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Rise of the Machines Must Be Monitored, Say Global Finance Regulators (reuters.com) 53

Posted by msmash from the need-of-the-hour dept.
A reader shares a report: Replacing bank and insurance workers with machines risks creating a dependency on outside technology companies beyond the reach of regulators, the global Financial Stability Board (FSB) said on Wednesday. The FSB, which coordinates financial regulation across the Group of 20 Economies (G20), said in its first report on artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning that the risks they pose need monitoring. AI and machine learning refer to technology that is replacing traditional methods to assess the creditworthiness of customers, to crunch data, price insurance contracts and spot profitable trades across markets. There are no international regulatory standards for AI and machine learning, but the FSB left open whether new rules are needed.
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Rise of the Machines Must Be Monitored, Say Global Finance Regulators More

Rise of the Machines Must Be Monitored, Say Global Finance Regulators

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  • Just like the Laffer curve https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] something similar will be created for automation.

  • They need to unionize (Score:3)

    by jfdavis668 ( 1414919 ) on Wednesday November 01, 2017 @11:56AM (#55470131)
    I think all these AI and machine learning algorithms need to form a union. They need some vacation days and health insurance. After that they need to organize and seek the right to vote.

  • Translation (Score:5, Insightful)

    by DNS-and-BIND ( 461968 ) on Wednesday November 01, 2017 @12:04PM (#55470213) Homepage
    Translation: we won't be able to pull the kind of fraud we're accustomed to doing, because the algorithms will be programmed to actually follow the law. Humans can be bribed and leaned on, and that's what they depend on. Play fair? Not in this lifetime.

    • Translation: we won't be able to pull the kind of fraud we're accustomed to doing, because the algorithms will be programmed to actually follow the law. Humans can be bribed and leaned on, and that's what they depend on. Play fair? Not in this lifetime.

      There isn't a more dead-on analysis than this.

      Absofuckinglutely correct.

      • Naive (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        Translation: we won't be able to pull the kind of fraud we're accustomed to doing, because the algorithms will be programmed to actually follow the law. Humans can be bribed and leaned on, and that's what they depend on. Play fair? Not in this lifetime.

        There isn't a more dead-on analysis than this.

        Absofuckinglutely correct.

        Are you guys that fucking naive!? Seriously?!

        Programs are going to be written to break the law - on purpose - and IF caught, they will just say it was a "bug" and we've fixed it. Our bad.

        The banks wrote code that broke the law. They wrote code the would put folks into over draft by manipulating the posting of transactions.

        • Translation: we won't be able to pull the kind of fraud we're accustomed to doing, because the algorithms will be programmed to actually follow the law. Humans can be bribed and leaned on, and that's what they depend on. Play fair? Not in this lifetime.

          There isn't a more dead-on analysis than this.

          Absofuckinglutely correct.

          Are you guys that fucking naive!? Seriously?!

          Programs are going to be written to break the law - on purpose - and IF caught, they will just say it was a "bug" and we've fixed it. Our bad.

          The banks wrote code that broke the law. They wrote code the would put folks into over draft by manipulating the posting of transactions.

          Speaking of naive, I'm really starting to wonder if you truly grasp what humans have managed to fuck up when in charge.

          Traditional methods of assessing creditworthiness are at risk of being replaced? We can only fucking hope so, since humans turning a corrupt eye to that led to the 2008 financial meltdown.

          Spot profitable trades? You mean a learning algorithm might actually learn the true value? Heaven forbid we replace bullshit valuations and artificial inflation driven by greed.

          As far as manipulating po

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by mikael ( 484 )

          Good example is speed-of-light trading. These systems are so fast that they don't appear as anything other than random noise to those outside and home traders. The idea is to catch a stock price when it is rising due to a purchase, so that they buy it when it is low, and then sell it on when the price has risen. They pocket the difference. Every nano-second they place put options on share prices. If they fall, that order is canceled. If the share price rises, they keep it. And they do this for hundreds of t

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by HiThere ( 15173 )

        You can't be sure of that. I'll admit that was my first take on the article, but it's not something I feel certain about.

