Professor Andrew Lo, who teaches finance at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, knows that many people find financial matters perplexing and scary. Lots of us don’t have a good head for numbers, and besides, how can one get advice and make sound decisions when it’s taboo to discuss one’s finances at all? That’s where a financial advisor is useful–someone who understands the concepts, can crunch the numbers, and has a fiduciary responsibility to look out for your best interests. For many people, hiring a financial advisor might be a financial impossibility, but Prof. Lo and his colleagues are working to develop an AI financial advisor that not only gives ordinary people access to sound financial advice, but acts with real fiduciary responsibility. Large language models can’t do this yet, he says, but the technology is developing fast.

In the first of two pilot episodes of Chalk Radio with video, Prof. Lo joins host Sarah Hansen to discuss the future of financial technology:

Later in the interview, the conversation goes on to consider the role of finance in issues of vital human importance such as drug development and global decarbonization:

The full interview, embedded below, covers these topics as well as the “Adaptive Markets Hypothesis,” the different forms intelligence can take in different people (and in computers!), and the outsized influence teachers have on their students–Prof. Lo names many who changed his own life, from his third-grade teacher in Queens to his professors at college and graduate school.

If watching the interview leaves you wanting to learn more, MIT OpenCourseWare has you covered–through our site you can access the materials from Prof. Lo’s popular course 15.401 Finance Theory I, as well as his 15.481x Adaptive Markets: Financial Market Dynamics and Human Behavior and RES.15-005 (15.482x) Healthcare Finance.