Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why do traders in investment banks feel their jobs are immune from AI, etc?

quora.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 232 posts

Re: Why do traders in investment banks feel their jobs are immune from AI, etc?

#121

Post by dilemma »

dougabug wrote: post #109
vegabook wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference is that chess, go, etc are all essentially rules based. Finance has very few rules that do not break over time. Just look at QE. Arguably the financial market represents the collective intelligence of a huge amount of very clever people. Machines are only just starting to challenge a single human at a rules-based activity. We're very far from beating a brutally darwinian, impressively adaptive, human h…

What are the rules for image / video captioning? For natural sounding speech synthesis? For realistic image generation? For semantic segmentation? For determining perceptual visual similarity between images? Frankly, rules based AI is basically a bust compared to learning from data approaches. The hive was pretty amazing at destabilizing the entire global economy within a brief span following fundamental financial de…

Automatic image and video captioning is in a very sorry state. Machines can't do it.

Machine learning is rule based. The difference is just that it creates many more rules for more and more granular cases. But it will never be intelligent, it will always be a dumb digital bureaucrat.

Re: Why do traders in investment banks feel their jobs are immune from AI, etc?

#122

Post by [deleted] »

dougabug wrote: post #109
vegabook wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference is that chess, go, etc are all essentially rules based. Finance has very few rules that do not break over time. Just look at QE. Arguably the financial market represents the collective intelligence of a huge amount of very clever people. Machines are only just starting to challenge a single human at a rules-based activity. We're very far from beating a brutally darwinian, impressively adaptive, human h…

What are the rules for image / video captioning? For natural sounding speech synthesis? For realistic image generation? For semantic segmentation? For determining perceptual visual similarity between images? Frankly, rules based AI is basically a bust compared to learning from data approaches. The hive was pretty amazing at destabilizing the entire global economy within a brief span following fundamental financial de…

[deleted]

Re: Why do traders in investment banks feel their jobs are immune from AI, etc?

#123

Post by john61 »

Because Warran Buffet uses a computer - but only for bridge playing. But he uses a pocket calculator for his investment decisions.

His philosophy is heavily based on soft facts. Appreciation of management and understanding of the business model. This is not only based on logic and numbers. Therefore a computer does not help.

Re: Why do traders in investment banks feel their jobs are immune from AI, etc?

#124

Post by ynniv »

a constant change respecting an infinite and broad amount of variables (macroeconomic), a complex system (repeating exact past actions, will not give you the same results) and a social interaction/conflict regarding an ambiguous valuation of a price, it becomes incredibly difficult to determine those laws and rules.

Just like driving a car.

Re: Why do traders in investment banks feel their jobs are immune from AI, etc?

#125

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

dilemma wrote: post #119
dougabug wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Machine learning is "learning from data." It is not the assumption that there are no dynamics, and that the future will simply be a repetition of the past. To the extent that the future is predictable, learning from data is the best that can be done. The reality is that speech recognition, language translation, face recognition, object classification and detection, semantic segmentation, speech and image synthesis ha…

But the idea that you can predict the future is absurd. And even if you could, acting on that knowledge would change the future.

But the traders are trying to predict the future already! If it's impossible, then the machines are a shoe in, and if it is possible I'd still give the machines great odds.

Re: Why do traders in investment banks feel their jobs are immune from AI, etc?

#126

Post by brianwawok »

cm2187 wrote: post #116
vegabook wrote: post #66

because traders are used to seeing such predictions fail. Reuters was trading FX electronically since the early 1990s. At the tier one IB I worked for the IT budget was 500m USD a year (across products), and that was in 1997! Huge resources were thrown at automation. However, to this day, large trades in FX (> 10m USD notional) are still almost exclusively performed by humans over a telephone or over the bloomberg me…

> because traders are used to seeing such predictions fail. There was a joke from the 80s: soon the whole trading floor will be replaced by a computer, a man and a dog. The man presses the button to turn on the computer every morning. The computer operates all of the transactions and settlements automatically. And the dog is there to bite the man if he touches any other button. 30 years later, still no dog on the flo…

But on the flip side, most physical trading floors are closed. Can't see the last few lasting much longer.

Re: Why do traders in investment banks feel their jobs are immune from AI, etc?

