World's Largest Hedge Fund To Replace Managers With Artificial Intelligence (theguardian.com) 209
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: 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 $160 billion, 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. The machine will make the decisions, according to a set of principles laid out by Dalio about the company vision.
haha! (Score:1)
AI replacing Finance (Score:2)
Particularly CEOs and the finance department. After all, the beancounter approach of the payroll guys - 'why can't we just let go of these 500 people and hire 10,000 in Bangalore for half the price?' is something an AI can do just as easily, just like identifying which head does every line item fall into. Why do we need to pay somebody to do that when AI can do it for free?
And hopefully, the AI payroll declines to pay out a golden parachute while dropping these princes and princesses from cloud 9
So the Singularity occured, AI rule established (Score:2)
Re:So the Singularity occured, AI rule established (Score:5, Insightful)
I thought SkyNet was supposed to originate from the defense industry. Shoulda known that that isn't where the true evil lies ...
Re:So the Singularity occured, AI rule established (Score:5, Insightful)
If we're going to do sci-fi references, why leave out Asimov? Terminator was a throwback to the kind of pulp robot-run-amok stories that Asimov almost single-handedly made obsolete.
I've always thought that one consistent point in Asimov's robot stories that that robots are morally superior to humans -- at least if by "moral" you mean "principled". Ethics are literally baked right into Asimov's robots.
A robotic COO could be programmed to serve shareholder interests in a way a human COO could not be. It could also be programmed to be law abiding to within its ability to interpret what the law requires. Perhaps most importantly, it won't have an inbuilt tendency to rationalization and wishful thinking. Of course you still can't trust the bastards that programmed the thing, but it will serve somebody faithfully, to the best of its abilities.
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Actually this is an inevitable property of any kind of utopian scheme in literature. That's because protagonists need to have agency; they need to do things that matter, and in a Utopia there is nothing to be accomplished. Usually literary utopias are totalitarian, forcing people into the roles they would ideally play in the utopian scheme.
The main exception is Star Trek, which sets its human utopian in a non-utopian galaxy. No matter how many planets are brought to Federation standards of enlightenment,
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Try the Culture series by Iain M. Banks. Novels set in a fully post-scarcity society.
Re: So the Singularity occured, AI rule establishe (Score:2)
Re: So the Singularity occured, AI rule establishe (Score:2)
The weapons industry calls itself the defense industry to pretend that it's not evil.
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I thought SkyNet was supposed to originate from the defense industry. Shoulda known that that isn't where the true evil lies ...
One of the most powerful weapons of war and control is money and banking systems. "Let me issue and control a nation’s money and I care not who writes the laws.” Mayer Amschel Rothschild (1744-1812), founder of the House of Rothschild.
There's no evidence any Rothschild ever said this. It was attributed to him by lobbyist & author T.Cushing Daniel in 1911 and was one of several corrupt appropriations of Scottish politician Andrew Fletcher's remark "if a man were permitted to make all the ballads he need not care who should make the laws of a nation"
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What would an AI consider a dirty job?
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" their electronics failed quickly"
Bah, nothing a vacuum tube and tunnel diode control system can't handle.
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Or just use depleted boron [wikipedia.org] as your P-type semiconductor dopant, and stick to 100nm or bigger fabs. Since this is a fairly common requirement, you can buy such rad-hard products off the shelf.
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Recruited is the wrong term.
They where recruits and forced by gun point to clean up, or get court court martialed.
Obviously most recruits where from "trouble zones" so they could kill two birds with one stone.
Re:So the Singularity occured, AI rule established (Score:5, Funny)
After all these years, Clippy finally gets his big break!!!
Skynet! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Skynet! (Score:5, Interesting)
There are two ways to take control of the planet. You can destroy all opposition (and their possessions, factories, etc.) or you can get most of the money. You don't even need that much of it, especially if the population is stupid, as we saw in the last election. Look how little it took to take over the US. How much more will be needed to take the rest of the world?
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There are two ways to take control of the planet. You can destroy all opposition (and their possessions, factories, etc.) or you can get most of the money. You don't even need that much of it, especially if the population is stupid, as we saw in the last election. Look how little it took to take over the US. How much more will be needed to take the rest of the world?
