Submitted 1 week ago by andallthat@lemmy.world to showerthoughts@lemmy.world
Most of our financial decisions are already algorithmically driven.
Now with this vision of the near future where e-commerce uses only AI-generated content on apps built by AI developers and AI-agents (soon?) buying it independently, money does not need a human in the middle any longer.
I’ve had similar thoughts. Feels like money is a bit like gravity, at some point it’s completely out of control and distorts the normal rules.
I like the comparison. We used to think of the Economy like this hard-to-control, vital but occasionally dangerous natural force, like Gravity. The showerthought was that with the advent of machine models, money has started becoming sentient and making decisions without us.
That’s not a true statement. It’s barely coherent. But it’s kinda got a kind of surreal charm to it… like with a bit of work you could turn it into a great science fiction story or a thought experiment.
Thanks! I’ll try longer showers.
So… there was some kind of thought experiment about an AI that was optimized for making paperclips and it took over the world… I never really got the point of that one.
But if you’ve ever called tech support at a big company, at some point you realize you’re not talking with people, but with scripts that someone wrote and are forcing the people to read. So: how about a steampunk novel in which a company becomes “sentient” because everything is automated through business processes, including executive decisions? This sounds like something that might already have been done, so you’d have to do some background reading.
Alternately, I believe sophisticated algorithms are used to predict market trends… but imagine if one of those algorithms begins defining itself in such a way that “something happens”… I dunno this one requires a bit more thought…
Opinionhaver@feddit.uk 1 week ago
I disagree with the premise that most of our financial decisions are algorithmically driven. The majority of my spending goes toward necessities that I have little to no control over - mortgage, groceries, utility bills, insurance, fuel, maintenance, and so on. I’d imagine it’s the same for most people. Very few of my purchases are something I’ve actively decided to buy.
andallthat@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Fair enough… I meant more in the sense of investment/pension funds. Or the fact that the actual value the bills in our pockets have is driven up or (more frequently) down and probably so does the interest rate of your mortgage or the price of your fuel. And maybe not for you, but the algorithms on social media do have influence on what company you choose for your insurance.
_g_be@lemmy.world 1 week ago
You could argue that that price of these things is determined by ‘the market’ which can be algorithmically driven and thus automated to AI potentially