pe-ratio
(Conoco Phillips makes my point.)
Oil low and bubble ready to bust? You might as well shoot dice on the corner with 40's of St. Ives. Forget about the robotic analyst stories. The real story is in this market your ass is grass and computers are what you are gonna get busted all up in yo ass with.