Terminators wearing Armani suits, driving a Ferrari, carrying an iPad made of solid gold and slurping on a hundred dollar cup of cat shit latte?? ... no still not feeling it.
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Did you know that he can't actually do ANYTHING (except scare the hell out of anyone with a few functioning brain cells) until he is sworn-in as president on January 20th?
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Sorry, but history repeatedly shows otherwise.
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Sarah Connor Chronicles got cut?
It did. I hear both the fans were absolutely distraught.
News present and news to come (Score:2, Interesting)
2016: Ray Dalio commissions AI to make business decisions in his place.
2017: Business AI makes business decision, finds Dalio a jerk, fires him.
Manna? (Score:5, Insightful)
Funny, I thought Manna [marshallbrain.com] was supposed to start at the burger flippers. Oh well! They've already got these paranoid little hedge fund monkey's judging each other throughout the day, sounds like hell on earth. Couldn't happen to nicer slime bags.
Re:Manna? (Score:5, Interesting)
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Due to an unexpected software glitch... (Score:2)
Or three programmers get 300% raises (Score:5, Funny)
The programmers are creating a system that makes business decisions. That means one of two things:
A) "The program" decides to give the programmers big raises
B) The programmers are incompetent
I know if *I* were programming such a system, the system would "know" that I'm extremely valuable.
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I would think that A=B, in that case.... while most management may be replaced by the machines, it is highly unlikely that a suddenly much larger amount going to salary payouts would be unnoticed by the people who pay attention to the bottom line margins for very long. A smarter programmer would arrange for the program to give himself a smaller raise, one that it is less likely to be noticed by someone else. If, for example, the team designs the software such that it never recommends anyone currently on
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Obvious (Score:4, Funny)
Robots and AI have always been taking the mentally easiest and least skill demanding jobs first. But where do they plan to find AI with the right connections?
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Think of it as being interviewed by Eliza.
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So you are thinking of being interviewed by Eliza.
Do you like Eliza?
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She's a tramp.
Like Melania Tramp? [gq-magazine.co.uk]
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That's a porn star. [iheart.com]
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Did you even read the link I provided?
PICS: Melania Trump Has Appeared In Soft Core Lesbian Porn Modeling
It's the fucking headline.
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It makes a difference because she's a prostitute.
She's also a liar [archive.org]. She did not graduate.
After obtaining a degree in design and architecture at University in Slovenia ...
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Robots and AI have always been taking the mentally easiest and least skill demanding jobs first. But where do they plan to find AI with the right connections?
That's why it won Jeopardy.
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Robots and AI have always been taking the mentally easiest and least skill demanding jobs first.
One of the first things that an AI accomplished was becoming a grandmaster at chess. Is that mentally easy?
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It actually *is* mentally easy *IF* you have an infallible memory AND you can work basic logic AND your logic runs quite quickly.
Admittedly, that would only qualify you as a very bottom level "grand master", but it would suffice to beat most masters. The games would be uninspired, but technically sound, and the defense could be essentially unbeatable. Just about all your games against master level players would be draws.
durable intent (Score:5, Insightful)
The goal is technology that would automate most of the firmâ(TM)s management. It would represent a culmination of Mr. Dalioâ(TM)s life work to build Bridgewater into an altar to radical opennessâ"and a place that can endure without him.
At Bridgewater, most meetings are recorded, employees are expected to criticize one another continually, people are subject to frequent probes of their weaknesses, and personal performance is assessed on a host of data points, all under Mr. Dalioâ(TM)s gaze.
Bridgewaterâ(TM)s new technology would enshrine his unorthodox management approach in a software system. It could dole out GPS-style directions for how staff members should spend every aspect of their days, down to whether an employee should make a particular phone call.
I think the Wall Street story (here [google.com] gets you past the paywall once) is obsessing over the micromanagement side of the thing and missing the big picture.
This is among the first examples of someone using AI to try to maintain strategic and organizational integrity of an organization after their death. While there's a good chance this just fails utterly (particularly with the obsession on micromanagement and dysfunctional business dynamics), it does lead to a potential problem or opportunity down the road when many of these things have been set up with conflicting interests. There have been many examples through history of powerful people trying to create an enduring legacy through creation and propagation of something throughout time. These endeavors often fail merely because successors have different interests and high levels of incompetency, leading eventually to dissolution of the thing.
