Digital Financial Reporting

This excerpt from Ray Dalio's book Principles is one of the best discussions about artificial intelligence that I have run across: SYSTEMIZED AND COMPUTERIZED DECISION MAKING.

This YouTube.com video, AI and Algorithmic Decision Making, provides an excellent overview that is very approachable to business professionals.

There is one notion that I disagree with that comes across in this article.  The article gives the impression that you literally "program" rules (i.e. put rules in code).  For a number of reasons, that is not a good idea. If logic and rules is expressed in "code"; then only programmers can add new logic/rules, maintain the logic/rules, and business professionals have to educate the coders on the business logic that they are trying to get programmed.

There is a better way.  If the "computer code" and the "business logic/rules" are separated, then programmers can write code and business professionals can work with and maintain the rules/logic.  Using this approach, the rules/logic are represented in declarative form in some machine-readable format.  A rules engine or logic engine then uses those rules/logic.

So, rather than writing your "principles" code, you write them as declarative rules.  Closed systems are necessary, you cannot just add "stuff" haphazardly.  Open ended systems might not work reliably, there is a chance of error. If the "future can be different than the past", you have to be very careful.  Open versus closed systems seems to be described by control theory.

Plenty of rules engines or logic engines already exist.  The missing piece is the computer readable business rules. Rules for creating a financial report look like this. (Here are many more examples.)

And so, while I would not dispute that understanding how to code is helpful.  But, you really don't need to "learn to code".  If you want to understand the details better, I would invite you to read Artificial Intelligence and Knowledge Engineering Basics in a Nutshell.