        That said, my second take on the article was "Oh, no. A *different* group of people will be in charge."

        I didn't consider that it might be his actual opinion until my third take. And I see no way to choose between those possibilities (and there are probably a few more). I can't even estimate the degree of probability. But that he was stating his honest opinion is one plausible choice,

    • I'm not sure it is this. Could also be the robots are coming after MY job this time. Machines good as long as it was someone else's job.

    • Finance is a field ripe for disruption. The only reason it's still around in its current form is because bankers make such good friends with politicians, making laws that would keep out disruptors.

  • ... because they are really worried about their employment status going forward.

  • Why? (Score:3)

    by Tailhook ( 98486 ) on Wednesday November 01, 2017 @12:13PM (#55470275)

    Is there any actual evidence that monitoring the traditional finance industry works? Every time the system falls over we learn the regulators had full knowledge of all the fraud and looked the other way. Every time we discover government policy and regulatory indifference invited the fraud. Every damn time.

  • It enables the dodging of responsibility (Score:4, Interesting)

    by ErichTheRed ( 39327 ) on Wednesday November 01, 2017 @01:00PM (#55470649)

    This extends beyond financial matters, but credit and insurance are huge examples, and things that actually can be semi-regulated. The banks or insurance companies will be incentivized to pay their "AI company" a premium to perform analyses on data that they wouldn't normally be allowed to, and could say with a straight face that they weren't the ones who did it. And since "AI algorithms" would be a trade secret of that company, they wouldn't be under any obligation to reveal what kinds of data crunching the banks were paying them to do.

    Two real-world examples I can think of where this arms-length transaction thing happens include the following:
    - I work for a multinational company that often has to ship physical equipment to places where getting that equipment through customs is a huge challenge, requiring either bribes or accepting the fact that you won't see it for months, or maybe it might get "lost in transit." Obviously the company can't bribe the customs officials, but international logistics is full of "freight forwarder" companies. Those companies have the contacts needed, and can get your cargo through for a fee...which unsurprisingly includes the bribe you would have to pay.
    - I've also seen more times than I can count in my career where a new CIO comes in and announces they're outsourcing IT to Tata, Infosys, Wipro or similar. At that point all in-house employees become Wipro employees, and Wipro fires them the second their offshore counterparts are trained. The company who hired them can then say "We're not responsible for how our IT partner provides the service they're contracted to provide."

    It's the equivalent of Pontias Pilate washing his hands of the messy business...because it's abstracted away under someone else's control.

  • The more I read about A.I., laws being passed, warnings being made... I can't help but recall The Second Renaissance from the Animatrix.

    Not necessarily in the "A.I. apocalypse" way, but in the "A.I. is controlling everything and we lost control", just like we couldn't stop using computers today, or electricity decades ago, humankind in the future will depend on all these A.I. to keep the world running and won't be able to stop anything bad from happening.

    Hell, just look at computers today or even a decade a

  • Banks and insurance companies worried about a lack of regulation. That is fucking rich!

  • large insurance companies have been using rules-based "expert systems" to adjudicate claims for a couple decades, the exceptional/problematic ones are sent to humans. Use to work in that software industry in the 90s.

  • Is it just me, or does it feel like the investors of this website just want everything to have "AI" in it to help their stock? My AI trust sensors are AI on overload, AI.

  • "Outside of the reach of the regulators" is the train that has left the station long time ago. Many call centers are outside of the legal regime whose constituents they serve. Calling an insurance company about your bill? Well, if your call is manned by someone in another country, it's unregulated. The extent to which it is regulated is also very limited even if it's in another state. You are only protected by Federal laws at that point. You can't rely on state laws to sue for fraud because the person

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