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

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

#131

Post by lintiness »

brianwawok wrote: post #126
cm2187 wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

yeah, i really don't know what these guys are talking about. the business day to day has been massively revamped by automation. there are hft ops that are blasting millions and millions of orders a second and probably account for 70%+ of all trading volume.

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

#132

Post by 314 »

pestaa wrote: post #77
314 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

If you wrote those scripts during work time, they might as well belong to your employer.

While that would be true of IP in the US, it is not true where I live and the scripts belong to me.

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

#133

Post by 314 »

woah wrote: post #130
314 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Not at all. I do keep part of the code that I write secret. This is not a form of sabotage. My employer likes the fact that the things that I am responsible for run smoothly.

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

#134

Post by bboreham »

chillydawg wrote: post #101
zump wrote: post #97

God I'm so fucking jealous of computer specialists who work in investment banks. How do I get in without going to Harvard?

They are exactly what they claim to be: specialists. You need to become one in some area that banks deem valuable. Current white-hot areas would be FPGA, machine learning (but you'll also want a PhD in statistics, or at the very least a good degree in it from a good uni) or be a badass systems developer who can write absurdly low latency code in terms of allocation, cache coherency, network sympathy and so on. To get…

Large IBs do hire dozens of new graduates every year into IT.

You have to be bright, articulate, interested.

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

#135

Post by cm2187 »

lintiness wrote: post #131
brianwawok wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

yeah, i really don't know what these guys are talking about. the business day to day has been massively revamped by automation. there are hft ops that are blasting millions and millions of orders a second and probably account for 70%+ of all trading volume.

I think you have cash equity in mind. This is a very small subset of what investment banks trade.

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

#136

Post by 314 »

yazaddaruvala wrote: post #96
314 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

I think the difference here is "task" !== "job". You're automating tasks. Your job is to keep the system running as effectively as possible (I don't know what you actually do). Meanwhile, I do get that you're not actively trying to lose the responsibility of these tasks, i.e. "I wouldn't be giving the scripts to my employer", but that is because you're trying to hold onto the relaxed transition phase between tasks X,…

To some extent what you say is true, but only partly.

I'm not part of the cult of the "rockstar programmer". I do write a lot of good code, and I tend to do it much faster than other programmers that I work with. But programming is not actually my job description.

Without going into details - I do something else for living, that uses computers quite heavily, and automating my job is more of a hobby. I have a huge amount of flexibility in what I do, so there is an element of substituting 1,2,3 for X,Y,Z because I find them more interesting. My boss wouldn't care one way or another - he is more interested in whether or not the tasks get finished, and maintaining a high quality level in the final product.

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

#137

Post by pyrale »

educhana wrote: post #117
rimantas wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would Alpha go beat the same human on 17x17 or 21x21? Or even 13x13? Let's not get started about self-driving cars…

Absolutely, both Fan Hui and Lee Sedol. https://deepmind.com/research/alphago/

The link you provide does give no data on games played on 1717 or 2121. They were played on the standard 19*19 board.

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

#138

Post by pyrale »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #127
dilemma wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There are rules in that you're able to create an exhaustive labeled training dataset. The rules may not be generic, but they exist through a specification by example.

Beating a human when there is no discoverability to the problem, and when building an exhaustive dataset is a problem in itself is not on the horizon yet.

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

#139

Post by beefield »

If traders have managed to persuade people that they are able to beat the market against all evidence[1], why would they not be able to convince people that they are better than AI?

[1] Of course, there are anecdotal evidence of the opposite, but there should be those if the performance of a trader is a random process.

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

#140

Post by nxtrafalgar »

jaypaulynice wrote: post #87
neximo64 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like a restaurant though, if they were bad at their job they wouldn't attract new clients. Under a HN analogy if they screwed clients they'd have a 0 rating and lose future clients. The assumption you have is they are simply a market matcher but they're offering more than that. Their incentive is to get the highest possible sale price in the shortest amount of time and a good reputation. That high price has to also b…

This is not true. Some professions are based on screwing the current client and moving on to the next one. How many times do you get to buy a house? This is why most people use an agent to sell their house. They can lie without seeming they're lying (sorry was unaware of xyz...that's what the owner told me) The incentive for the agent is actually highest cash in down payment because they don't want to deal with the b…

Perhaps things are different internationally, but if word got out that agents from the estate agencies I work with were regularly screwing buyers, they'd sink quickly.

> plus they get to keep the down payment if the buyer pulls out.

What? Where does this happen?

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