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Robots Are Coming for These Wall Street Jobs
- conn01 9y agoStephen Hawking says we should be more frightened of capitalism than robots Who is behind robot? capitalism
- Flavius 9y agoI guess we just need some good ol' communism to fix this problem.
- arkades 9y agoMaybe? Kind of? I'm extremely pro-capitalism, but free market economics does rely on a number of assumptions being met in order to function, and only maximizes utility functions for those participating. If you build a market that violates those assumptions (e.g., massive consolidation of supply) and effectively excludes people from participating (by reducing total volume of work amenable to human intervention), capitalism ... just doesn't work. Wrong tool for the job. Traditionally we either regulate operations to make them better fit free market assumptions, or regulate outcomes. Whether that looks like communism is a secondary discussion, though if you consolidate supply heavily enough, then yes, you end up with some central supplier choosing what to produce and how to allocate it for all those people that have no resources to create meaningful demand.
- eb3c90 9y agoI think we can make supply distributed (given micro manufacturing/recycling etc) so even if it is less efficient for a community to do it than something more centralised they still have some autonomy. See my profile for my website if you are interested where I am coming from.
- arkades 9y agoI meant centralized in terms of ownership/control, not geographic placement. The current trend towards winner-take-all automation and resultant oligarchy.
- eb3c90 9y agoSo do I. Consider the technological extreme of open source manufacturing. A set of tools like repraps, that that can really make themselves (and computers etc)
- maxxxxx 9y agoIt's pretty sad that whenever someone criticises capitalism that people immediately shout "communism" to kill the debate.
- wu-ikkyu 9y agoIt's ultimately humans behind the robots. So what we should really be wary of is the values and assumptions of those who develop the robots. >"When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism and militarism are incapable of being conquered." -Dr. King
- kazinator 9y agoYou cannot take away property rights and still claim that people are considered important. (Didn't King notice the word rights in property rights?)
- ashark 9y ago> (Didn't King notice the word rights in property rights?) What's that supposed to prove?
- vkou 9y agoCapitalism, Communism, Socialiasm, and Collectivism all have property rights. They are structured somewhat differently, but they all recognize that some things can be owned, and some cannot. You can't build a consistent legal, or ethical system from the first principle of "Property rights are the most important right."
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- wu-ikkyu 9y agoHe didn't say "take away property rights"
- kazinator 9y agoYes; but rather that they aren't more important than people. Well, that is actually silly because under the right circumstances, it could be that the property (or any other) rights of person A are more important than all of person B as such. It's just trivially true when A = B (A and B are the same person). No right attributed to A is more important than A him or herself.
- tome 9y agoStephen Hawking should stick to saying things in his area of expertise. I wouldn't expect Bernie Sanders, Slavoj Zizek or Elon Musk to start making pronouncements about black holes.
- echion 9y agotl;dr: data processing is getting automated. This is just a dramatisation (and a bit of a summary) of normal process automation. Nothing to see here.
- TheAdamAndChe 9y agoDramatization? How so? Is the continued loss of middle and upper-middle class jobs to outsourcing and automation not noteworthy?
- dogruck 9y agoAlso, if you are a regular BBG reader, and anything in that article is news to you, than you should be worried and get updated.
- booleandilemma 9y agoSo can we expect an influx of developers who were former traders?
- lloyd-christmas 9y agoThat's me. I switched 3 years ago because I saw exactly this. I originally did it to gain more tech skills with the plan on going back into it, but I left and didn't go back. I took a bootcamp, and about 1/3 of my class were ex-wall street.
- corpMaverick 9y agoIn your opinion how hard is for average ex-wall street workers to pick up programming ?
- whatok 9y agoReally depends on what role they were in but the Bloomberg Excel API is very widely used along with VBA which I think can assist with some transition.
- lloyd-christmas 9y agoFinance is a huge industry. I can't really speak to the average, but I was a buy side equities trader. Technical: All of us are well versed in excel and have working knowledge of SQL. Going from VBA to ruby/javascript was pretty trivial. While I don't really consider college all that meaningful, most people had been STEM majors, so the non job-specific knowledge tends to have some overlap. I was a math/econ double major with a stats minor. Had I dropped 2 econ courses and taken data structures + computer architecture, I would have had a minor in CS. The rest of the minor overlapped with my math/stats. Work-life: Finance is a very hard-working industry and had a ton of continuing education, so that transition was extremely easy to the tech life. I previously worked 60-80 hours a week (dependent on earnings season) and went from that to 50 hours. All that free time went towards a few hours of extra sleep and MOOC work to catch up on some of the more fundamental CS concepts.
- 9y ago
- ClickbaitTitle 9y agoTrading, Sales, Portfolio Manager, Analyst
- gbrown_ 9y agoKevin Slavin gave an excellent talk [1] on the need for trading systems to be built with humans in mind rather than just for beating the other bots. I highly recommend it, it's certainly one of my favorite talks. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Goa1Y9OBHU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Goa1Y9OBHU
- cujic9 9y agoGood talk. And I, for one, am confident that Wall Street will accept the limits of their intelligence and introduce software constraints that require human oversight for the benefit of market stability. /s Seriously though, any system with many actors is going to see unanticipated failures resulting from runaway interactions. There is no way around it. And I think that if the threat of losing money isn't a powerful enough incentive to stop it, then nothing is.
