It is ‘nearly unavoidable’ that AI will cause a financial crash within a decade, SEC head says::undefined
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:
in the after action reports people will say ‘Aha! There was either one data aggregator or one model . . . we’ve relied on.’ Maybe it’s in the mortgage market. Maybe it’s in some sector of the equity market
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.
Gosh, maybe legalized gambling is not a good way to run an economy?
What are talking about? Did you read any of this conversation.
What are talking about? Did you read any of this conversation.
I have more questions than answers.
Honestly hoping something like this happens in residential real estate, if it isn’t happening already. Housing is well overdue for a correction.
You can’t tell me that most people can afford a $400,000-$700,000 mortgage. Median incomes don’t support that price point. Median household incomes might support the lower end…barely. So I am starting to wonder just who is buying/selling all these houses. When I see a $600,000 “average” house last 3 days on the market and then sell for $760,000…I have questions.
Median incomes don’t support that price point. Median household incomes might support the lower end…barely.
I swear if I ever marry it will just be to combine finances so we can actually buy a house and stuff
I am married with a household income in the 200,000-300,000 range and we can’t afford anything here.
I’ve been reading that nobody can afforrd to buy houses for at least a decade now and the price just keeps going up so clearly people can afford it.
In my blue collar, median wage earning workplace the vast majority are homeowners and having an investment property is seen as normal and expected., it’s the new baseline for doing ok. They have dual incomes, two cars, and overseas holidays every year. They are migrants who had no bank of mom and dad and they prefer to send their kids to private or carholic schools.
They are not poor, but if you believe what you read on the internet they should have zero kids and be living paycheck to paycheck.
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.
While that’s really interesting, there was a lot more at play than a pricing algorithm. It was a culmination of a lot of things, starting with Cash for Clunkers that had a huge impact on the used car market. Then there were a ton of supply chain issues during COVID that squeezed the new car market. Probably some other factors I’m not aware of, too.
He has a good point as this monoculture of systems and models would very greatly amplify any market imbalance and defects, at a speed human bank managers would only realize when getting notified of their impending bankruptcy
It was pretty bananas for a minute. The Mazda dealership offered us 5,000 more than we paid brand new for my wife’s Mazda 3 in 2018. I told the salesperson that it makes no fucking sense and he couldn’t explain it either. Didn’t go for it for a bunch of reasons but it was really odd.
Yes. Definitely one of those or something else entirely.
That’s an economist level reply right there
Currently, I would rather guess it’s the usual bubble popping. AI has attracted billions of investments and will likely pull in even more, but it’s already foreseeable, that hardly any of the investments will turn a profit. So we’ll end up with a third dotcom bubble.
AI isn’t a bubble. The futurist/Rationalist/transhumanist communities were saying what’s happening now would happen in a few years about a decade ago, and our predictions are that the next phase is AI taking over all labor through sophisticated automation. We’ve been trying to warn everyone about this since the advent of Google Deep Dream, but sure stick your head in the sand again and let the world burn around you; it’s worked so well so far.
This comment will probably get bombed, but w/e. 🤷♂️ Go ahead and be ignorant and angry at me, I’m used to it.
Edit: yes I am bitter. I’ve had a bad day, and I’m annoyed.
How many times has that been predicted already? Three, four? Look at the history of AI, it happens every few years.
Anyway, you’re implying a dichotomy here. World domination or pipedream, but that’s not the case. The dotcom bubble was without a doubt a bubble, but much of the underlying technology was used a few years later, just without the hype and fanfare.
AI will probably find its uses, and has the potential to eliminate a lot of jobs, but the current iteration of AI businesses is utter garbage. Even something as comparatively simple as Microsoft’s Copilot is currently losing money - roughly as much as it costs to use. Yet, there are billions upon billions being poured into useless start-ups that will never produce anything of value in a profitable manner.
What exactly happened to self driving cars BTW? Weren’t those totally on track of what experts predicted?
They’re on the streets in San Francisco, I see them all the time
I’m thinking yes, plus AI margin trading running into a tragedy of the commons where they collectively run the stock market into the ground and there’s no reset button on that.
Bears have predicted 100 of the last 3 market crashes
Yeah.
It’s a casino, and a lot of these folks are no smarter than a retiree rubbing troll dolls on their favorite slot machine.
The solution is to realign markets to human needs. The is no productive benefit to high speed trading. There is no benefit to stock by backs. We need to reign in most of the nonsense that these financial services institutions do.
This meme gets funnier and funnier every time I read it!
