Nerds on Wall Street: Math, Machines, and Wired Markets

Part III: Artificial Intelligence and Intelligence Amplification

Markets are machinery now. This raises the question of how to best participate in the world's new wired markets. People who use information technology most effectively will be rewarded.

Artificial intelligence (AI) as an academic discipline began at the famous 1955 Dartmouth conference organized by John McCarthy from Stanford University and Marvin Minsky from MIT. The goal of the AI pioneers was to create a mind, a human in silicon. One key idea was that the brain was a biological computer so all the researchers had to do was figure out what the brain was doing and put it into an actual computer and they'd be done. This was something that people thought in the 1950s might take 10 years to accomplish, maybe 15 with long lunches.

So far, it hasn't exactly worked out. In fiction we have the example of HAL, from 2001: A Space Odyssey. Letting the computer do the thinking turned out badly in that case. HAL discovered the lie in the first reel, and quickly moved on to become a paranoid serial killer.^[]

^[] Sci-fi buffs have a rich amount of material to consider in this context. Vernor Vinge, a computer scientist who has also won five Hugo awards, deals with the topic in much of his work, including his latest novel, Rainbow's End. If we construct an artificial superintelligent entity, what will it think of us?

In financial ...