Date: March 17th, 2016 4:51 PM
Author: comical thirsty associate nursing home
By 2026, Nadler thinks somewhere between 33% and 50% of finance employees will lose their jobs to automation software. As a result, mega-firms like Goldman Sachs will be getting "significantly smaller."
That's because Kensho does analytics work — previously an artisanal skill within Wall Street — at high speeds. Instead of sorting through news clippings to create a report, Kensho generates them from its database of finance analytics — essentially doing the work of researchers and analysts algorithmically.
Type in "Syrian Civil War" into Kensho and you'll get a number of data sets showing how major assets like oil and currencies reacted to events in the conflict, Popper reports. The minutes-long search "‘would have taken days, probably 40 man-hours, from people who were making an average of $350,000 to $500,000 a year," says Nadler.
http://www.businessinsider.com/high-salary-jobs-will-be-automated-2016-3
‘‘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.
‘‘I’m assuming that the majority of those people over a five-to-10-year horizon are not going to be replaced by other people,’’ he said, getting into the flow of his thoughts, which, for Nadler, meant closing his eyes and gesticulating as though he were preaching or playing the piano. ‘‘In 10 years Goldman Sachs will be significantly smaller by head count than it is today.’’
Goldman executives are reluctant to discuss the plight of their displaced financial analysts. Several managers I spoke to insisted that Kensho has not yet caused any layoffs, nor is it likely to soon. Nadler had warned me that I would hear something like that. ‘‘When you start talking about automating jobs,’’ he said, ‘‘everybody all of a sudden gets really quiet.’’
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/28/magazine/the-robots-are-coming-for-wall-street.html?_r=0
(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3168293&forum_id=2).#30080755)