And then we finally eat the rich, right?
The scapegoat for the next financial crash can’t be put in prison. How convenient.
I’m optimistic we’ll find a way to blame the poor. Just learn to code, and do rigorous statistics you ungrateful meatbag.
Just learn to code, and do rigorous statistics
I actually am working on both of these things.
They’ve been fucking with automated trading for decades though, unless you’re going to try to convince me that there’s a human investing in a trillionth of a company for a hundredth of a second at a time.
It’s already caused “flash crashes” before. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_flash_crash
The idea of investing in companies because you believe in them and want a share of their profits is sound enough I guess, but what it’s morphed into is nonsense. The result is a system where you have trillion dollar companies that never actually turn a profit in favour of “growth”.
Wow, they tried to blamed it on one autistic dude trading from his parent’s apartment in London?
- WTF
- He was the most powerful man in the world for 30 minutes according to them, lmao. Why can’t my personal issues give me super powers?
I love how they always mention the autism, as if being a mathematical genius is a common symptom, rather than just being able to remember every episode of Naruto.
Hey did you know the specific heat of water is 4.184 j/g°c because i learned that once in a physics class more than a decade ago and i still remember.
I am not a physicist and the memorization of that fact does not help me. Thanks brain.
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The crash is already in motion and it was not AI that caused it. This is just getting us ready for who to blame when it crashes.
Many stocks have been far oversold and there is no way to reset it without the rich losing it all.
This is how they will reset it and protect the rich.
Is this before or after it destroys the economy for everyone but the super rich by replacing them and making them compete for fewer and fewer scraps? Sorry, there will be lots more new jobs created by AI probably, like AI wrangler, AI safety consultant and the like. Probably.
I always have a laughing fit whenever I see “Prompt engineer” used unironically in a job posting on LinkedIn.
I also think the term is granted way too much prestige, but a bit over a decade ago people also laughed at the notion of “Social Media Manager” being a real, high paying job
Who knows where this stuff will go
Even today the term Social media manager is still conflated with graphic designer, sales representative, customer information management, publishing, copywriter, photographer and creative writing, all the time.
I have… feelings about LLMs being the big thing in AI/ml right now… because its really not much new. Maybe the transformer model kind of but ultimately LLMs are massive supervised learning neural nets trained on obscene amounts of data. And then other models use that pretrained “foundational model” to work and just tune their parameters. Which is why prompt engineer is becoming a thing.
Corpos are playing by the book here and trying to extinguish any competition before it begins by having people rely on their “foundation” models instead of innovating their own solutions
How many tutorials can you find for implementing LLM NLP tasks that dont include “import this model from X company” id wager its only maybe 33%
Part of what makes localized model engines and custom ML chips interesting is precisely their ability to enable small custom local models. Right now LLMs require so much computational power and massive amounts of data to be trained and operate that even the most expensive options lose money with every prompt query.
So, the reason every tutorial starts with “download this model”. Is because there’s a good chance you don’t have the hundreds of super computer cluster chips and the several hundreds of exabytes of scrapped and curated data needed to train a natural language processing model. There’s a reason there are only big players in this game.
Facts.
Even if you could design your own model… How do you acquire a dataset even a fraction of the size those pretrained models from the corps.
Then how do you train the model in a reasonable time. Other than relying on cloud computing which leads to the same problem of only corps can play this game properly right now.
I designed and collected/labeled the data for a relatively small deep CNN for my masters thesis and training it on 60000 images was taking over a dozen hours (this was 5 years ago at this point so that part may be misremembered) on a 1080ti.
I just applied for a Prompt Engineer job last week!
Honestly, it’s a legit position. Maybe not something that will last a long time, but to do it well you need to know what prompts to give.
The average person might put “cat on a speed boat” whereas someone’s job would need to know what “bokeh” is, what kind of camera lens you want to simulate with what F-stop, know the rule of thirds, negative space, etc.
The problem is whether someone is willing to pay for that extra knowledge or get their nephew to pump something out on their iPhone then say it’s good enough.
Pretty sure that crash is more the fault of the greedy shits who think it’s normal for 4 folks to own 50% of the country while 50% owns 2% of the country. Don’t need AI to tell you that system isn’t sustainable.
Good, let it all collapse. I want to see the 1% shit themselves before climate change kills them.
That’s not who suffers most in financial collapse.
Bingo. The super-rich love a financial collapse, it gives them a golden opportunity to turn disaster capitalist. All those foreclosed homes & businesses available at a knockdown price, nom nom nom.
