Over the next decade, U.S. banks, which are investing $150 billion in technology annually, will use automation to eliminate 200,000 jobs, thus facilitating “the greatest transfer from labor to capital” in the industry’s history. The call is coming from inside the house this time, too—both the projection and the quote come from a recent Wells Fargo report, whose lead author, Mike Mayo, told the Financial Timesthat he expects the industry to shed 10 percent of all of its jobs.
Lunar lander developer Intuitive Machines has signed a contract with SpaceX for its first mission to the moon. The company announced this week that a Falcon 9 will launch its Nova-C lander in 2021 as part of a rideshare mission, but terms of the deal were not disclosed. The company won a contract from NASA in May to carry five payloads to the moon on that mission as part of the agency’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services program. Separately, a federal appeals court this week upheld a verdict in favor of the company in a suit against Moon Express, another commercial lunar lander company. That suit, involving work disputes between the companies, led to Intuitive Machines receiving $4.1 million in cash and stock. [SpaceNews]
A startup planning propellant depots in orbit for refueling satellites has raised $3 million. OrbitFab announced Thursday it raised the seed round of funding from venture capital fund Type 1 Ventures, Techstars and others. The company is working on technology to allow for refueling of satellites using small depots in orbit, and recently tested that technology on the International Space Station. At a conference in Washington earlier in the week, the company said it was still working on raising a funding round but hopes to have its first tanker in orbit by the end of next year. [TechCrunch].
This thorough review focuses on the impact of AI, 5G, and edge computing on the healthcare sector in the 2020s as well as a look at quantum computing’s potential impact on AI, healthcare, and financial services.
Hundreds of the world’s brightest minds — engineers from Google and IBM, hedge funds quants, and Defense Department contractors building artificial intelligence — were gathered in rapt attention inside the auditorium of the San Francisco Masonic Temple atop Nob Hill. It was the first day of the seventh annual Singularity Summit, and Julia Galef, the President of the Center for Applied Rationality, was speaking onstage. On the screen behind her, Galef projected a giant image from the film Blade Runner: the replicant Roy, naked, his face stained with blood, cradling a white dove in his arms.
At this point in the movie, Roy is reaching the end of his short, pre-programmed life, “The poignancy of his death scene comes from the contrast between that bitter truth and the fact that he still feels his life has meaning, and for lack of a better word, he has a soul,” said Galef. “To me this is the situation we as humans have found ourselves in over the last century. Turns out we are survival machines created by ancient replicators, DNA, to produce as many copies of them as possible. This is the bitter pill that science has offered us in response to our questions about where we came from and what it all means.”
PricewaterhouseCoopers, the large accounting and management consulting firm, released a startling report indicating that workers will be highly impacted by the fast-growing rise of artificial intelligence, robots and related technologies.
Banking and financial services employees, factory workers and office staff will seemingly face the loss of their jobs—or need to find a way to reinvent themselves in this brave new world.
The term “artificial intelligence” is loosely used to describe the ability of a machine to mimic human behavior. AI includes well-known applications, such as Siri, GPS, Spotify, self-driving vehicles and the larger-than-life robots made by Boston Robotics that perform incredible feats.
Fintech risk management systems are getting a makeover. By adding machine learning technologies to their traditional rules-based fraud management systems, banks hope that they can do better at catching real criminals while declining fewer legitimate credit card transactions. ML technologies, though, have their own gotchas.
Here and there, although not necessarily everywhere, banks are introducing machine language technologies into their fraud detection systems. Essentially, the objective is twofold: to detect real incidents of fraud quickly and accurately, and to do so while preventing false positives, in which legitimate transactions are wrongly tagged as suspicious.
Large banks have led the way in spending on ML-enabled risk management, says Steven D’Alfonso, a research director at IDC responsible for compliance, fraud, and risk analytics strategies for IDC Financial Insights. Lots of bigger banks plan to expand the artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled fraud detection systems into enterprise-wide decision support systems. Many smaller banks that haven’t yet embarked on ML are expected to follow by signing on for ML managed services.
The previously “impossible to solve” problems for some of the biggest financial, technological and academic institutions will soon be solved in Poughkeepsie.
That’s according to IBM, which announced the opening of its first Quantum Computing Center on Wednesday, based on its Poughkeepsie campus.
Quantum computing is “nothing short of a revolution for how we are going to process information,” Director of IBM Research Dario Gil said. While computers have traditionally processed binary code — a collection of ones and zeroes — quantum computers, he said, process information in qubits, or quantum bits.
Artificial intelligence is infiltrating every industry, allowing vehicles to navigate without drivers, assisting doctors with medical diagnoses, and giving financial institutions more nuanced ways to predict risk. But for all the authentic use cases, there’s a lot of hype too.
