Ask HN: Could we replace parts of the financial sector with computers?
It seems like every day now that we read about housing meltdowns, LIBOR fraud, accounting scandals, and other financial market misdoings. It's apparent that our current financial system is not only unstable and unaccountable, but unsustainable as failure and fraud continue to destroy companies and nations. While I won't pretend like I know anything about how the financial sector works as a whole, it seems to me like, at the very least, large sections of it could be entirely automated and digitized, reducing the systematic vulnerability to fraud.
Take the Big Four public accountancy firms, for example. It seems to me (again, not having a deep knowledge of the industries) that the tax system and accounting should be handled entirely by computers since data handling is something computers do infinitely better than humans. We could easily eliminate many of the issues that lead to things like the Enron scandal with automatic computer based auditing, and resultant data from the sector as a whole would provide better insight for systemic issues.
I'm just trying to pull at the thread... let me know what you think.
Also, to any CPA's that I may have offended, I apologize. If it makes you feel any better, I think computers will replace everything we do at some point, and then we'll all just have to make art.