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The Singularity is already here – it is the market

The Singularity is already here – it is the market

The market economy exhibits most of the traits of the much hyped – and feared – singularity, where an artificial intelligence takes over the show and humans are enslaved.

We have all heard the stories of the powerful algorithms. They control our choices and they learn by analyzing an ever increasing amount of data. In the book Homo Deus, Yuval Noah Harari says that we have replaced the idea of God with an algorithm. In this emerging ideology, which he names Dataism, the ultimate goal is to increase the amount of information flow through the algorithm.

“Hitherto, data was seen as only the first step in a long chain of intellectual activity. Humans were supposed to distil data into information, information into knowledge, and knowledge into wisdom. However, Dataists believe that humans can no longer cope with the immense flows of data, hence they cannot distil data into information, let alone into knowledge or wisdom. The work of processing data should therefore be entrusted to electronic algorithms, whose capacity far exceeds that of the human brain.”

Harari makes a link to the markets in his analysis, for example he says that:

“We often imagine that democracy and the free market won because they were “good”. In truth, they won because they improved the global data-processing system.”

These are good observations, but in my view he doesn’t draw the full conclusions of his own observation.

That the market is the super AI and the Singularity.

According to the singularity hypothesis, an intelligent agent (such as a computer running software-based artificial general intelligence) would enter a “runaway reaction” of self-improvement cycles, with each new and more intelligent generation appearing more and more rapidly, causing an intelligence explosion and resulting in a powerful superintelligence that would far surpass all human intelligence. (Wikipedia)

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