Here is a possibility to create something enduring, a machine capable of surviving long durations and implementing its creators' will long after their deaths. Here, the alleged goal is retention of a particular business culture, but who knows what else has been tossed in? There could be all sorts of covert purposes and priorities, some introduced by the patron and perhaps, some introduced by other parties?
Then there's the matter of what happens in the distant future, if this approach turns out to be successful without a corresponding improvement in human longevity? Either it's the only one of its kind, and we have a build up of economic power not subject to the usual restrictions of human lifespan or we have multiple powerful parties in permanent conflict with each other.
This need not be universally bad. For example, an AI could be set up to further environmentalism or poverty elimination goals just as easily as it could a particular business's interests.
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Then there are the clever "de-automizers" who subscribe to the CaptainDork Third Corollary that:
For every mother fucker out there with a computer, there's another mother fucker out there with a computer.
And when Mr. Roboto expires, his legacy shit gets reformatted by another Mr. Roboto.
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This need not be universally bad. For example, an AI could be set up to further environmentalism or poverty elimination goals just as easily as it could a particular business's interests.
Don't forget to equip your environmental and poverty AI's with the three laws of robotics, otherwise it might go for the easy solution in both cases...
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Steve Jobs did this by setting up a "college" on the Apple campus to teach his legacy after he died.
Re:durable intent (Score:4, Insightful)
So, when can we see some graduates of this "college" start to work on Apple's deficiencies? They're sitting on the cusp of riding a managed decline into irrelevancy over the next decade or so. The only thing they seem to have going for them any more is that if you care at all for personal security, you can't afford to buy a device from pretty much any of their competitors, and they're fast trying to give that up as well.
Do they really want to go back to the days when they had to beg Microsoft to keep them alive? Where they, too, can string along as an also-ran, kept on life-support by the dominate player to avoid anti-trust attention? 'Cause that's really working out well for AMD.
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I think this may not be quite so new as it seems. In a way, attempts to apply cybernetic control principles to management go waay back ("Management by Objectives 1954), even predating cybernetics itself ("Scientific Management" circa 1910).
The thing is the evidence for the effectiveness of these systems have always been mixed. As with every kind of educational reform ever attempted, there were some remarkable success stories but in practice these saddled users with a rigid ideology and time-consuming ritu
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The difference we're seeing now is that we're not talking about applying "mechanical" management principles to people, we're now beginning to glimpse a world in which the machines effectively integrate and compete with each other, where you're not going to have humans being managed with machines or by machines, but rather the machines being at least semi-autonomous, with a few humans with the authority to override them, much as how automation of industrial processes has been heading. The reality is that the
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The goal is technology that would automate most of the firmâ(TM)s management. It would represent a culmination of Mr. Dalioâ(TM)s life work to build Bridgewater into an altar to radical opennessâ"and a place that can endure without him. At Bridgewater, most meetings are recorded, employees are expected to criticize one another continually, people are subject to frequent probes of their weaknesses, and personal performance is assessed on a host of data points, all under Mr. Dalioâ(TM)s gaze. Bridgewaterâ(TM)s new technology would enshrine his unorthodox management approach in a software system. It could dole out GPS-style directions for how staff members should spend every aspect of their days, down to whether an employee should make a particular phone call.
I think the Wall Street story (here [google.com] gets you past the paywall once) is obsessing over the micromanagement side of the thing and missing the big picture. This is among the first examples of someone using AI to try to maintain strategic and organizational integrity of an organization after their death. While there's a good chance this just fails utterly (particularly with the obsession on micromanagement and dysfunctional business dynamics), it does lead to a potential problem or opportunity down the road when many of these things have been set up with conflicting interests. There have been many examples through history of powerful people trying to create an enduring legacy through creation and propagation of something throughout time. These endeavors often fail merely because successors have different interests and high levels of incompetency, leading eventually to dissolution of the thing. Here is a possibility to create something enduring, a machine capable of surviving long durations and implementing its creators' will long after their deaths. Here, the alleged goal is retention of a particular business culture, but who knows what else has been tossed in? There could be all sorts of covert purposes and priorities, some introduced by the patron and perhaps, some introduced by other parties? Then there's the matter of what happens in the distant future, if this approach turns out to be successful without a corresponding improvement in human longevity? Either it's the only one of its kind, and we have a build up of economic power not subject to the usual restrictions of human lifespan or we have multiple powerful parties in permanent conflict with each other. This need not be universally bad. For example, an AI could be set up to further environmentalism or poverty elimination goals just as easily as it could a particular business's interests.
