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Calling financial markets AI is wrong in pretty much the only way a word can be "wrong": It's not what most people mean when they talk about AI. This makes it

by edanm 9y ago

Calling financial markets AI is wrong in pretty much the only way a word can be "wrong": It's not what most people mean when they talk about AI. This makes it really easy to make statements that sound deep and meaningful, but really aren't. E.g. "I'm not worried about Artificial Intelligence - we already have artificial intelligence, its called a company. Companies are artificial, and they behave intelligently". This just isn't what people are worried about. What people are worried about is: 1. Soon we will be able to create software/robots that replace tons of human jobs. This has nothing to do with "companies as an AI". 2. A super-intelligence will be created that is vastly smarter than any human, and can make itself even smarter, but will have different goals than humanity. Again, this is only very thinly related to the "companies as AI" spiel (companies are not superintelligent, they don't actually have coherent goals of their own).

crpatino 9y ago
You need to get out more. The problem with companies is not that they are intelligent, but that they are artificial. >What people are worried about is: >1. Soon we will be able to create software/robots that replace tons of human jobs. This has nothing to do with "companies as an AI". Well, there is now a tendency for big companies to hire smaller outsourcing companies to provide labor and shield the first company from the liabilities that come with hiring human labor. I know I do not have the kind of proof that courts, and HN some dwellers, demand... but from hearsay in the local job market it is public knowledge that managers and ex-managers at main company are often owners of the outsourcing ones, or at least it was so 10 years ago before Indian companies like TATA raided the market. Also, it is not as if outsourcing companies are making peanuts. More hearsay, supposedly first hand, says that they charge as much as 1,000% of employees salary for their services. It is not possible in the US, but in the offshoring side of things, US based headquarters usually do not have a grasp of how much/little the foreing job markets are. In the local market, $1,000USD per month is a great salary for a junior programmer, and good for a senior one. Cost of liviing is lower that most US cities, let alone SFO... > 2. A super-intelligence will be created that is vastly smarter than any human, and can make itself even smarter, but will have different goals than humanity. Superintelligence is a red herring. If you command as much resources as a Fortune 50 company, you can do a world of harm if your goals are sufficiently opposed to those of the general society. You just need to be "intelligent" enough to not go under during the next couple of years, which most big companies are. More so, let's consider the case when the company has "substandard intelligence", say if the management team is incompetent, or if they are distracted with internal conflict and lack the ethics to put the interest of the company ahead of their own, personal gain. A stupid company with plenty of resources to burn can deliver truckloads of hurt on its way down, and it does not have to be intentional either, unforeseen consequences are way more realistic ways for bad things to haven than the kind of evil performed by Bond-movie villians.
notthemessiah 9y ago
It's not that companies are "operating intelligently" it's that they aren't: they're operating on a principle that maximizes profits (and ROI for shareholders) at the expense of everything else, that's the central guiding principle, and nobody at a publicly traded firm can oppose it successfully, without being voted off the board by shareholders. It's effectively an algorithm that delegates tasks to human operators, and automation is slowly replacing the human component.
Retra 9y ago
If I said "algebra is geometry", you could make the same criticism; it's wrong, because that's not what most people mean by those terms. But then you see that almost all of the most important mathematical developments in human history make that exact conflation, and that it is all driven by the need to describe human experience in symbolic language... and it does look very deep. Nobody cares what 'most people' mean. Most people are idiots. Sure, you wouldn't talk like that when you're writing a dictionary, but dictionary writers are not known for making intellectual breakthroughs. That's the difference between description thinking and proscriptive. One allows for creativity.

by edanm 9y ago

crpatino 9y ago

You need to get out more. The problem with companies is not that they are intelligent, but that they are artificial. >What people are worried about is: >1. Soon we will be able to create software/robots that replace tons of human jobs. This has nothing to do with "companies as an AI". Well, there is now a tendency for big companies to hire smaller outsourcing companies to provide labor and shield the first company from the liabilities that come with hiring human labor. I know I do not have the kind of proof that courts, and HN some dwellers, demand... but from hearsay in the local job market it is public knowledge that managers and ex-managers at main company are often owners of the outsourcing ones, or at least it was so 10 years ago before Indian companies like TATA raided the market. Also, it is not as if outsourcing companies are making peanuts. More hearsay, supposedly first hand, says that they charge as much as 1,000% of employees salary for their services. It is not possible in the US, but in the offshoring side of things, US based headquarters usually do not have a grasp of how much/little the foreing job markets are. In the local market, $1,000USD per month is a great salary for a junior programmer, and good for a senior one. Cost of liviing is lower that most US cities, let alone SFO... > 2. A super-intelligence will be created that is vastly smarter than any human, and can make itself even smarter, but will have different goals than humanity. Superintelligence is a red herring. If you command as much resources as a Fortune 50 company, you can do a world of harm if your goals are sufficiently opposed to those of the general society. You just need to be "intelligent" enough to not go under during the next couple of years, which most big companies are. More so, let's consider the case when the company has "substandard intelligence", say if the management team is incompetent, or if they are distracted with internal conflict and lack the ethics to put the interest of the company ahead of their own, personal gain. A stupid company with plenty of resources to burn can deliver truckloads of hurt on its way down, and it does not have to be intentional either, unforeseen consequences are way more realistic ways for bad things to haven than the kind of evil performed by Bond-movie villians.

notthemessiah 9y ago

It's not that companies are "operating intelligently" it's that they aren't: they're operating on a principle that maximizes profits (and ROI for shareholders) at the expense of everything else, that's the central guiding principle, and nobody at a publicly traded firm can oppose it successfully, without being voted off the board by shareholders. It's effectively an algorithm that delegates tasks to human operators, and automation is slowly replacing the human component.

Retra 9y ago

If I said "algebra is geometry", you could make the same criticism; it's wrong, because that's not what most people mean by those terms. But then you see that almost all of the most important mathematical developments in human history make that exact conflation, and that it is all driven by the need to describe human experience in symbolic language... and it does look very deep. Nobody cares what 'most people' mean. Most people are idiots. Sure, you wouldn't talk like that when you're writing a dictionary, but dictionary writers are not known for making intellectual breakthroughs. That's the difference between description thinking and proscriptive. One allows for creativity.