Robot financial workers to replace human traders, report says — from innovationnewsdaily.com by Jeremy Hsu

Excerpt:

Human financial traders complicit in precipitating the Great Recession may soon find themselves as unemployable as many others, put out of work by robots as if they were factory workers or stevedores.

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Of course, like the human world of high finance, the new world of robot financial trading comes with some risks. Better self-regulation is needed to prevent short-sighted, computer-driven market swings such as the “Flash Crash” of May 6, 2010, that wiped out $800 billion on the U.S. equity market in five minutes, and then recovered most of the loss within 30 minutes. Disturbingly, the report found very few studies that examine how human and robot traders interact with one another.

The evolution of next-generation trading algorithms that can learn and adapt without human involvement may also make their behavior “very difficult to predict or control,” the report says. That unpredictability would extend to world financial markets dominated by such robot traders.

Still, there is one likely upside for any college graduates and job seekers of today and tomorrow — computer programmers who can develop such algorithms will certainly remain in high demand.

 

Addendum on 9-13-11: