
Robots Are Coming for These Wall Street Jobs - champagnepapi
https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2017-wall-street-robots/
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gbrown_
Kevin Slavin gave an excellent talk [1] on the need for trading systems to be
built with humans in mind rather than just for beating the other bots. I
highly recommend it, it's certainly one of my favorite talks.

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Goa1Y9OBHU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Goa1Y9OBHU)

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cujic9
Good talk.

And I, for one, am confident that Wall Street will accept the limits of their
intelligence and introduce software constraints that require human oversight
for the benefit of market stability. /s

Seriously though, any system with many actors is going to see unanticipated
failures resulting from runaway interactions. There is no way around it. And I
think that if the threat of losing money isn't a powerful enough incentive to
stop it, then nothing is.

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robot197
I still think there is too much hype around AI with all the doomsday
prediction. Yeah, data processing will get automated away, but most jobs that
require thinking within an ill defined framework will be fine for at least the
next 20 years. The human brain is vastly superior to any machine learning
algorithm we currently have.

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cujic9
Firstly, the human brain is not vastly superior. There are already tasks such
that a reasonably competent developer can build and train a deep learning
model that _beats human perception_ on commodity hardware with open source
software.

Secondly, the number of jobs requiring thinking in an ill-defined framework
these days is shrinking rapidly.

This is not specifically _caused_ by machine learning, but rather by the
desire for predictable timelines / cost savings / metrics gathering. But it
has set the stage for AI automation.

Take law and health care, for example:

* Law firms are consolidating, and lawyers can now spend their entire career working on one small, specialized aspect of a field.

* Primary care physicians barely are allotted just enough time to refer you to a specialist. The specialist has just enough time to order tests.

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robot197
Yeah, on the ImageNet data set, where all the images are pretty unclear, low
res and cropped weirdly leaving out context, deep learning "beats" human
vision system.

Human brain beats everything for now. It is a much more generic system.

I don't know enough about the specific fields you talked about to comment.

Deep learning is an incredibly powerful tool, but we should differentiate
between its actual merit and the huge hype around it, mostly done for PR and
misleading investors/financial analyst.

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cujic9
You are moving the goalposts.

If we're talking about doing a specific task within a well-defined framework,
computers are already proving to be superhuman. That includes image
recognition beyond ImageNet, as well as games like Go.

But yes, if we're talking about a generic system, then humans are better. And
I think they will be for a long time.

And yes, I agree, there is a lot of noise and sizzle around AI (but there is
also quite a bit of steak there too.)

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nocoder
Were they ever making any meaningful difference? How many of them have beaten
the returns given by an index fund over last 20 years? Also, I hate the
sensationalism of such articles, more sensationalism usually means less sense.

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clavalle
Quite a few. Famously Medallion:

[https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-11-21/how-
renai...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-11-21/how-renaissance-
s-medallion-fund-became-finance-s-blackest-box)

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nocoder
I know about medallion but its also run by quants and afaik largely
algorithmic. My argument is against the more traditional fund houses and stock
pickers.

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whatok
Most of the jobs listed are on the sell-side and predominately in market
making roles.

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fellellor
What is market making?

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ac29
[http://www.investopedia.com/terms/m/marketmaker.asp](http://www.investopedia.com/terms/m/marketmaker.asp)

tl;dr They provide liquidity to markets.

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ihsw2
tldr their wealthy benefactors throw money at them and they in turn throw
money at an unexplored corner of an unintuitive industry

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stupidcar
If you want an inadvertent AI doomsday scenario, how about black-box trading
models that figure they can make money by betting on a market crash caused by
a war, then manipulate the market to induce an economic conflict between
different states, without every really having any understanding of the meaning
of the outcomes they're optimising for.

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mFixman
AI doesn't work that way.

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dws
You might find the history of Doug Lennat's Eurisko informative.

"Lenat fed the massive Traveller rulebook into the system and asked it to find
the best way of winning. Each night, after several hours of trial and error,
Eurisko would spit out a few strategies—some interesting, some impractical,
some ridiculous. At one point, Lenat remembers, it suggested he could win the
game by changing the rules."

[https://www.wired.com/2016/03/doug-lenat-artificial-
intellig...](https://www.wired.com/2016/03/doug-lenat-artificial-intelligence-
common-sense-engine/)

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gumby
I used to work for Doug and let’s say there is some “dramatization” in that
characterization.