- Mrtierne 9y agoThe title should read "Robots Are Here..." Great read for anyone interested in a history of the Wall Street bots: "Automate This" by Christopher Steiner
- nocoder 9y agoWere they ever making any meaningful difference? How many of them have beaten the returns given by an index fund over last 20 years? Also, I hate the sensationalism of such articles, more sensationalism usually means less sense.
- clavalle 9y agoQuite a few. Famously Medallion: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-11-21/how-renaissance-s-medallion-fund-became-finance-s-blackest-box https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-11-21/how-renai...
- nocoder 9y agoI know about medallion but its also run by quants and afaik largely algorithmic. My argument is against the more traditional fund houses and stock pickers.
- stupidcar 9y agoIf you want an inadvertent AI doomsday scenario, how about black-box trading models that figure they can make money by betting on a market crash caused by a war, then manipulate the market to induce an economic conflict between different states, without every really having any understanding of the meaning of the outcomes they're optimising for.
- mFixman 9y agoAI doesn't work that way.
- CPLX 9y agoNot yet.
- dws 9y agoYou might find the history of Doug Lennat's Eurisko informative. "Lenat fed the massive Traveller rulebook into the system and asked it to find the best way of winning. Each night, after several hours of trial and error, Eurisko would spit out a few strategies—some interesting, some impractical, some ridiculous. At one point, Lenat remembers, it suggested he could win the game by changing the rules." https://www.wired.com/2016/03/doug-lenat-artificial-intelligence-common-sense-engine/ https://www.wired.com/2016/03/doug-lenat-artificial-intellig...
- lostboys67 9y agoah this was Traveller book 5 Trillion Credit Squadron Publish in 1980 or so. The authors commented that having a computer (when Pc's where ultra rare and expensive) would be useful :-) I commented at that time that a PC was essential and working at the cutting edge of AI would be "useful" Traveller (book3) was the basis for Elite as well
- cabalamat 9y agoBear in mind that Lenat won't release the Eurisko source code, and some people have speculated that it didn't do all that he said it did.
- pyrale 9y agoHide yo' wallets, hide yo' quids! The robots are comin for you!
- npgatech 9y agoI hate to point it out but HN is not for jokes/puns. Please go to Reddit for that. Thanks.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- arkades 9y agoThose infographics: unless they render a lot differently on non-iOS devices, Tufte must be having a coronary.
- dralley 9y agoAnd, as per typical, the regulation won't start happening until the white collar workers making 120k+ start losing their jobs.
- rayiner 9y agoIt's been happening for quite awhile: https://www.wsj.com/articles/end-of-an-era-as-cme-to-close-almost-all-floor-trading-for-futures-1423100335 https://www.wsj.com/articles/end-of-an-era-as-cme-to-close-a....
- robot197 9y agoI still think there is too much hype around AI with all the doomsday prediction. Yeah, data processing will get automated away, but most jobs that require thinking within an ill defined framework will be fine for at least the next 20 years. The human brain is vastly superior to any machine learning algorithm we currently have.
- tachyonbeam 9y agoI think a big factor that people are failing to take into account is time to market and deployment. Imagine we had amazing AI that could do a lot of office jobs now. We’d still need to make useful software out of it, distribute and sell that software, customize it for different needs. That, by itself, could take years.
- adventured 9y agoForecasts are being pushed in the mainstream media that tout that 50% of all existing US jobs will be wiped out in the next 10 to 15 years. It has reached manic levels. 35-50 years, probably still wildly over the top. 10-15? Zero chance. If you had the perfect solution in a lab that could, for example, replace truck drivers today, you couldn't even get that fully implemented & distributed such that it cleared out 50% of all trucking jobs in 10-15 years. The entire economy? It'd be laughable if there weren't so much fear mongering involved in pushing these bogus forecasts. It's another example of people over-estimating change in the near-term. In 1999, ecommerce was going to immediately threaten all physical retail with extinction. If you didn't get on that hype train, you were toast. 23 years post founding, with year after year of incredible growth, Amazon is still just 1/4 the size of Walmart. As it turns out, it more often takes a long time to change the world.
- ko230 9y agoForget the human brain, we are a long way away from doing what an ant does with it's spec of dust size mind. And that still requires acres of racks. But the hype does help with funding. Which is a good thing.
- cujic9 9y agoFirstly, the human brain is not vastly superior. There are already tasks such that a reasonably competent developer can build and train a deep learning model that beats human perception on commodity hardware with open source software. Secondly, the number of jobs requiring thinking in an ill-defined framework these days is shrinking rapidly. This is not specifically caused by machine learning, but rather by the desire for predictable timelines / cost savings / metrics gathering. But it has set the stage for AI automation. Take law and health care, for example: * Law firms are consolidating, and lawyers can now spend their entire career working on one small, specialized aspect of a field. * Primary care physicians barely are allotted just enough time to refer you to a specialist. The specialist has just enough time to order tests.
- whatok 9y agoThis doesn't even touch on any of the back/middle office jobs that are going to completely vanish in the next few years. Most of these people have a very narrow skill set that is not transferable to other fields.
- Immortalin 9y agoUnrelated but if anyone's interested, KloudTrader is hiring for fintech developers. Looking for senior software engineers (fullstack web) and a CTO. We are an early stage startup that is willing to offer significant equity. Stack is Rails and python scientific software. Email's in profile!