In a lot of complex systems, the influence of the inputs and outputs are not linear and uncorrelated.
AI setup for environmentalism and poverty elimination might influence other systems and those influences might be huge in the wrong sectors. It might attribute environmentalism and poverty elimination with population reduction, war etc.
Just like the stock market, there is no real way to predict what will be successful and what will fail. As humans, we always have our 20/20 hindsight bias. As an exercise
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Re:"Poverty" will never be eliminated (Score:4, Insightful)
I call bullshit on this. While, all in all, most people living in the industrialized world in the last sixty or seventy years have the highest standard of living of any humans, that is really a statistical statement. That doesn't mean kings of the past lived in poverty, which is, of course, a moronic statement that only an ignoramus could make. People like Caesar Augustus, Charlemagne and just about any given Pope lived in splendor that would still amaze today (look at Versailles to see how Louis XIV thought a king should live).
The chief advantage most of the poor in the West have is that health care is a lot better, so I'll give you that, although for certain groups of poverty-stricken, life expectancy still hovers somewhere around where it did for their ancestors two or three hundred years ago. But other than that, they tend to have the same dismal nutrition of their ancestors, and in some ways much worse because the poor tend to consume a lot more pre-processed meals, meaning the levels of salts and carbohydrates they're consuming are far higher than people of the past, leading to health problems more unique to the 21st century.
But really, to claim the poor of today live better than the kings of yesterday is so astonishingly stupid a claim that I have to imagine you're either trolling or a fucking moron. In either case it doesn't reflect well on you at all. And if you don't think poverty doesn't exist in the West, go down to any inner city, where the mentally ill and the addicted tend to gravitate towards since society seems to have little desire to help them, and tell me you're not looking at people whose condition would likely have even shocked a 12th century serf.
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Unfortunately, "moron" is more likely. I've run into many people who just can't imagine how bad some other people's lives are. And "moron" is in quotes because many of these are people who are quite competent in areas in which they are experienced.
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If you took a close look at Versailles you would have noticed the absence of toilets [blogspot.ca].
Also lice back then did not differentiate between the poor and the aristocrats and everybody had them [fashionencyclopedia.com]. Same goes for bed bugs.
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If the business AI does better, then it's hard to imagine a level of tax that would make it non-viable. You can't tax away progress. It just doesn't work. Besides, those building these AIs are some of the most powerful entities in the world. They may have to accept some higher level of taxation, but at the end of the day, governments will no more put the AI genie back in the bottle than they did earlier forms of automation. AI is simply another step in a process that's been going on since the 18th century,
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Please note, this *ISN'T* the level of automation that people have been predicting "at least since the first decades of the 20th century". This is a relatively simple thing. The automated cars, imperfect as they are, are much more impressive. But this *is* a step along the way, and it *is* the kind of thing that will be done increasingly. And many of them will be "for the benefit of the owners/stockholders", which knocks on the head that "for the benefit of the living" argument.
No, what's innovative abo
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The living always find a way, because the dead can't fight back.
Unless there's a powerful AI on the side of the dead.
Go up yours skills!! (Score:5, Funny)
If they got passed highschool and got educated and decided to better themselves they wouldn't have been replaced by automation. They have no one to blame but themselves as a hedge fund manager is a job for highschool kids that anyone can do. It was never meant to support a family
Re:Go up yours skills!! (Score:5, Informative)
If they got passed highschool and got educated and decided to better themselves they wouldn't have been replaced by automation. They have no one to blame but themselves as a hedge fund manager is a job for highschool kids that anyone can do. It was never meant to support a family
Well done.
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What a scam they got going, It's a club - members only.
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You got your funny mod, but there have been several scientific papers showing hedge fund managers don't do any better than chance. There have been demonstrations where they are literally replaced by cats or monkeys throwing things.
At least a high school dropout burger flipper flips something other than a coin.
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My cats often throw things. It's their way of trying to get inanimate objects to play with them.
I'm not sure this signifies investment excellence but I'll run some tests next time I'm considering options.
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Well, there was this book called "A Random Walk Down Wall Street", which pretty much made the same claim, but I think that the actual job is a bit more skilled than that. Of course, this doesn't mean that it wouldn't be well within the capabilities of a good AI.
Funny? (Score:4, Insightful)
this was posted on hacker news a couple days ago and I still have the tab open.
In the comments you will find a link to this, which are Ray Dalio's "Principals" [principles.com] which were lauded on HN for some reason.
I didn't make it that far reading them. There are 200 of them some with subsections. It seems like a lot of managerial jerking off from one.
Re: Funny? (Score:4, Insightful)
It's the typical blather of the rich and shameless. All the bad things were just luck and all the good things were just their innate superior abilities and hard work.
Fact is, anyone can grab the brass ring if they can afford multiple tries, but most people are lucky if they can afford even a single try.
Re: Funny? (Score:4, Interesting)
It's the typical blather of the rich and shameless. All the bad things were just luck and all the good things were just their innate superior abilities and hard work.
Fact is, anyone can grab the brass ring if they can afford multiple tries, but most people are lucky if they can afford even a single try.
Nicolas Taleb, Fooled by Randomness [amazon.com] great book
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Excellent link, thank you!
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And you have to have the resources in place to exploit it.
AI programmed by psychopaths (Score:1)
The results should be interesting to say the least.
Wow (Score:2)
Great... (Score:1)
The REAL problem for AI to solve... (Score:2)
...is how the hell you develop a sustaining economy once you put all the humans out to pasture.
Projects like this are interesting in the lab and classroom for now, but the reality of today is we have no fucking idea whatsoever how we're going to handle humans being literally unemployable.
Not that the greedy elite creating this really gives a shit. If you thought the chasm between billionaires and reality was large now, just wait until this new model starts creating trillionaires.
Re:The REAL problem for AI to solve... (Score:5, Insightful)
First step: stop believing in the nonsense you've been told about the economy. "The economy" will work better with automation. It always has.
The problem is with distribution of wealth. Right now we have this quaint system developed during one of the nastier periods of human history where we give all of it to a few people and everyone else does what those people say in exchange for whatever the "bosses" think they deserve. You're absolutely right, we're going to have to come up with some better way.
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First step: stop believing in the nonsense you've been told about the economy. "The economy" will work better with automation. It always has.
The "economy" has always been fueled by humans who maintain the capacity to feed it, hence the main reason the Great Depression wasn't so "great" for anyone, including the economy. And our economy has always evolved to continue to create paths to employ humans to feed our economy. The next evolution is removing the human altogether. Hope that clarifies the impact of automation this time around, and how your "always has" theory quickly becomes an illusion.
The problem is with distribution of wealth. Right now we have this quaint system developed during one of the nastier periods of human history where we give all of it to a few people and everyone else does what those people say in exchange for whatever the "bosses" think they deserve. You're absolutely right, we're going to have to come up with some better way.
Greed created the slave. Greed created the 1%. G
One word says it all.... (Score:2)
Ick.
Damned Mythos cultists (Score:2)
Magic 8 Ball (Score:2)
Sure, this will work... (Score:2)
FFS. People still think crap like this works? It will swiftly degenerate into alliances, feuds, and an arena mentality.
See what Deming said [youtube.com]
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Survivor Wall Street. I'd watch. But only if they let them get a bit hungry before they give them giant bags of rice so they don't actually starve.
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Make them eat each other.
Surprising, yet welcome (Score:2)
It's sure nice to see the people at the high end of the financial scale being the first to go... Not something I expected, but hey, surprises now and then keep you sharp.
"Hedge fund manager? Yeah, I replaced a few of them with perl scripts last summer..."
Good move (Score:2)
Spreadsheet monkeys (Score:2)
Most "managers" I've met have been spreadsheet monkeys running things through formulas for other managers. Not much analytical skills and little if no human or leadership skills. Easily replaced by automation and good riddance when we do. The sooner the better.
They're overthinking the problem (Score:2)
Then you get rid of market index funds [economist.com]. The market index funds (DJIA, S&P500, etc) are weighted based on market capitalization. "Popular" stocks have a higher market cap, so tend to be over-represented in these funds. But a stock being popular means it has already experienced a value gain. It's less likely to appreciate more than the "unpopular" stocks.
So now you've got
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That's not *quite* true. An efficient market isn't at all like gambling. It allocates resources where they are best used. Investing in that market means your money is used as efficiently as possible, earning you the best possible return. Trying to *beat* that market is gambling.
Investors in an efficient market aren't gambling. Hedge fund managers aren't gambling either: they're fleecing the sheep by charging commissions for basically flipping coins.
This cult attempted to recruit me (Score:2, Interesting)
I got a weird call from a recruiter about a position at this place about 5 years ago. They had just finished a very profitable year, and I've been doing the type of mathematical modeling they find very interesting for over 15 years. What made the call weird was how much the recruiter felt the need to "explain" the company to me in our initial conversation.
He knew he had a turkey on his hands and had obviously found it difficult to place savvy people at Bridgewater in the past. They ask that everyone read
More of an ego problem than a business problem? (Score:2)
...who wants to ensure the company can run according to his vision even when he's not there...
So he has admitted that he has abdicated his responsibility to have people in place in case he is unable to manage the company?
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...who wants to ensure the company can run according to his vision even when he's not there...
So he has admitted that he has abdicated his responsibility to have people in place in case he is unable to manage the company?
Even better -- if the A.I. is designed to run the company according to his vision even when he's not there, why does he need to be kept on the payroll?
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Actually, if you assume that the AI is a good implementation of his vision, that's not an unreasonable way to do the management. Unfortunately(?) the environment isn't static, and once his vision is fixed in code, it *is*. Perhaps only at a rather abstract level, if it's a really smart AI (which, I believe, is beyond the current state of the art), but fixed. So when the environment changes in an unexpected way, it will fail...or at least react in an unpredictable way.
Management (Score:2)
Executive Decision Making (Score:2)
Its been done. [youtube.com]
Surely it's harder to replace managers (Score:2)
Indeed in my frame of reference -the shop I currently work for- I see a few challenging requirements. Perhaps we should lower our expectations and come up with a system to automate people that actually do that what they were hire
?? managers ?? replace with AI? (Score:2)
Low hanging fruit...
commentsubject (Score:2)
Incentivizes socializing, charisma, elbow-rubbing more than anything related to productivity or success.
I see them everywhere, but the worst offender of encouraging people to game things is our obsession with metrics and poorly-equated conclusions.
Reduce people to a number and they will immediately look for the levers that manipulate it. Which is to say, surprise surprise, they won't immediately go out and do
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The nomenclature of "baseball cards" is offensive too, because baseball stats are based upon objectively measured data, yet the peer rating system used here is subjective.
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I've used algorithms plugged with financial data to test man-hour scenarios. Yes, at the end of the day, I would make the final decision, but it sure isn't a matter of "I think Bob stinks like cheese, so I'll sack him." I could see the value of these tools, even if there's still a human at the top of pyramid who does the final assessment. And really, the final assessment in very large organizations isn't likely to involve "Mary's husband has leukemia and while she's underperforming right now, there's a good
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erm. Yes, it is.
Tha faceless behemoth doesn't make that decision, Mary's managers that know her do.
Her chances are better at a larger organisation; they can more easily afford to carry her for a while.
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I predict that PriOS will soon fire all the staff and hire former Jeopardy players
They already have Watson, don't they?
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They're constantly graded on every aspect of their performance, tightly micromanaged, and working in an extremely competitive environment. What I'm hearing is the business is designed to extract every possible erg of work from its employees and then spit them out when they're burnt out and no longer competitive. I would only work there if they paid enough to retire after five years.
I wish it was an good mix of *collaborative* and competitive environment.
What burns me out is working alone. And, everyone becomes uncollaborative when it's a competitive environment.
If it becomes too collaborative, I would think it becomes the class group project where one person does all the work and the rest slack.