How will AI change the future of banking and financial services?
Humanity has been on the road for a very long time—from the beginning, when each individual had to collect sufficient food to survive every single day—to the point where we invented agriculture. At that point, we moved from 99% survival and 1% reproduction to a brand new model.
Growing food marked the introduction of leisure. Since then, every step in our evolution has proceeded along the lines of doing more and more with less and less. You might recall the 1899 story of Charles H. Duell, Commissioner of the U.S. Patent Office, lobbying President McKinley for its closure, claiming that “everything had already been invented.” Nonsense, of course (or at least highly apocryphal), but demonstrative of how some people can appear to be short-sighted.
On a timescale where the entire universe was contained within a single calendar year, it would only be in the first hours of December 31st of that year where apes and monkeys had their evolutionary split. At 8:00 PM of that day humans and chimpanzees experienced their evolutionary split. Around 9:30 that night, humans began to walk upright for the first time.
If it was the very last second of that imagined December 31st right now, it was only an hour and a half ago, at 10:30 PM, that our brains began to grow from 1 pound all the way up to 3 pounds—and that was the Dawn of Intelligence. It was only 8 minutes ago that the first Modern Humans evolved. And it was only between 1 and 4 minutes ago that we migrated to all the continents of the world (except Antarctica).
The bulk of human evolution occurred in just the last 8 minutes, but what we identify as our history all happened in the last minute. With only 50 seconds to go before midnight our cave-dwelling ancestors were sketching prehistoric animals on the wall, the most recent Ice Age was coming to an end, and sea level was 400 feet lower than it is today.
About 30 seconds ago, the Mediterranean culture arose giving us agriculture, which led to the first permanent settlements. Just 15 seconds ago marked the beginning of Dynastic China. About 6 seconds ago was the time of the Old Testament and Buddha, with Christ and Mohammed born in the last 3 or 4 seconds. One second ago, Columbus set foot in North America.
The 100-year lifespan of a human on this scale is less than one-quarter of a second. It is only within the last 0.125 seconds that we gained computers, the Internet, microcomputers, cell phones, and the Totality of Human Knowledge doubling every 18 months.
Weliterally have gained twice the knowledge that the Human Race accumulated since we first evolved, in just the last 18 months. In another year and a half, it will have doubled again. And the process is speeding up. Consider this YouTube video made by IBM, showing the world’s smallest movie. It’s a brief (93 seconds) animation called A Boy, and his Atom made entirely with single atoms, manipulated at the atomic level, and magnified 100 million times so we can see it.
We’re learning to do so much, and so fast, that the information is accumulating faster than we can use it. This is a problem. Artificial Intelligence is the answer to the problems encountered in data science use cases in finance, and many other fields besides.
Machine intelligence is the last invention that humanity will ever need to make—Nick Bostrom, TED speaker, Vancouver, B.C.
Movies like Terminator tend to paint pictures about the downfall of humanity because an AI thinks humans are a threat. The movie’s Skynet is probably not something we need to worry about, however.
We should make sure we teach the AI what humans would approve of, and what would be a bad idea. A nebulous goal of “eliminate human unhappiness” might end up with it wiping out the race—no people, no unhappiness, right? We had better have a good, well-described goal for it to work on before we flip the switch. Keep the stories of The Monkey’s Paw and King Midas in mind, and we should be fine.
