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.

Comments

p-hacking

[VeryFluffyBunny]

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.

Re:Eh, maybe

[sheramil]

They don't have to win constantly to turn a profit. Those things you mentioned happened rarely, and all the bots need is a 60 to 70% win rate. Winning more than you lose is the only way forward.

Yeah, and when that level of winning pans out and they get greedier, they pay for the development of AI that understands a little more about the real world. And when THAT pans out and they get even greedier, they'll okay the development of AI that actively interferes in the real world to produce situations that profit can be made from.

Then it'll be too late.