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Robotics AI Businesses The Almighty Buck Technology

Consumers Trust Robots For Surgery Over Savings, Research Finds (bloomberg.com) 70

Posted by msmash from the how-we-see-things dept.
An anonymous reader shares an article: Andy Maguire faces a challenge: tasked with upgrading HSBC's digital-banking systems, he has discovered that customers are twice as likely to trust a robot for heart surgery than for picking a savings account. "I do find it slightly odd," said the chief operating officer of Europe's largest bank, referring to its survey of more than 12,000 consumers in 11 countries published this week. Just 7 percent of respondents would trust a robot with their savings, versus the 14 percent willing to submit to a machine for heart surgery. "You think, gosh, one would've imagined the world had moved on further or was moving faster than that," Maguire said in an interview. While consumers tend naturally to trust medical professionals, the "bar is pretty high" for banks dealing with people's money, he said. Banks around the world are spending billions of dollars to bolster creaking computer systems in a push to ward off startup competitors and cut long-term operating expenses. But consumers and regulators are holding them to ever-higher standards of security and convenience, driving the cost of overhauls higher and potentially eroding any savings.
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Consumers Trust Robots For Surgery Over Savings, Research Finds More

Consumers Trust Robots For Surgery Over Savings, Research Finds

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  • Maybe (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Daetrin ( 576516 ) on Wednesday May 24, 2017 @05:45PM (#54480753)
    Would that be because the hospital has no good ulterior motive to direct the robot to screw up your surgery, but a bank may very well have ulterior motive to direct your funds to an account that benefits them more than it does you?

    • Re:Maybe (Score:4, Insightful)

      by ShanghaiBill ( 739463 ) on Wednesday May 24, 2017 @05:53PM (#54480795)

      For heart surgery, you have to trust someone or something else. You can't do it yourself. So I would trust either a human or a robot, and choose whichever has the best track record.

      But picking a savings account? Why can't I just do that for myself? I wouldn't trust a "robot**", but I would trust a human "financial advisor" even less, since they have no fiduciary duty to act in my best interest.

      **Pet peeve: People using the word "robot" to describe a purely software program. No mechanical components are needed to recommend a savings account, so it is NOT a "robot". It is just a "program".

      • There is NO robot that performs heart surgery.

        Heart surgeons and other surgeons use devices [davincisurgery.com] that augment and enhance THEIR skills, reducing tremors, providing smoother actions, providing magnifications, etc. Even though the marketing dweebs throw the word robot around, it's NOT a robot in any sense of the definition people usually think of and you definitely are not trusting "a robot".

        Everything is driven by the surgeons actions. It's the difference between jumping in Google's Self Driving car and being dri

    • It also helps that heart-surgery robots are not under continuous attack from organized crime.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by djinn6 ( 1868030 )
      More importantly, if a heart surgery goes wrong, you will know about it. Whereas if the bank just accidentally took $10 from you, you probably wouldn't even realize. I've actually had that happen to me when they charged me a fee for something I didn't do and I didn't discover it until 4 months later. I was able to dispute the charge and get a refund, but you can imagine some banks might not be so nice.
      • The bank tried to rip you, after spending far more than $10 worth of your time you finally got them to reverse the bogus charge and you call that being nice? If that doesn't tell you anything about where we set the bar with the banks I don't know what does.

        • When your bank decides to rip you off, you lose everything, not just $10.

          That said, I'd trust my bank to refund my $10. But I wouldn't trust them to choose my bank account. They want me to "upgrade" to whatever is at the top of their list, they don't care that the options and benefits and risks are different. I trust them to guard my money, but I don't trust them to make good decisions. Any robot they program to make decisions is just going to pass that decision-making through to their programmer.

          Whereas th

          • On the contrary, in the "fee based banking world" ripping you off one fee at a time is how banks make their money. Banks offer convenience, I'm not sure protecting your money is on the list of things they do anymore. Anyone you've ever written a check to can submit an electronic check using the information on it and your bank will pay it without any verification.

            • Get a better bank, man. Stop blaming other people because you chose an asshole bank and won't change.

              If my bank charges me a fee I don't like, I tell them and they recind the fee. You're an idiot if you pay a lot of banking fees.

              Once there was even a computer error, and when I told them about it they corrected it and left me with a small surplus.

              They protect my money, if they don't protect yours you're doing it wrong. And if you want to avoid check fraud, don't write checks and nobody will have that informa

              • "Get a better bank, man."

                You say that like there are a huge number of viable banks. ATM availability alone limits you to maybe three realistic options, WaMu/Chase/BoA. Otherwise you'll get nailed with fees for ATM usage.

                "If my bank charges me a fee I don't like, I tell them and they recind the fee."

                First, every bank mentioned above has a fixed number of fees they'll refund. Even if they will it takes at least an hour of my time. An hour of my time is a much higher dollar amount than any of the fees.