So, how do we engineer a situation in which the richest suffer most? End of capitalism?
Greatly increasing taxes for the super wealthy and closing tax loopholes would be a good start.
If they haven’t done all this until now, what makes you think they’ll do it then?
The rich will get off unscathed with a blank canvas to work on, and the poor will pay the price, just like with every other market crash.
Historically riots, mobs, and terror have been the answer. See the origins of the luddites, saboteurs, the French revolution(s), the socialist movement, etc.
The luddites failed and the French revolutions ended poorly for everyone. Not exactly the best examples to draw from if you are trying to encourage violent rebellion.
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I’m not encouraging violent rebellion,
Ok good.
I’m simply saying the powerful have historically only ever been checked by property damage, terror, and blood, or at least fear thereof.
Nevermind. You just did an immediate 180.
I was thinking more along the lines of mad max.
Invent a system of money in which they are no longer in control of it.
AI is just a convenient excuse and you know that.
Lmao yeah. They need someone to blame for upcoming crash lol.
My thoughts exactly.
Financial expert predicts that (what is already) the longest bull market in world history will end within the next 10 years? And the thing that the world’s largest companies are investing the most in might play a roll in that?
Bold.
Shock, awe, hysteria. More “AI” fear mongering headlines to boost the stock prices of tech giants. Yawn.
Heavy doubt on this one.
There is still so much misunderstanding on the state of AI and its potential based on current technology (spoiler: reduce your expectations significantly). How can you expect anyone to make predictions with such misunderstanding.
That said it kinda seems like a financial crash is already happening, regardless of AI.
I think it’s tech illiterate people being amazed by chat gpt and shit, not realizing just how janky and limited it’s actual "artificial intelligence"actually is.
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I’m not dismissing its usefulness for those scenario’s (see my response to Veltoss below). But people tend to way over-estimate what it is capable of.
Generating an office layout? Yeah absolutely, because that’s largely based on prior art, no real innovation required. Though as you noted you’ll almost certainly need to “steer” the AI because there’s so many variables and permutations that it cannot realistically come up with a perfect solution without real intelligence. It’ll require iteration from “someone” no matter how advanced it gets.
But AI as it exists right now won’t replace let’s say your office manager, who would probably be given the responsibility of planning the office layout. Because their job entails making lots of intelligence based judgment calls. That said; given they will get more AI powered tools to do their job there may be fewer jobs available overall because now your office manager at some big office won’t need an assistant anymore.
Note I am not saying that AI affecting our economy isn’t happening or won’t happen. I’m merely saying that any predictions people are making should be met with a heavy amount of doubt, because there is so much misunderstanding out there.
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But that’s plain fantasy at this point. The current form of AI is fundamentally not intelligent. Advancement of the current form of AI won’t change that.
The current form of AI is like the speech center of your brain. On its own it does not constitute a brain, nor will it ever “evolve” to be its own brain.
So the current form of AI may end up forming a small part of the whole, but that whole is as of yet still a fantasy.
I’m not sure you fully appreciate what “advancement” means.
In this context I’d imagine you meant what the technology could evolve into. But what I’m saying is the technology is fundamentally incapable of being intelligent.
I imagine you think of “the technology” as just artificial intelligence in general. I’m talking about the actual technology in todays “ai”. The inner workings.
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I don’t know why everybody keeps downplaying where AI is already at and the speed at which it is improving. It can already disrupt multiple industries with where image, voice, and LMM AI is at right now.
For me personally it’s not that I want to downplay it, it’s that I want to balance the scales. I see far more over-estimating of AI happening than downplaying.
The current form of AI is great as a tool and sadly there are definitely jobs out there that are nearly completely replaced by this tool. But that scope isn’t about to change much based on where we are currently at. Many jobs require actual intelligence to make judgment calls, and the current form of AI just isn’t going to cut it here as it has no real intelligence.
Of course, that won’t stop dumb business leaders from still trying to use AI here, but that’s an error in judgment that imo will correct itself over time.
The SEC means: Security, and Exchange Commission. In case anybody like myself hates abbreviations, and have to look it up on Google to see what it even means
I mean, a few communities I’m a part of have been warning about this since c. 2014, so I think he’s actually correct in his prediction. I haven’t read the article, but I don’t think any solution he’d propose would be good regardless, so I think I’ll just save my time. TLDR: failing a real leftist paradigm shift, we need global welfare like 5 to 10 years ago and UBI.
We need ubi. But that funding for a ubi program needs future predictions of economics.
