World’s Biggest Hedge Fund puts AI in Charge

The largest hedge fund in the world has put an artificial intelligence into a key management position in which it will make strategic business decisions, including hiring and firing of the company’s human staff. Ray Dalio, the founder of Bridgewater Associates, wanted to ensure the future of the hedge fund after he is gone, and has decided to entrust that responsibility to an AI, the Wall Street Journal reports.

The automated management project is being handled by the Systematized Intelligence Lab, which is led by David Ferrucci, the lead developer of IBM’s Watson AI program. The lab has also developed a number of iPad apps for the company’s staff to use to track their own goals and targets. The data input into these apps creates “baseball cards” which profile and score employees’ strengths and weaknesses.

“It’s ambitious, but it’s not unreasonable,” Devin Fidler, Research Director at the Institute For The Future, told The Guardian. “A lot of management is basically information work, the sort of thing that software can get very good at.”

Fidler argues that personal biases can negatively impact financial decisions, a curse with which computers are not afflicted. “People have a bad day and it then colours their perception of the world and they make different decisions. In a hedge fund that’s a big deal,” he added.

Such a move, though, is one more step down the road to make human workers obsolete. “Soon there just won’t be any reason to keep us around,” Zoltan Istvan, founder of the Transhumanist party, said. “Sure, humans can fix problems, but machines in a few years’ time will be able to fix those problems even better.”