Saturday, February 4, 2017

Carlyle's Rubenstein and Conway Promote Artificial Intelligence


PR.com reported

A large quantity of the Asset TV interviews conducted at the 2017 Davos World Economic Forum directly addressed both the threat and opportunity that automation brings.

David Rubenstein, co-founder and co-CEO of The Carlyle Group believes that automation is “coming down the pipeline and that if we’re not prepared we’re going to be run over.”
Carlyle ran over the pension benefit for employees of UK carpet maker Brintons.  Now their jobs could be victims of the next PEU money saving move.

Carlyle owns UK roadside assistance company RAC, whose pension the PEU also dumped.  It's not clear if they will have to respond to their jobs being run over.

Waxing philosophical Carlyle co-founder Bill Conway said in a Carlyle podcast:

"Take AI (artificial intelligence).  Why couldn't they develop AI that could do Bill Conway's job, even better than he can do it?  Could it free us?  Could it be a freeing kind of thing, innovation, technology?  It can so improve the human condition I think frankly in ways that we don't imagine.  I don't even know what they will be. Maybe life expectancy."
AI could be freeing for billionaires, but not for people who've lost their retirement funding and face the specter of job loss.

Life expectancy dropped for the first time since 1993:

For the average man, his life expectancy has fallen from 76.5 years to 76.3 years. For women, their life span is also on the decline – going from 81.3 years to 81.2 years.
Drilling down deeper into the data reveals something disturbing:

Suicides also increased significantly, although they do not account for a large absolute share of deaths. Researchers often include both unintentional injuries and suicides as related outcomes for people suffering mental illness and homelessness.
How many people have been cast aside by private equity's focus on greed the last twenty fives as PEUs became ubiquitous?


That's the train PEUReport stepped in front of in 2007 and a big time financial reporter spoke out against in 2011.

I have seen so many people -- particularly those in their 50s - 70s -- taken apart by what has happened in their industry as greed has hollowed out the economy. These are people took pride in their jobs and held themselves to this invisible standard that we all just took for granted, but is being wiped out. 
The Carlyle Group scares me more than anything I've ever seen on Wall Street. It seems to exist to corrupt politicians and it's hard to know who they even represent.

President Trump's administration is chock full of private equity underwriters so this trend will not reverse soon.   The PEU train believes in AI and it may run over lots of jobs before encircles the globe.

Update 11-11-19:  Google's healthcare partnership has access to millions of health records and plans to use artificial intelligence to "identify diseases and make predictions aimed at improving outcomes and reducing cost."  How about we reduce costs by not spending a penny on healthcare AI?  I don't want an algorithm deciding what treatment I need or can't get.  The public has seen the driver-less car not recognize a jaywalker and Goldman's Apple credit card employ a sexist algorithm without even know the cardholder's gender.  The Boeing 737 Max shows MCAS system programming can be deadly on a mass scale. 

Update 8-12-22:  In many cases AI fails to meet the scientific method as "results" are not reproducible, i.e. have no predictive value.   They can do worse and cause harm.