Now with the advent of Artificial Intelligence, the new thing is called Deepfake. Deepfake superimposes somebody's face on the body of another person. This can be done in a still photograph, or with video. It looks real. Very popular on pornography sites; especially with the face of a popular actress on an adult movie star's body. Like they need it. Most movie stars are under 40. Nevertheless, when the pixel police get their hands on these images, whether it be via sexting, revenge porn or deepfake, they go viral PDQ. All sensitive data can get hacked in an unencrypted communication. Black hats (malicious hackers) smell blood in the water and can do whatever they want with your images, too.
A.I. is everywhere. You just don't notice it creeping up on you. My favorite current crazy algo is the predictive text feature on my iPhone. Android has it, too. Makes writing emails much easier. Another area that A.I. is rapidly enveloping is the stock market. The Economist cover story this past week was: "Masters of the Universe - How Machines Are Taking Over Wall Street". It's a good article. Anyone with skin in the game should read it. However, there is a caveat. The first thing that came to my mind after finishing the story is, "What took them so long to write this?". It just seemed like old hat if you've been following the inner machinations of trading floors.
To be fair, The Economist is a general interest magazine with a business leaning, and the majority of their readership may not be versed in computer science. But Ed Thorp wrote Beat The Market in 1967 which unleashed the Quant Fund revolution. Computerized trading has been around a long time. The A.I. angle in The Economist piece is that humans previously programmed the algos. Now it's the algos programming the algos because they can decipher data patterns we humans can't see. The only thing the traders are doing is feeding data to the machines. From what I could infer, only ten percent of trades are now done by humans. So what are you doing by investing in individual securities?
As the world takes a few more spins, the stock market becomes more efficient. The Economist article emphasizes this. It's the gist of the entire story. Nevertheless, there's still a plethora of information on the Internet, in newspapers, in magazines, and on business networks touting the benefits of seeking alpha. It sells a lot of advertising. Alpha is the out-performance of a portfolio versus the overall market, or, the S&P 500. Just doesn't happen anymore. There's a lot of pump and dump schemes out there. Buyer beware. I don't want to spend too much time on the financial industry, but it's important to me. It's probably important to you, too.
Don't want to fight the technological advances, but do want to question them. How did my Apple and American Online calendars become populated on a Google calendar? Keep getting notices on Gmail for events I was unaware they had access to. Google probably has my permission. I am unaware I gave it. This has got to change. With the evolution of A.I., and the roll-out of 5G communications networks, we're going to see a lot of changes in the next ten years. Although telecommunications carriers are already advertising the speed and lack of latency on 5G smartphones, it's the machines that will benefit the most. The Internet of things. Robots. Autonomous cars. You name it, it's going to improve exponentially. This can only be good for the economy. And good for my portfolio.
HAL 9000 anybody?
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