David Brin believes that high speed trading bots are a high probability route to human indifferent AI. If you agree with him, then laws governing the usage of high speed trading algorithms could be useful. There is a downside in terms of stock liquidity, but how much that will affect overall economic growth is still a research area.
The article seems to miss the point. In the current world where a high frequency trading algortihm has to make decisions in a milli second it doesn’t have time to run advanved artificial intelligence algorithms.
If you would slow down trading through some public policy more focus would move into complex AI algorithms instead of focus on fast algorithms.
Brin is full of the brown stuff here and he is making an emotional scare-mongering string-up-the-bastards argument in favor of a financial transaction tax.
This seems unlikely. How do the stock-trading bots make the jump to being good at anything other than trading stock? Maybe if it spurs a bunch of investment in natural-language processing so the bots can read written-for-humans information on the companies they’re buying and selling stock in, but unless that ends up being a huge percentage of the investment in NLP, it would probably make more sense to worry about NLP directly.
I see trading bots as a not unlikely source of human indifferent AI, but I don’t see how a transaction tax would help. Penalizing high frequency traders just incentivizes smarter trades over faster trades.
David Brin believes that high speed trading bots are a high probability route to human indifferent AI. If you agree with him, then laws governing the usage of high speed trading algorithms could be useful. There is a downside in terms of stock liquidity, but how much that will affect overall economic growth is still a research area.
I found at least one article relating to this from Brin.
http://davidbrin.blogspot.com/2011/12/gingrich-asimov-and-computer-trading.html
In my opinion here are two of the notable pieces of evidence he advances in that article:
1: The people involved are already spending billions of dollars on ways to get information processing slightly faster.
2: The people involved doesn’t significantly value ethics or tight control.
The article seems to miss the point. In the current world where a high frequency trading algortihm has to make decisions in a milli second it doesn’t have time to run advanved artificial intelligence algorithms.
If you would slow down trading through some public policy more focus would move into complex AI algorithms instead of focus on fast algorithms.
Brin is full of the brown stuff here and he is making an emotional scare-mongering string-up-the-bastards argument in favor of a financial transaction tax.
Care to present an argument rather than just insults?
There is nothing to argue against.
Brin’s post is a mindkilling political rant full of demagoguery and appeal to emotions.
Somebody may make a mindkilling political rant full of demagoguery and appeal to emotions about the Sun shining, but that doesn’t make it dark out.
It does not, but presenting a mindkilling political rant as evidence that the Sun is shining is… not the best of arguments.
If you want to claim that the evolution of HFT algorithms into Skynet is likely, please show relevant data and reasoning.
This seems unlikely. How do the stock-trading bots make the jump to being good at anything other than trading stock? Maybe if it spurs a bunch of investment in natural-language processing so the bots can read written-for-humans information on the companies they’re buying and selling stock in, but unless that ends up being a huge percentage of the investment in NLP, it would probably make more sense to worry about NLP directly.
Modelling the decisions of various stackholders that can influence stock prices.
Does Brin give an argument for that? That significantly conflicts with my priors.
That seems highly unlikely to me.
I see trading bots as a not unlikely source of human indifferent AI, but I don’t see how a transaction tax would help. Penalizing high frequency traders just incentivizes smarter trades over faster trades.