#127

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

dilemma wrote: post #121
dougabug wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are the rules for image / video captioning? For natural sounding speech synthesis? For realistic image generation? For semantic segmentation? For determining perceptual visual similarity between images? Frankly, rules based AI is basically a bust compared to learning from data approaches. The hive was pretty amazing at destabilizing the entire global economy within a brief span following fundamental financial de…

Automatic image and video captioning is in a very sorry state. Machines can't do it. Machine learning is rule based. The difference is just that it creates many more rules for more and more granular cases. But it will never be intelligent, it will always be a dumb digital bureaucrat.

Given results from ex. neural networks, ML "rules" appear to be granular and flexible enough that I'm not sure they usefully count as being rules anymore.

Re: Why do traders in investment banks feel their jobs are immune from AI, etc?

#128

Post by Tistel »

sverige wrote: post #88

Well, an equally good question is why do programmers feel their jobs are immune from AI, etc.?

People are working on it. Search for: artificial general intelligence. There was a book out last year called: "the master algorithm" that talked about it (the book is not that great). We all know about how well certain AI are doing now (neural nets etc), and historically there were high hopes for logic based systems (prolog) that are not as popular at the moment. Anyway, the author speaks of 4-6 different AI camps that are all separate (depending on definitions) and he believes that combining them together could result in gerenral AI. The book is a half decent review of some the less well known AI (that might be worth exploring) but it has the problem that it's too much info for the novice and not enough for a non AI CS person. He actually has code etc, can't remember the name of the system.

Re: Why do traders in investment banks feel their jobs are immune from AI, etc?

#129

Post by Cybiote »

dougabug wrote: post #85
vegabook wrote: post #66

because traders are used to seeing such predictions fail. Reuters was trading FX electronically since the early 1990s. At the tier one IB I worked for the IT budget was 500m USD a year (across products), and that was in 1997! Huge resources were thrown at automation. However, to this day, large trades in FX (> 10m USD notional) are still almost exclusively performed by humans over a telephone or over the bloomberg me…

Machine learning is "learning from data." It is not the assumption that there are no dynamics, and that the future will simply be a repetition of the past. To the extent that the future is predictable, learning from data is the best that can be done. The reality is that speech recognition, language translation, face recognition, object classification and detection, semantic segmentation, speech and image synthesis ha…

There are varying levels of sophistication from which data can be learned from. Pigeons can learn non-trivial word concepts and statistics but they do so at a rate that is much slower than a human infant.

Thus far, machines have not done well in scenarios of low stationarity. Those are scenarios where the past is not so good a predictor of the future or where the data manifold is rapidly changing. This occurs for example, when the act of predicting changes what is being predicted. The related notion of Antipredictable Sequences is the most interesting consequence of the oft misconstrued notion of the No free lunch theorem.

Humans are far from the ideal machine for this scenario but they vastly outmatch current algorithms. This is because humans are much better in the kind of generalization that is based off theory building. While not perfect, it does well enough at generalizing from observations (think Newton deriving the laws of gravitation from observations and Brahe's data) to scenarios that are not so close to the data.

This means that for now and in complex environments, simpler models that are adaptable to change online are better. Additionally, their inspectability means they are more easily modified to better match any very changed dynamics.

So your examples of: `speech recognition, face recognition, object classification and detection, speech`

Are of the type where a learner, such as a deep network, whose generalization ability mostly hails from interpolating to fill in missing structure based on data (implying poor out of sample performance) does well when you can give lots of examples which provide good coverage.

Language translation is sort of inbetween (the space is not as smooth but is still fairly stationary at the scale of years) and so we also find that the advantages of deep learning have not been as pronounced and dramatic as has been the case for image and speech.

The digital machine advantage is two. Their memory capacity is outmatched. Second, and related to the first, energy needs are not so pressing a concern.

Re: Why do traders in investment banks feel their jobs are immune from AI, etc?

#130

Post by woah »

314 wrote: post #49
yazaddaruvala wrote: post #5

Everybody feels their job is safe from automation. Its the same way planes crash but not mine . Believing "I am special", is just built into us.

Not only do I believe that my job can be automated - I've spent years trying to do just that. Of course, I wouldn't be giving the scripts to my employer, just spending more time doing other things...

You actively sabotage your employer by keeping part of the code you write secret?
Post reply on HN