WTF?: What's the Future and Why It's Up to Us

by Tim O'Reilly

These are noble goals. But they may have come too late. We are already in the thrall of a vast, world-spanning machine that, due to errors in its foundational programming, has developed a disdain for human beings, is working to make them irrelevant, and resists all attempts to bring it back under control. It is not yet intelligent or autonomous, and it still depends on its partnership with humans, but it grows more powerful and more independent every day. We are engaged in a battle for the soul of this machine, and we are losing. Systems we have built to serve us no longer do so, and we don’t know how to stop them. If you think I’m talking about Google, or Facebook, or some shadowy program run by the government, you’d be wrong. I’m talking about something we refer to as “the market.” To understand how the market, that cornerstone of capitalism, is on its way to becoming that long-feared rogue AI, enemy to humanity, we first need to review some things about artificial intelligence. And then we need to understand how financial markets (often colloquially, and inaccurately, referred to simply as “Wall Street”) have become a machine that its creators no longer fully understand, and how the goals and operation of that machine have become radically disconnected from the market of real goods and services that it was originally created to support.