At the end of the business radio show I was on at the weekend, the presenter asked me the same question he always asks. "Are the markets going to go up or down this week?" He was surprised when I said I thought they'd go down since things had been on a bit of a rally the week before. When asked why, I think I said (and the podcast isn't up yet so I can't check) something about human nature taking it's tole. My logic (which may be more post the event than during as is the way with live radio) was that traders, having pushed the markets up last week, would be feeling nervous that they might have over done it and would be cautious this week as a reaction.
It occurs to me now that this is more true than I realised at the time. As it happens the markets do appear to have gone down a little this week. But I'm not claiming any kind of soothsayer status. (I wish!) More the realisation that the biggest flaw in our current model is surely ourselves. If computers, using pure logic (something they're not yet capable of in my opinion as we programme them) had full control of the markets we probably wouldn't be in the current mess as no computer could have been so blind to the over-valuations of the past 5 to 10 years. As I understand it computers now fly our planes, and do so many tasks that we still kid ourselves humans can do better, because in fact computers make infinitely less mistakes than any human ever could.
It's very easy to get all '2001' or 'I Robot' on this topic. But the more I think about it the more I can't wait for the advent of AI. What a treat to have all our mundane tasks done for us (and how many of those are there for your average SME owner?) without having to think about them. Leaving us to find other things to get our creative heads into........ oh!
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