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by edanm 3180 days 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).
2 comments
notthemessiah 3180 days 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.
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Retra 3180 days 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.

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