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posted by on Monday December 05 2016, @05:53PM   Printer-friendly
from the we-make-money-the-new-fashioned-way dept.

Money makes the world go round, or so they say. Payments, investments, insurance and billions of transactions are the beating heart of a fractal economy, which echoes the messy complexity of natural systems, such as the growth of living organisms and the bouncing of atoms.

Financial systems are larger than the sum of their parts. The underlying rules that govern them might seem simple, but what surfaces is dynamic, chaotic and somehow self-organizing. And the blood that flows through this fractal heartbeat is data.

Today, 2.5 exabytes of data are being produced daily. That number is expected to grow to 44 zettabytes a day by 2020 (Source: GigaOm). This data, along with interconnectivity, correlation, predictive analytics and machine learning, provides the foundation for our AI-powered future.

takyon: ComputerWeekly actually reports that, "The amount of data on the planet is set to grow 10-fold in the next six years to 2020 from around 4.4 zettabytes to 44ZB. That's according to IDC's annual Digital Universe study, which also predicted that, by 2020, the amount of information produced by machines, the so-called internet of things, will account for about 10% of data on earth."


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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by maxwell demon on Monday December 05 2016, @09:10PM

    by maxwell demon (1608) on Monday December 05 2016, @09:10PM (#437384) Journal

    One thing Science Fiction regularly gets wrong: In Science Fiction, the AI always takes control of the world through the military. The truth will be completely different: The AI will wield power through the financial markets. The financial markets are more powerful than any military of the world, and while taking power through the military will be blatantly obvious, taking power through the financial markets can be covert until it is too late.

    Or maybe the AI already has taken over?

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    The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 05 2016, @09:34PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 05 2016, @09:34PM (#437398)

    The flash crash was just a birth pang.

    • (Score: 2) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Monday December 05 2016, @10:54PM

      by GreatAuntAnesthesia (3275) on Monday December 05 2016, @10:54PM (#437441) Journal

      Is that a Lawnmower Man reference? You know with the resurgence of VR, we are about due a crappy remake of that crappy film.

  • (Score: 1) by khallow on Monday December 05 2016, @10:32PM

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Monday December 05 2016, @10:32PM (#437426) Journal

    The truth will be completely different: The AI will wield power through the financial markets. The financial markets are more powerful than any military of the world, and while taking power through the military will be blatantly obvious, taking power through the financial markets can be covert until it is too late.

    Boy, I hope you're right. An AI that takes over through financial markets is an AI we can work with because they are cooperating with us from the start.

    And why in the world do you think financial markets are more powerful than military force? Markets are only as powerful as the things they buy and sell. Military power is only one of many flavors of power that you can't buy and sell on those markets.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 06 2016, @12:35AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 06 2016, @12:35AM (#437483)

      sorry. the a.i. doesnt run on binary silicon chips. only on wetware.
      and now you know who is using the other 90% of a regular human brain.
      also "commas" are for text. mtheres no comma in math and numbers. either use ' or .
      thank you.

    • (Score: 2) by mhajicek on Tuesday December 06 2016, @02:22AM

      by mhajicek (51) on Tuesday December 06 2016, @02:22AM (#437515)

      Oh, but you can! One of the main reasons the US is always at war is because war is so profitable. Halliburton made $8 per MRE alone in the Gulf War. War consumes more of everything, which means more money changes hands, and some of that money lubricates the system to make more war. If you invest in a steel mill (or just about any other general purpose production facility) chances are some of that will go toward making war.

      --
      The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek