Artificial Intelligence Discussion

Yeah. Arguably the technology we speak of is MS Excel. Since Excel’s invention, any good actuary can calculate pricing, trends, reserves, financials, etc. in a matter of minutes and then spends the rest of their time arguing on the internet about how AI will transform things.

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I do find this all a bit sad anyway. I had really good “turn the crank” skills when I was EL. And I still would rather spend any afternoon writing code or creating models than blathering over the output.

Points finger. This, right here.

Excel is a great all purpose tool, but databases and other tools on the market now can do a lot more.

But once we all figure out how to automate reserve calculations, we blather over the output rather than automating what we are blathering about. Our roles expand so our blathering covers multiple business units or lines and once we figure out how to do that, we enter the world of powerpointing BS.

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Oh I think of databases as part of Excel.

(Don’t tell @meep)

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Yesterday, my little kid wanted to help plan her own birthday this time. Pretty exciting!!

Naturally, she started by opening powerpoint.

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fast track her to upper management.

A while back, one of my coworkers created a mock-up of something in Word, and within the document included lots of tables of mocked up numbers. He emailed this to another coworker. She did not like the approach and proceeded to create her own mock up by detailing lists of descriptions using boxes organized in Excel.

I noted their tool selections were awful and suggested they meet in the middle and create powerpoint slides.

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A model-based decision depends on both the predicted outcome, and also on the cost of being wrong, which is sometimes called the utility function or cost function.

In practice, many business application predictions have enough uncertainty that the utility function is very important. This utility function will reflect the values of the decision maker (or company). Then a person will be needed to act as a bridge between the unquantified values of the decision maker, and the quantified assumptions and predictions of the models.

This is why I do not think many of these models can ever truly be automated.

Hey, just like a real person!

Alan Turing would be so impressed.

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I’m holding out for the AI that can give solid wisdom like my grandparents did when they were alive.

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“… which was the style at the time…”

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I find it interesting that there were sci-fi tropes about AI that couldn’t lie, but we are faced with AI that can’t tell the difference between truth and lies.

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Maybe it’s closer to becoming human than we thought.

Do you mean like cloud gaming?

This is idiotic

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