Major Firm Announces It's Replacing Stock Brokers With A.I.

A new report on the world's largest money manager, BlackRock, Inc., has revealed that it will be thinning the ranks of its human stock pickers, and transitioning toward algorithmic solutions. It's a stark example of algorithms directly taking people's jobs, and while the move is only tentative for now, it shows that soon even the world's most lucrative professions will be vulnerable to the oncoming wave of automation. The move comes in the wake of a troubling year for the conventional, so-called "actively managed" investment management business. In general, investors are starting to question whether having their money managed by a real human being is worth the vastly higher fees -- sometimes dozens of times higher than management through the application of simple rules, like following certain market indicators. Faith is waning in both the raw return on investment a human advisor can provide, and the value of being able to talk to a person who is specifically tasked with handling your financial future. Though there are no real details about the specifics of how these programs work (and, short of a leak, there won't be any coming), these new products have been available in some form for a while, previously locked away for large investors only.