A Goldman Sachs partner just warned that letting AI replace human reasoning could weaken future bankers' critical thinking skills. This assumes bankers currently possess reasoning skills. Bold claim.
The firm is embracing AI while simultaneously fretting that junior employees might forget how to think without it. They're describing a calculator for people who make seven figures. The technology lets analysts automate grunt work so they can focus on higher-level tasks, except the higher-level tasks were also grunt work, just dressed up in a nicer PowerPoint template.
Goldman wants the efficiency gains from AI without the pesky side effect of creating a generation of bankers who can't perform basic analysis when the servers go down. They've identified a huge danger. The danger is not that AI will replace banking jobs. The danger is that it won't replace enough of them, leaving behind a workforce that knows how to prompt ChatGPT but not how to build a discounted cash flow model without asking it to show its work first.
This is the same industry that nearly collapsed the global economy because it forgot how mortgage-backed securities worked. Now they're concerned about cognitive atrophy from over-reliance on machines. The irony would be poetic if it wasn't so f*cking predictable.
Retail traders are thrilled by this news. They've spent years getting their asses handed to them by algorithms they don't understand, and now Goldman is admitting those algorithms might make everyone dumber. Equal footing at last. Everyone loses together.
The partner raising this alarm is a senior tech leader, which means he's paid to implement the very tools he's warning about. That's like a cigarette company executive expressing concern about lung health between drags. He's not wrong, but he's also not stopping.
Goldman will keep deploying AI because the alternative is watching competitors do it first, and the reasoning skills of future employees will continue their long march toward complete fucking irrelevance, which started well before the machines showed up.
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