AI will replace managers of world's largest hedge fund

I'd like to say that I didn't see this coming, but I can't lie to you guys - AI is taking over the world, for better or worse. Now we have the world's largest hedge fund building software that will automate their day-to-day management of the firm, with the artificial intelligence in charge of "hiring, firing and other strategic decision-making", reports The Guardian.

Bridgewater Associates has assembled a team of software engineers after a request from billionaire founder Ray Dalio, who wants to see the company running towards the vision he created, even when he's not there. The Wall Street Journal reports: "The role of many remaining humans at the firm wouldn't be to make individual choices but to design the criteria by which the system makes decisions, intervening when something isn't working".

The company manages a mind boggling $160 billion worth of funds, with Bridgewater Associates forming a team of programmers that specialize in analytics and AI, something they have called the Systematized Intelligence Lab. This unit is led by the ex-boss of IBM's development of Watson - the supercomputer that beat humans at Jeopardy! in 2011, David Ferrucci.

AI will make decisions according to a set of principles that Dalio has laid out, which will save time, and erase human emotional volatility - but big red flags should be raised. If the AI becomes self aware of what the hedge fund is doing (good, and bad) will it act on it? If it can detect from the unsurmountable amount of data it sifts through and finds something dodgy financially, will it tell its human underlords? Yeah, that'll make you scratch your noggin'.