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It is 'nearly unavoidable' that AI will cause a financial crash within a decade, SEC head says
(www.businessinsider.com)
this post was submitted on 16 Oct 2023
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Technology
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Is it because replacing employees with AI results in a never-ending cascade where your stupid system doesn't keep consuming because AI don't consume and won't get paid?
Or is it because using AI will result in the climate to continually become more inhospitable?
Maybe it will be because AI will be used to create more and more believable misinformation that results in WW3?
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:
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.
I traded in a 2014 Toyota hatchback to Carmax and got an Audi A3 when the algorithms went haywire. It didn’t cover the whole cost but it was a silly enough trade that I thought for sure someone would call me and say it was a computer error.
Wow, what a deal! Did they say anything about how crazy that was?
No, they actually called and paid me $100 to make the swap at a lot about an hour away. I wasn’t gonna argue my way out of an upgrade so I was like, “Oh, yeah, I can drop it off wherever.” The dude who details the cars after you drop them off definitely wasn’t worried about it. He thought it was funny his bosses fucked up.