Also Eurisko and other symbolic/semantic systems are fundamentally different
from the NNs popular today.

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echion
tl;dr: data processing is getting automated. This is just a dramatisation (and
a bit of a summary) of normal process automation. Nothing to see here.

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dogruck
Also, if you are a regular BBG reader, and anything in that article is news to
you, than you should be worried and get updated.

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booleandilemma
So can we expect an influx of developers who were former traders?

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lloyd-christmas
That's me. I switched 3 years ago because I saw exactly this. I originally did
it to gain more tech skills with the plan on going back into it, but I left
and didn't go back. I took a bootcamp, and about 1/3 of my class were ex-wall
street.

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corpMaverick
In your opinion how hard is for average ex-wall street workers to pick up
programming ?

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lloyd-christmas
Finance is a huge industry. I can't really speak to the average, but I was a
buy side equities trader.

Technical: All of us are well versed in excel and have working knowledge of
SQL. Going from VBA to ruby/javascript was pretty trivial. While I don't
really consider college all that meaningful, most people had been STEM majors,
so the non job-specific knowledge tends to have some overlap. I was a
math/econ double major with a stats minor. Had I dropped 2 econ courses and
taken data structures + computer architecture, I would have had a minor in CS.
The rest of the minor overlapped with my math/stats.

Work-life: Finance is a very hard-working industry and had a ton of continuing
education, so that transition was extremely easy to the tech life. I
previously worked 60-80 hours a week (dependent on earnings season) and went
from that to 50 hours. All that free time went towards a few hours of extra
sleep and MOOC work to catch up on some of the more fundamental CS concepts.

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arkades
Those infographics: unless they render a lot differently on non-iOS devices,
Tufte must be having a coronary.

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whatok
This doesn't even touch on any of the back/middle office jobs that are going
to completely vanish in the next few years. Most of these people have a very
narrow skill set that is not transferable to other fields.

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Mrtierne
The title should read "Robots Are Here..."

Great read for anyone interested in a history of the Wall Street bots:
"Automate This" by Christopher Steiner

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dralley
And, as per typical, the regulation won't start happening until the white
collar workers making 120k+ start losing their jobs.

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rayiner
It's been happening for quite awhile: [https://www.wsj.com/articles/end-of-an-
era-as-cme-to-close-a...](https://www.wsj.com/articles/end-of-an-era-as-cme-
to-close-almost-all-floor-trading-for-futures-1423100335).

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Immortalin
Unrelated but if anyone's interested, KloudTrader is hiring for fintech
developers. Looking for senior software engineers (fullstack web) and a CTO.
We are an early stage startup that is willing to offer significant equity.
Stack is Rails and python scientific software. Email's in profile!

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conn01
Stephen Hawking says we should be more frightened of capitalism than robots

Who is behind robot? capitalism

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Flavius
I guess we just need some good ol' communism to fix this problem.

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arkades
Maybe? Kind of?

I'm extremely pro-capitalism, but free market economics does rely on a number
of assumptions being met in order to function, and only maximizes utility
functions for those participating.

If you build a market that violates those assumptions (e.g., massive
consolidation of supply) and effectively excludes people from participating
(by reducing total volume of work amenable to human intervention), capitalism
... just doesn't work. Wrong tool for the job.

Traditionally we either regulate operations to make them better fit free
market assumptions, or regulate outcomes. Whether that looks like communism is
a secondary discussion, though if you consolidate supply heavily enough, then
yes, you end up with some central supplier choosing what to produce and how to
allocate it for all those people that have no resources to create meaningful
demand.

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eb3c90
I think we can make supply distributed (given micro manufacturing/recycling
etc) so even if it is less efficient for a community to do it than something
more centralised they still have some autonomy. See my profile for my website
if you are interested where I am coming from.

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arkades
I meant centralized in terms of ownership/control, not geographic placement.
The current trend towards winner-take-all automation and resultant oligarchy.

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eb3c90
So do I. Consider the technological extreme of open source manufacturing. A
set of tools like repraps, that that can really make themselves (and computers
etc)

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ClickbaitTitle
Trading, Sales, Portfolio Manager, Analyst

