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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.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by bradley13 on Tuesday December 27 2016, @12:25PM
The sad thing is: they're replacing the wrong managers. "Hedge Fund Managers" can have two very different meanings:
- The managers of a company that handles one or more hedge funds. This is what they're trying to automate. But a good manager (of which there are sadly very few) has a lot of interpersonal skills that - by definition, since a machine is not a person - cannot be replaced by AI. Maybe someday, with a fully aware AI, we could have something equivalent, but that is a very long way away.
- The individual managers who decide what a hedge fund should invest in. The long term performance market index funds beats every single hedge fund in existence. In order to deliver this stellar underperformance, hedge funds charge whopping fees and the managers rake in whopping salaries. A very simple program could provide a performance boost, simply by eliminating the manager salaries.
The financial management industry gives itself perverse incentives. The funds take a percentage of invested capital, plus transaction fees, giving themselves no incentive whatsoever to actually earn money for their customers. Customers ought to demand that everyone's incentives align: The funds should take a portion of customer profits and refund a portion of customer losses. But that would require actual, long-term, successful investment strategies - no more short-term thinking, no more churning customer accounts, etc..
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Tuesday December 27 2016, @04:20PM
The latter is happening as well.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek