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Hundreds of financial analysts are being replaced with software. What office jobs are next?
I work in artificial intelligence, and I'm here to tell you, this level of A.I. capability is new, and it's unbelievably disruptive. And it's only going to become more capable.
...as the software of his company, Kensho, scraped the data from the bureau’s website. Within two minutes, an automated Kensho analysis popped up on his screen: a brief overview, followed by 13 exhibits predicting the performance of investments based on their past response to similar employment reports.
Nadler couldn’t have double-checked all this analysis if he wanted to. It was based on thousands of numbers drawn from dozens of databases. He just wanted to make sure that Kensho had pulled the right number — the overall growth in American payrolls — from the employment report. It was the least he could do, given that within minutes, at 8:35 a.m., Kensho’s analysis would be made available to employees at Goldman Sachs.
...
‘‘People always tell me, ‘I used to spend two out of five days a week doing this sort of thing,’ or ‘I used to have a guy whose job it was to do nothing other than this one thing,’ ’’ Nadler said.
This might sound like bragging. But Nadler was primarily recounting those reactions as a way of explaining his concern about the impact that start-ups like his are likely to have on the financial industry. Within a decade, he said, between a third and a half of the current employees in finance will lose their jobs to Kensho and other automation software.
It began with the lower-paid clerks, many of whom became unnecessary when stock tickers and trading tickets went electronic. It has moved on to research and analysis, as software like Kensho has become capable of parsing enormous data sets far more quickly and reliably than humans ever could. The next ‘‘tranche,’’ as Nadler puts it, will come from the employees who deal with clients: Soon, sophisticated interfaces will mean that clients no longer feel they need or even want to work through a human being.
...
Kensho’s software is constantly tweaking and broadening these suggested search terms, all with little human intervention. In some ways, this is the most sophisticated part of the program. In the past, a trader or analyst would have to search Wikipedia or a news database using whatever keywords came to mind. Kensho’s search engine automatically categorizes events according to abstract features. It has figured out, for instance, that ISIS’s seizure of Palmyra and France’s first airstrike in Syria were both escalations in the civil war there but also that in one of those cases, ISIS was the aggressor while in the other case, it was on the defense. The software also looks for new and unexpected relationships between events and asset prices, allowing it to recommend searches that a user might not have considered. For this feature, Nadler said, he hired one of the machine-learning whizzes who worked on Google’s megacatalog of the world’s libraries.
...
This points to a disconcerting possibility: Perhaps this time the machines really are reducing overall employment levels. In a recent survey of futurists and technologists, the Pew Research Institute found that about half foresee a future in which jobs continue to disappear at a faster rate than they are created.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/28/magazine/the-robots-are-coming-for-wall-street.html
Nadler couldn’t have double-checked all this analysis if he wanted to. It was based on thousands of numbers drawn from dozens of databases. He just wanted to make sure that Kensho had pulled the right number — the overall growth in American payrolls — from the employment report. It was the least he could do, given that within minutes, at 8:35 a.m., Kensho’s analysis would be made available to employees at Goldman Sachs.
...
‘‘People always tell me, ‘I used to spend two out of five days a week doing this sort of thing,’ or ‘I used to have a guy whose job it was to do nothing other than this one thing,’ ’’ Nadler said.
This might sound like bragging. But Nadler was primarily recounting those reactions as a way of explaining his concern about the impact that start-ups like his are likely to have on the financial industry. Within a decade, he said, between a third and a half of the current employees in finance will lose their jobs to Kensho and other automation software.
It began with the lower-paid clerks, many of whom became unnecessary when stock tickers and trading tickets went electronic. It has moved on to research and analysis, as software like Kensho has become capable of parsing enormous data sets far more quickly and reliably than humans ever could. The next ‘‘tranche,’’ as Nadler puts it, will come from the employees who deal with clients: Soon, sophisticated interfaces will mean that clients no longer feel they need or even want to work through a human being.
...
Kensho’s software is constantly tweaking and broadening these suggested search terms, all with little human intervention. In some ways, this is the most sophisticated part of the program. In the past, a trader or analyst would have to search Wikipedia or a news database using whatever keywords came to mind. Kensho’s search engine automatically categorizes events according to abstract features. It has figured out, for instance, that ISIS’s seizure of Palmyra and France’s first airstrike in Syria were both escalations in the civil war there but also that in one of those cases, ISIS was the aggressor while in the other case, it was on the defense. The software also looks for new and unexpected relationships between events and asset prices, allowing it to recommend searches that a user might not have considered. For this feature, Nadler said, he hired one of the machine-learning whizzes who worked on Google’s megacatalog of the world’s libraries.
...
This points to a disconcerting possibility: Perhaps this time the machines really are reducing overall employment levels. In a recent survey of futurists and technologists, the Pew Research Institute found that about half foresee a future in which jobs continue to disappear at a faster rate than they are created.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/28/magazine/the-robots-are-coming-for-wall-street.html
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