Reports of our death are an exaggeration: Difference between revisions

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 Getting regulations wrong can have ''bad'' consequences. Even apparently formalistic things like [[KYC]] and [[CASS 6|client asset protection]]. Banks ''already'' throw armies of bodies and [[legaltech]]<ref>Our [[legaltech roll of honour]] refers.</ref> at this and still they are routinely breaching minimum standards and being fined millions of dollars.
 ===The gorillas in the room===
+{{Quote|A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.
+:—Robert Heinlein}}
 But in any case park all the above, for it is beside the point. For Mr. Perez overlooked the same core banking competence that Mr. Cryan did: quality ''people'', and quality ''leadership''.
-We have fallen into some kind of modernist swoon, in which we hold up ourselves up against machines, as if techne some kind of ideal to which we should aspire. Having done that, we naturally find ourselves in every regard ''wanting''. It has gone beyond that, for we set our children modernist criteria, too from the moment they set foot in the classroom. We have geared our [[education]] system to select for individuals who can be scored by reference to how reliably and quickly they can analyse and resolve ''known'' scenarios.  This is exactly what machines are best at. If we tell ourselves that machine-like qualities are the highest human aspirations we make it easy for the robots. We set ourselves up to fail.
+We have fallen into some kind of modernist swoon, in which we hold up ourselves up against machines, as if ''techne'' is a platonic ideal to which we should aspire.
+So we set our children modernist criteria, too from the moment they set foot in the classroom. The [[education]] system selects for individuals who can be scored by reference to how well they obey rules, how reliably and quickly they can identify, analyse and resolve ''known'', precategorised, “problems”. But these are historical problems with known answers. This is a [[finite game]].  ''This is exactly what machines are best at''.
+If we tell ourselves that “machine-like qualities” are the highest human aspiration, we will naturally find ourselves ''wanting''. We make it easy for the robots to take our jobs. We set ourselves up to fail.
-But human attributes — our tendency to improvise, our ability to imagine, narratise and analogise — our impish inconstancy, unreliability and unpredictability — these do not make us inferior to machines. They make us difficult for machines to control and manage.
+But human qualities are different — humans can improvise, imagine, narratise, analogise — they can conceptualise Platonic ideals — in a way that algorithms simply cannot.
-And that is the point. By suppression these instincts, we make ourselves more legible, more machine readable, to the advantage of efficiency, economy. These advantages accrue to the machines and their owners, not to us .
+And there is the impish inconstancy, unreliability and unpredictability of the human condition — these make humans ''different'', not ''inferior'', to algorithms. They make us difficult to control and manage by algorithm.
+And that is the point. ''We are not to be making it easy for machines to manage and control us.'' By suppressing our human qualities, we make ourselves more legible, machine readable, triageable, categorisable by algorithm. The economies if scale and process efficiencies this yields do not accrue to us. They accrue to the machines and their owners.
 Why surrender before kick-off like that?
+===A real challenger bank===
+Programmatisation has its place.
 They are the irreducible, ineffable, magic difference between excellent banks and hopeless ones: the transparent ''informal'' networks by which it mysteriously navigates all kinds of terrain like some hovering, morphing jellyfish. Sundar Pichai can’t code that. The same human expertise the banks need to hold their creaking systems together, to work around their bureaucratic absurdities and still sniff out new business opportunities and take a pragmatic and prudent view of the risk — this is not a bug in the system, but a feature. Neither Cryan nor Perez seems to think it exists.