I'm still working my way across the table of recommended books at the local library and I often find it leads me to read books that don't immediately appeal to me. This is exactly the kind of cover that I usually skip right over, but I noticed the line at the bottom that says it has been made into a mini-series, so I decided to give it a go.
It's the kind of book that I imagine businessmen picking up at the airport before a long-haul flight, as there's a good pace to the way the story develops, and events and places are described in plain language that doesn't stray from the point.
Alex Hoffman is a computer nerd with Harvard University and a position at CERN on his CV, and after pushing the scientists out of their comfort zone with his work on Artificial Intelligence, he takes his talents into the financial sector and earns more money than he can keep track of. His AI tool, VIXEL, scours through the Internet picking up detail from countless websites, then automatically buys and sells shares accordingly. The algorithms work far more quickly than human analysts, and rapid reaction times allow automatic transactions before other brokers realise what's happening. VIXEL has made investors very rich indeed, and it certainly seems as though they have found the goose that lays the golden eggs, but the more the computer learns, the more independent it becomes. What happens when it over-rides human input?
The bottom line message is that AI is not to be trusted, but it is already in our lives on a daily basis. Lets hope the extreme outcomes described in the book do not become a reality!
Comments
Post a Comment