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posted by on Tuesday December 27 2016, @09:24AM   Printer-friendly
from the who-gets-the-year-end-bonus? dept.

The Guardian reports on the next step of AI taking over a job that humans never imagined they would:

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 $160bn, 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.

See also.


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  • (Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 27 2016, @10:02AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 27 2016, @10:02AM (#446292)

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Brain_Center_at_Whipple%27s [wikipedia.org]

    In 1967, Wallace V. Whipple, owner of a vast manufacturing corporation, decides to upgrade his plant to increase output by installing a machine named the "X109B14 modified transistorized totally automated machine," which leads to layoffs. Some former employees try to convince him that the value of a man outweighs the value of a machine, but their protests fall on deaf ears. Eventually, the board of directors find him neurotically obsessed with machines and retire him. Whipple joins his former plant manager (whom Whipple had replaced with a machine) at the bar opposite his factory and expresses deep sorrow at his misfortune ("It isn't fair, Hanley! It isn't fair the way they...diminish us"). A robot now runs his office.

    http://movpod.in/z0hqpn7qyuwb [movpod.in]

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  • (Score: 2) by edIII on Tuesday December 27 2016, @10:45AM

    by edIII (791) on Tuesday December 27 2016, @10:45AM (#446297)

    That's my take on it. What comes around, goes around.

    to automate the day-to-day management of the firm, including hiring, firing and other strategic decision-making.

    This is replacing the suits with AI, who had replaced workers with robots. First it was labor that could be so easily replaced, and now it is the intelligence that made the previous decision :)

    The cycle is completing itself. Maybe in 10 years there will be suits on the sides of the street offering to do some of the menial MBA type tasks your company needs for a bowl of soup.

    --
    Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
    • (Score: 3, Funny) by Nerdfest on Tuesday December 27 2016, @03:26PM

      by Nerdfest (80) on Tuesday December 27 2016, @03:26PM (#446358)

      menial MBA type tasks your company needs

      Oh, you don't need real people to run a company into the ground by optimizing only for the next quarter. That'll be one of the first tasks automated.