Artificial Intelligence Finishes 360,000 Hour Workload In Seconds, Law And Banking Jobs Threatened

Automation is the current boogeyman for blue collar workers, minimum wage earners, and even doctors, but it seems lawyers and bankers are now on the list of endangered occupations. JPMorgan Chase & Co. recently showed how an artificial intelligence could go through 360,000 hours of work reviewing documents by its lawyers in a matter of seconds.

The banking firm used an AI called COIN (COntract INtelligence) to go through thousands upon thousands of documents pertaining to loan contracts, Bloomberg reports. Before the AI went live back in June 2016, it was the job of lawyers to sift through all of these documents to review them and make sure that everything was in order.

What took these professionals hundreds of thousands of man hours to complete, COIN finished in less than a minute. What’s more, the AI made fewer mistakes compared to the work of the lawyers and is expected to take no paid vacations. Put all of these advantages together and the bank has a pretty good case to replace a good chunk of its workers with a system that is expected to save them a lot of money.

COIN’s impressive efficiency is something that the financial sector and the rest of the industry simply can’t ignore anymore, Futurism reports. If a program can save banks, tech companies, and even the government a considerable amount of time of tedious labor, it can be difficult to justify not using such a convenient tool.

Factories and farms during the Industrial Revolution faced similar problems with the clear advantage brought about by machines threatening to put millions of people out of work. Then there are people like JPMorgan Chief Information Officer, Dana Deasy who justify automation as a means of unburdening employees of fruitless labor.

“People always talk about this stuff as displacement,” Deasy said. “I talk about it as freeing people to work on higher-value things, which is why it’s such a terrific opportunity for the firm.”