Quantitative futurist Amy Webb.
Although artificial intelligence and other technologies may not be playing a significant role in the financial services sector today, advisors would be wise to be open-minded about embracing them to at least some degree to help prepare for the future.
That was one significant takeaway from the Schwab Impact conference at the San Diego Convention Center, both from a media panel Tuesday on the state of the industry and a keynote Wednesday by Amy Webb, a self-described "quantitative futurist" who's the founder of the Future Today Institute consultancy in New York.
"I know everybody in this room has been hearing a lot about artificial intelligence — so much so that it sounds like a buzzword," Webb said. "You've heard all about artificial intelligence and blockchain and probably quantum," she said, calling them the "ABQs of financial services."
But "it turns out we don't actually know what we're talking about" when it comes to AI, she said, adding: "When it comes to AI, there's a tremendous amount of misplaced optimism and fear."
"It's not your fault," she told attendees. After all, she said: "We've been living with the idea of artificial intelligence for so long that it's hard for us now to escape these unbelievably visceral stories that we're read about and that we've seen. So, when we think about AI, our brains automatically go to" the "Terminator" movies in which "AI is a robot from the future that's going to come back and murder us in our sleep."
Or our perception of AI is instead based on "very positive utopian ideas about the future, where all the data and all the AI will just solve all of our problems [and] this magical dashboard will do everything for you."
However, she said: "In reality … it turns out AI's already here. It just doesn't show up the way that we were all expecting." What we have with AI now is narrow intelligence, a system that's "capable of performing a single narrow task as good or better" than we can on our own, she explained.
But there were recent advancements in AI that advisors should be aware of, including research company DeepMind's AlphaZero computer program that mastered the ability to play games involving strategic decision-making against humans by learning what human trainers had previously done and then came up with its own strategy and learned to collaborate with other systems, she said.
