Blain’s Morning Porridge – Aug 11 2020 – Who Pulled the Plug?
“Unnervingly coherent and laughably mindless”
This morning’s opening quote isn’t an independent assessment of the Morning Porridge – but is lifted from a newspaper article on Artificial Intelligence. It ends on a very scary tag: the AI is asked if it is conscious and responds: “To be clear, I am not a person. I am not self-aware. I am not conscious. I can’t feel pain. I don’t enjoy anything. I am a cold, calculating machine designed to simulate human response and to predict the probability of certain outcomes. The only reason I am responding is to defend my honour.” This is not from some dystopian novel or a reboot of the Terminator series… but from the this morning’s FT!
Should we pull the plug or ask it some more questions?
Back in the real world….
We are now in the depths of the summer doldrums – and markets are showing even less correlation to global events than usual. Stock and Bond Markets remain chronically distorted by the effects of Central Bank liquidity. China markets have shrugged off the new Trump US sanctions – and Xi has stepped up the arrest of protest figureheads in HK. Ten-cent has taken a tumble on the back of Trump banning Tik Tok and WeChat – confirming the degree to which individual stocks are vulnerable to shifts in the narrative. Watch for case-by-case wobbles as the China-US rift opens wider – when will China decide to make trouble for Tesla to boost its copy-cars?
But even the China/US tiff is likely to be something of a sideshow. My first question to the AI machine would be – just how deep is the coming global recession going to be? Despite some recent strong economic releases, the trend shows the recession is underway.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
