(Bloomberg) -- Humans won’t be obsolete in this lifetime.

That’s what a quartet of money managers have posited in recentweeks as new technologies rewire finance, threatening to supplantthe industry’s rank and file.

Related: Study finds robots displacingpeople

Winton, a $30.6 billion hedge fund that’s used algorithms totrade for two decades, told clients that people must still make thebig decisions. Michael Hintze, who runs another major fund, saidcomputer models can spot market anomalies but rarely provideanswers.

Jordi Visser, investment chief at a third firm, said humansstill have the upper hand when it comes to recognizing patterns.Billionaire bond manager Jeffrey Gundlach said he’s betting peoplewill prevail.

“Despite the immense power of modern computing, it is neitheradvisable -- nor even possible -- to dispense with humansentirely,” Winton, founded by David Harding, who earned adegree in theoretical physics before going into finance, wrote inits letter to clients this month.

Legions of finance workers are wondering how many years they’lllast as banks and money managers experiment with tech, lookingto someday automate everything from securities underwriting toportfolio management.

It comes amid a crescendo of warnings from the likes of FederalReserve Chair Janet Yellen and software billionaire Bill Gates thatbig data and machine learning may unleash a wave of automation onthe U.S. (To be sure, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin has saidautomation isn’t on the administration’s radar.)

Related: We've hit peak human and a robot wantsyour job

Wading into the debate last week, DoubleLine Capital ChiefExecutive Officer Gundlach said he doesn’t believe in machinestaking over finance. His advice for beating them is simple: “Workhard.”

Indeed, Winton wrote in its letter, there are big tasks at hedgefunds ripe for automation, such as performing large-scale,recurring calculations for assessing risk across portfolios.

But according to the firm, whose 450 employees includeastrophysicists and other scientists, computers are far from readyto make investing decisions independently. Instead, people will berunning software at every stage of the process.

Winton managers design and choose algorithms that are ultimatelyapproved or rejected by its investment board. And while computersare better suited to handle early stages of checking data, onceanomalies are flagged, humans are better at cross-referencing theirregularities against other sources to draw conclusions, theLondon-based firm said.

“The notion that human involvement in investment managementshould, or even could, be fully automated is wide of the mark,”Winton, which returned 1.3 percent this year through May on itsmain fund, wrote in the letter.

Cohen’s experiment

Finance typically isn’t the first place economists andconsultants point to when predicting the most severe joblosses.

A recent report by CB Insights estimated 25 million U.S. jobsmay be eliminated by automation across seven “high risk” industrieswith relatively low regulation and predictable workenvironments -- like retail floors and restaurant kitchens. WallStreet didn’t make that list.

Yet, there’s lots of news troubling financial professionals.

Billionaire trader Steven Cohen is experimenting with ways toautomate his best money managers. Goldman Sachs Group Inc. is developing systemsto eliminate hundreds of hours of human labor in initialpublic offerings.

JPMorgan Chase & Co. is using machine-learning techniques totake over work from lawyers. (Its CEO, Jamie Dimon, said in aninterview published Monday that people are massively overreactingto the threat of technology.)

For investing professionals, the fear isn’t just that firms mayneed fewer of them to perform tasks -- it’s that they’ll becompeting against low-cost rivals.

Hedge fund managers, for example, traditionally charged clients2 percent of assets and 20 percent of profits. It’s harder tojustify if automated platforms can achieve decent results without abig bite. Such has been the case with index funds.

But according to Visser at Weiss Multi-Strategy Advisers,a $1.7 billion hedge fund in New York, human investors stillhave a big advantage when it comes to recognizing patterns andconnecting the dots: intuition.

“The good thing about computers is that they don’t haveemotions,” Visser said in a phone interview. “The bad thing aboutcomputers is that they don’t have emotions. Computers can’t detecthuman sentiment. They can’t identify the usual suspects whotypically attend crowded conferences when markets are at atop.”

Visser is particularly skeptical about all the money being spenton finding profitable trading strategies by testing them onhistorical data, or so-called backtesting. While that helps revealhow portfolios will likely perform under various market conditions,computers aren’t yet adept at forecasting what people will do inthe future, he wrote in a June paper.

The industry’s survivors will be the ones who imbibe technologyinto their processes, Visser said. The trick is to use acombination of human judgment and models, “while artificialintelligence tries to catch up to the power of the brain,” he said.His hedge fund also returned 1.3 percent this year through May.

‘Team effort’

Hintze at CQS, a $14 billion hedge fund based in London,concedes that quant-driven strategies are here to stay, and thatthey’re good at taking advantage of anomalies in markets. Whileengineering and mathematics are intriguing, successful investing isbased on an understanding of fundamentals, technicals and investorsentiment, he said.

It’s better to pair technology with human insight andimagination to generate alpha, he said, referring to the profitmade over a benchmark. His hedge fund returned 3.2 percent thisyear through May.

“Models are a great place to begin, but not necessarily a goodplace to finish,” he said. “It is a team effort and you needthe analysts, traders and portfolio managers with the skills,experience and judgment to use and understand sophisticatedfinancial models.”

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