                The peop

                • My bank isn't one of those three, and has lots of ATMs. That said, sounds like more of a life skills problem than a banking problem.

                  None of those banks have a fixed number of fees they refund. It doesn't take an hour to get a fee rescinded. If your banker told you that, it means you were being difficult, or otherwise asking in an ineffective way. The branch manager can always rescind fees at their discretion. And anyways, a couple fees is one thing, but why would you need some high number? Don't you learn h

    • Exactly. Maguire is either being disingenuous, or he's just exceptionally out of touch with the general public.

    • But, robots make money laundering so much faster.

    • I think it's much more simple than that. People trust hardware - they can see it, they can see that it looks sturdily built. Sturdily built hardware means that the whole thing is of good quality... right? I mean, no one would put bad quality software in a good looking machine like that.

      Meanwhile, a bank's AI for figuring out how you should invest is just some etherial bit of software that runs in the cloud somewhere, and everyone knows that software is really unreliable, so clearly this bank AI is really

      • The banks AI has a conflict of interest. The same with your stock broker. There is always some pattern of investing/trading/saving/spending that would generate more profit for them and that they could spin as being harmless or in your interest if caught.
    • BINGO. Nobody had a nationwide occupy the ER movement and if they did I somehow doubt Doctors would have had the pull to get the protesters attacked and silenced by local officials and police.

      As long as banks deliberately operate using a model that utilizes fees as a significant revenue stream nobody will trust them, period. Seriously, they even reorder transactions highest to lowest so if you went into the red at any point you'd get hit with as many overdraft transactions as possible. And what is worse the

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by lazlo ( 15906 )

      Not just that, but (and I realize this is more pertinent to investments than to savings accounts) heart surgery does not have emergent behaviors based on the choices of heart surgeons. Financial decisions do. If every heart surgeon simultaneously decides that (I don't know jack about heart surgery) clamping a certain artery in a certain way during surgery is the best choice, they may or may not be right, but the fact that they're all making that choice won't change how right or wrong it is. If every reti

  • But consumers and regulators are holding them to ever-higher standards of security and convenience, driving the cost of overhauls higher and potentially eroding any savings.

    Boo-hoo! We can't just ignore good security practices and pocket the money! Those nasty unfair consumers and regulators!!!

    • Higher than the bottom of the world's deepest well, is still "higher".

      I "trust" my bank as far as I can throw them. Hell, at least the Mafia admit to being criminals.

  • Could it be because banking is the penultimate rent-seeking behavior? Nah.

  • I agree (Score:5, Insightful)

    by sobachatina ( 635055 ) on Wednesday May 24, 2017 @05:51PM (#54480781)

    It's about motives.

    I trust a surgeon is motivated to save me. A robot assisting him will therefore be working in his and my best interest.

    A bank is not motivated to save me money- their whole purpose is to extract money from me. Therefore a robot assisting them cannot be trusted to have my best interests in mind.

    • I agree also, to a point.

      The surgeon might well be motivated to inflate his bill for services rendered, and choose to use a robot where none is actually needed.

    • A bank is not motivated to save me money- their whole purpose is to extract money from me. Therefore a robot assisting them cannot be trusted to have my best interests in mind.

      Just...no. Banks exist to redistribute wealth, not hoard it. A bank's role in the economy is to make capital available to an enterprise. And "enterprise" means everything from Joe Sixpack who wants a new truck, to Elon Musk who wants a new hyperloop, to Boeing who wants to build a new spaceplane. There is a certain risk involved when choosing which enterprises to capitalize with their depositors' funds, so banks have to manage that risk responsibly. Some do, some don't.

      If AI can manage that risk bette

  • If the robot screws up during your heart surgery you will most likely be dead.

    If the robot screws up your bank account you will most likely be broke but still alive and have to go through the torment of proving you had money.

  • Ever-higher standards of convenience? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by SeattleLawGuy ( 4561077 ) on Wednesday May 24, 2017 @06:04PM (#54480843)

    If you call a bank for help with random consumer matter X, on average they are wrong about how their own system works maybe 30-60% of the time.

    The only "higher standard of convenience" in the last few years is the ability to easily deposit checks via the average phone. Which is only useful for the few cases where people still send you checks.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by pnutjam ( 523990 )
      Just found out my bank changed their bill pay. I used to send a check and it would come out of my account when sent. Now it comes out when they cash it, which makes it the same PITA that regular checks are.

  • Among other things, there's a pretty clear understanding that robots serve useful purposes in surgery. We know that human beings have limitations of how steady of a hand they have, and how small of an object they can manipulate. Mechanical operations requiring a lot of precision are one of the key reasons to deploy robotics and automation!

