Technology

OK, it is addressed in the article...

He's specifically talking about the use of AI in finance, and that an algorithm that runs amok in a particular sector:

in the after action reports people will say 'Aha! There was either one data aggregator or one model . . . we've relied on.' Maybe it's in the mortgage market. Maybe it's in some sector of the equity market

I'll throw out a microeconomic example. About a year into the pandemic, the price of used cars started going up... a LOT... in a short time. One of the reasons for the sudden changes in used car prices was that major used car resellers were using algorithms to set buying and selling prices for cars. While supply chain pressure on the new car market was unprecedented, and it trickled down to used cars, a facilitating cause is that the used car price-setting algorithms didn't really have any humans in the chain checking to see if the numbers they were kicking out made a lick of sense.

So you had companies like Carmax and Carvana buying used cars for $X, and then a month later 5X, then a month later 10X, because they were programmed to just up the offering price until they reached target stock levels. Sometimes they were buying 3+ year old used cars for more than the current price of NEW cars of similar trim level. Carvana's numbers got so whacked that it nearly sunk the company.

Now imagine that kind of a runaway algorithm in stocks, bonds, real estate, etc. It's 2008 all over again.

Currently, I would rather guess it's the usual bubble popping. AI has attracted billions of investments and will likely pull in even more, but it's already foreseeable, that hardly any of the investments will turn a profit. So we'll end up with a third dotcom bubble.

Yes. Definitely one of those or something else entirely.

You win the chance to afford to eat human or expired cat food you found on the body of someone you shot over a pair of worn boots.

I'm afraid your bingo winnings are going to be confiscated by the government in order to pay for more golden parachutes for the CEOs whose decisions led us here.

Yeah.

It's a casino, and a lot of these folks are no smarter than a retiree rubbing troll dolls on their favorite slot machine.

The solution is to realign markets to human needs. The is no productive benefit to high speed trading. There is no benefit to stock by backs. We need to reign in most of the nonsense that these financial services institutions do.

I'm optimistic we'll find a way to blame the poor. Just learn to code, and do rigorous statistics you ungrateful meatbag.

Sorry, the best we can do is a small marginal tax increase on income over $1M and a 50¢ bump to the minimum wage.

Market manipulation? SEC should investigate him

I always have a laughing fit whenever I see “Prompt engineer” used unironically in a job posting on LinkedIn.

That's not who suffers most in financial collapse.

I think it's tech illiterate people being amazed by chat gpt and shit, not realizing just how janky and limited it's actual "artificial intelligence"actually is.

Have you seen congress? We don't do that here....