While the world seems to have a solution for every problem, an app for everything, one simple problem about bubbles and crisis bothers no one. How to make bubbles less bubbly and crisis less severe? How to build more stable economic systems? How to reduce risk in our day to day life? How not to let money destroy our cultural fabric? We are so busy counting our crypto and/or our fiat wealth, it does not bother us whether the wealth we count is here today or gone tomorrow. We write stories about how Google sentiment drives bitcoin prices or vice versa, unaware of the fact that a few decades ago we were wondering whether the sunspots used to lead the economic cycle or vice versa. The fragmented nature of our research and markets and focus on causality is the reason we are happy betting on alpha as alphabet rules the world and not focus on alphabots that could allow self destruction for the general good, as they generate alpha, solutions to meaningful predictive problems competing intensely lest they are overwhelmed by a competing better alphabot. A war of alphabots.
Lee et. al [2001] said that “The human language thrives when using the same term to mean somewhat different things, but automation does not.“ The assumption that automation cannot flourish where human language prospers is the semantic puzzle that circumscribes our vision. The reason ultra smart agents are not yet coming alive because you the reader can understand that it is me (the human) who has written this article not a machine. The reason for the Lee challenge is our focus on myopic causality. We are so busy explaining causes that we refuse to think creatively.
AI today also focuses on small causal problems far away from the bubbles problem. The problem of seeking behavior in data will not take us to the intelligence we seek from machines. We need to focus on generality, commonality, universality if we need a machine to speak to us intelligently and also manage our money. The future is not about piecemeal efforts but the consolidation of General AI, fintech and blockchain fused into one ecosystem. This fusion can create a new intelligent market mechanism that better understands how to diffuse bubbles and ameliorate the sequence of crisis and is capable to solve more meaningful problems. Do you have a list 10 predictive problems to solve?