    When you're talking about a computer system that's supposed to recommend the "best savings account" option for you? That's far more dubious.... I think almost ALL of us h

  • Duh! (Score:3)

    by avandesande ( 143899 ) on Wednesday May 24, 2017 @06:19PM (#54480881) Journal
    Why would you ask a surgery robot what bank to choose?

  • Liability (Score:2)

    by c ( 8461 )

    Suing a hospital for malpractice is a lot easier than suing a bank for losing your life savings.

    The other part of it is that finance is, by necessity, a connected adversarial environment, so there's a lot of incentive for people to game banking robots. That's basically what high speed trading is about. There's not a lot of incentive for people to mess with surgical robots... I'm sure some might do it for kicks, but there's not a lot of money in it.

  • Surgery is a science. We know exactly where everything is and what needs to be done. So we can program it ahead of time and trust the machine to do exactly what we already know is right.

    But investing is an art. Ask 3 economic professors what to do and you will get FOUR different answers. In fact, the only thing we generally agree on is that humans tend to overdo things, economics wise.

    Which means if we program a computer, it will do exactly what we told it too, which means it will overdo something.

    I w

  • Learned behavior, not natural (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward

    People don't "naturally" trust medical professionals. It's learned behavior acquired in societies where we see decades of the medical profession being policed and bitch slapped when they step out of line by more than a medium amount ... and also see decades of the financial profession getting away unscathed after literally causing global catastrophes.

    When HSBC gets put out of business after the next time they launder billions in criminal funds, then we'll talk about starting to trust the financial industry

  • Money is adversarial, surgery is cooperative (Score:3)

    by GuB-42 ( 2483988 ) on Wednesday May 24, 2017 @06:40PM (#54480987)

    With very few exceptions, everybody want your heart surgery to succeed. There isn't much to gain by messing you up.

    Money is different. As far as your savings account is concerned, it is a zero-sum game. The money you lost is money someone else gained, and vice versa. So there is a lot of incentive to mess up with your robot.

    It is easier to trust a robot when everyone is trying to make it better than when thousands of smart people are trying to turn it against you. It is possible to trick humans too but because humans are more diverse and adaptable, the return on investment is better when attacking robots.

    • This is true. However, when it comes to surgery, there are often different ways of treating the same condition, each having a different level of complexity, and a different price point. Surgeons might well have a financial motive to use a robot where none is needed, if that means higher fees to them.

  • ...is that people know technology in hospitals is held to high levels of accountability for reliability. If the banks are complaining that the demand for higher standards is driving prices up too much, maybe they just don't understand why people trust surgical robotics more than their unlicensed, uncertified, proprietary software.
  • The aerospace and medical device industries have done a stellar job of building reliable products. The ITcloud/app fields have not come close to that level of quality.
  • When responding to questions like these, people subconsciously factor in how much a situation is likely to apply to them. Almost nobody thinks they will need heart surgery, and it follows that they'd be more liberal/trusting in their responses. Almost everybody can imagine the problems a robot-controlled savings account would cause them personally. We are not objective.

  • It's not about lack of trust in robots here.

    Consumers trust medical doctors and healthcare professionals/researchers to design and commission surgical robots generally in good faith.

    They equally certainly expect banks to try to rob them at every turn while cutting every possible security and safety corner and then try to escape liability by any possible means.

    Who do you think is really gonna make the best robots? They should have asked the users who's robots they'd trust more to manage their bank accounts.

  • I'm asleep through the whole thing and there are doctors operating and watching very carefully and robotic tools are more accurate. If I have a problem with a bank, I get to cuss out a machine for 20 minutes before a human picks up and gets to deal with an already extremely disgruntled customer. On top of which, we have the nightmare of a cashless economy heading our way in most of the world in the next few years; that means your complaints go to human in India if you're lucky, except they are getting rid o

  • I hear this all the time from bank IT folks.

    "Oh the hardship that I am not allowed to use deep learning!"

    Deep learning just doesn't cut it if you need accountability. On the other hand they could do all they wanted, and more, if they understood how to apply Bayesian networks and probabilistic graph theory.

  • I'm not surprised, actually. With the medical profession, there is at least the concept of "first, do no harm" while the banks generally go with "hey, whatever we can do to rape your wallet, shall be done."

  • This speaks much more about the level of trust (or more precisely the lack thereof) in the banking system then of technology

  • If the survey had HSBC plastered all over it the same way the summary and article reads, then of course they'd list it at under a robotic surgeon. HSBC is one of the most untrustworthy and unethical banks out there. Test this with someone more reputable and you may get different results.

  • This is an apples/oranges comparison when you consider the standards that medical equipment is held to vs. say an ATM. Yes, I'd trust something that was certified to preform heart surgery much more than I'd trust something put out by Skank of America or Shitibank.

  • It's not the tech that I don't trust, it's the banks. The best tech in the world won't make the banks more ethical.

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