TALKING BOTS AND EDIBLE BOTS AND LITTLE LAMBS EAT IVY…

You know the popular old song, "Mares eat oats and does eat oats and little lambs eat ivy." I couldn't help but be reminded of that song when sorting through some of this week's articles, and everyone seemed to be on a technological focus this past week, and there may have been big news that slid right under the myopic vision of the controlled fakestream media. Indeed, I get the feeling that humanity is singing and fiddling while nanobots may be burning the house down. Mr. V.T. and Mr. A., for example, both shared this article from Cade Metz at Wired magazine:

https://www.wired.com/2017/03/openai-builds-bots-learn-speak-language/

Of course, as the article points out, the bots haven't quite achieved complete AI yet, but they're at least making significant progress in teaching them to learn, and, judging from the various stories, they are doing so and in the process constructing their own "language" in which to do so. Now, file that one away for a few moments, and turn to this little bit of news from our friends at Zero Hedge, shared by Ms. K.M.:

Steve Cohen Developing A.I. To Replace Expensive, Talentless Traders

Note that the objective here is to create trading bots that will replace human traders:

Nevertheless, one way to avoid those pesky insider trading charges going forward, or rather to solve the "thin talent pool" issue as Cohen would say, is to simply develop artificial intelligence to do all of your dirty work.  As Bloomberg points out, Cohen's family office, Point72 Asset Management, is currently analyzing years of trading behavior of top traders in an effort to replicate the type of bets that allowed SAC to massively outperform the broader markets for years.

Now, file that one away for a moment along with the language-learning bots, and consider this article from The Wall Street Journal, also shared by Ms. K.M.:

How AI Is Transforming the Workplace

Ted Greenwald, author of the Journal article, puts it best, perhaps, with his opening line.

Move over, managers, there’s a new boss in the office: artificial intelligence.

To reassure us a bit, Mr. Greenwald summarizes what is going on in the hiring process, for example:

A company can provide a job description, and AI will collect and crunch data from a variety of sources to find people with the right talents, with experience to match—candidates who might never have thought of applying to the company, and whom the company might never have thought of seeking out.

Another AI service lets companies analyze workers’ email to tell if they’re feeling unhappy about their job, so bosses can give them more attention before their performance takes a nose dive or they start doing things that harm the company.

Now, we all know where this is going: humans will be directed to follow the AI's "recoomendations," and eventually the time will come that humans would be needed for many functions at all. Why have human traders in various markets when machines can do it faster and more efficiently and make more money: the old fast track to wealth, commodities or other trading careers, may soon be a thing of the past.

Now, file that one away for a moment along with the other two items, and then ponder this article shared by Mr. J.D.:

The robot you can EAT: Tiny machine made of gelatin could crawl into your stomach to deliver medicine

"Talking bots and edible bots and little lambs eat ivy..."

Ok, now gather all those filed-away things and put them on the table, because they're essential to today's high octane speculation; we have:

1) bots learning to communicate and adapt a language to do so;

2) more efficient trading bots to add to the already growing amount of market trades being executed by high frequency trading algorithms (think the  1987 and 2010 "flash crashes" here);

3) "AI" crunching numbers, analyzing employees' emails, and so on, for the more "efficient" running of corporations;

4) and now, voila, you can eat them too!

Now forgive me if I overindulge my high octane speculation tendencies here, but I cannot help but to think that what can deliver medicine can also deliver "monitoring" equipment. And that, of course, will be patented and hence proprietary, and as I've pointed out before, could thus render every human ingesting this junk to be to a certain extent property of the corporation, monitored in private life as in corporate life (and you thought the government was bad? Wait until you taste the bitter wine of "whole person management" philosophies!). Moving from one corporation to another? Take this colonic to literally flush out the "bad" bots and replace them with the "good" bots.

But I digress. My real high octane speculation of the day concerns something else. Is it just me, or has there been a dramatic increase of articles focusing on this or that aspect of all the wonders of AI coming down the pike? I cannot help but think that there has been. The question is, why? And my speculation is that real AI is not something coming down the pike, but that it's already here, and has been here for some time. I suspect to a certain degree that the proverbial "They" have perhaps lost control over some of it. Why do I think this? Precisely because of things like the flash crashes of 2010, the increasingly absurd behavior of markets which bear little to no resemblance to any real human market, especially in terms of areas of labor and human productivity. For example, typical and conventional analysis of economic behavior has stressed that the amount of quantitative easing being bandied about after the bailouts of 2008 would lead to hyper-inflation and so on. The predictions of hyper-inflation "just around the corner" have kept pushing the dates back and back, as each prediction does not occur. My answer to this previously has been, in part, to argue that such analysis does not factor in the very large hidden financial system. Conventional analysis was, so to speak, only looking at half the circuit, not the whole thing, and hence, its analysis had - to borrow the insight of Catherine Austin Fitts - committed a material omission of fact. While there is certainly enough information to strongly suggest such a hidden system does exist and has existed for some time, I question whether even my speculative analysis on that score is sufficient to explain what we see and, for that matter, don't see. I strongly suspect that these types of stories are similar to the various "space stories" we have seen over the past few years about the privatization of space and "asteroid mining," that they are "opinion forming" stories designed to accustom people to something that might already exist, something which the powers-that-be might suspect has happened, namely, that the massive computing power needed to run the high frequency trading "dark pools" and massive data collection efforts of global surveillance (not to mention the massive computing power needed for something like CERN's Large Hadron Collider) might have "woken up", or is close to it.

See you on the flip side...