Future job? Don’t bank on it!
Squeezed by low interest rates, shrinking trading revenue, and nimbler technology-based competitors, banks are preparing for the day that machines made by men and women take over more of what used to be the sole province of humans: knowledge work.
The human brain is a wondrous machine, but it isn’t changing. The pace of technological advancement is accelerating, and artificial intelligence (AI) may one day make many forms of work extinct.
Both Bank of America and Morgan Stanley, which together employ more than 32,000 human financial advisers, are developing automated robo-advisers. More than 40 global banks have joined forces with startup R3 to develop standards to use blockchain – software that allows assets to be managed and recorded through a distributed ledger, to overhaul how assets are tracked and transferred.
The universal theme of banking’s tech strategy is to make sure that, internally and in dealing with clients, ones and zeros flow seamlessly without messy human interference.
Machine learning, where the decision-making power of algorithms improves as more data are raked in, can replace people in some instances, say finance executives including Daniel Pinto, head of JPMorgan’s investment and corporate bank. Algorithms already tackle tasks such as vetting banking clients, pricing assets, and hedging some orders without human intervention. “As we make those processes more and more efficient, you will need less people to do what we do today,” Pinto says. Read more here
“IS IT TIME TO RETHINK YOUR CAREER?
Andrew Ng, chief scientist at Chinese Internet giant Baidu, on how AI will impact what we do for a living
Truck driving is one of the most common occupations in America today: Millions of men and women make their living moving freight from coast to coast. Very soon, however, all those jobs could disappear. Autonomous vehicles will cover those same routes in a faster, safer and more efficient manner. What company, faced with that choice, would choose expensive, error-prone human drivers?
There’s a historical precedent for this kind of labor upheaval. Before the Industrial Revolution, 90% of Americans worked on farms.”
Read more on the future of Artificial Intelligence here
