IBM’s Watson supercomputer became famous for trouncing his human opponents in a widely publicized promoted high-level game of Jeopardy. Since then the AI genius has been used in the field of diagnostic medicine, and IBM is constantly working on new application for its post-human protege. Now we get the news that Watson just landed a job on Wall Street, aiming to help Citibank make sense of the piles of information and financial data that that are produced at the rate where no human will be able to keep up.

These are still early days for the AI in the workplace, but there is no reason to doubt that this trend will not accelerate in the near future. You don’t need to be a sci-fi fanatic or a futurist to see the gradual encroachment of the “soft” AI in all walks of life. Like all other technologies, this one is froth with both the promise of simpler and more enjoyable life, as well as with the potential dangers and disturbances of our way lifestyles. Jobs in the financial sector, especially the more quantitatively driven ones, have for a long while been a refuge of sorts for bright and ambitious individuals with high technical and mathematical skills who were unable or unwilling to pursue the highly uncertain careers in academic and other fields. In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, this sort of career path has tightened somewhat, and it’s likely that it will tighten even more due to the new technical advances such as Watson.