C.A.R.P. Ch. 06 - Sex Stories

C.A.R.P. Ch. 06

... trading gets automated."

"Why the hell would you ever want to do that?" Ali asked.

"Because as everything accelerates, being even a few minutes behind your competitor in terms of stock market trades could cost you millions. Let's say you set up a system that's designed to recognize if the data says that a stock you hold is starting to be sold off in high quantities, usually the kind of things that precursors a company's value crashing. In return, when the data shows that, it commits to selling you faster, at an even lower price than you might normally sell for, just so you don't get undercut on the market."

"That sounds stupid," Ali said. "Because if I figured out someone was doing that, I could invoke false rushes or runs on stock. You could make a company crash with minimal effort."

"Shit, we can do thatnow if we want to," Nate laughed. "We'd just have to work a little harder."

"Right, but what we'd do relies on convincingpeople, who have all sorts of intrinsic biases against data. They want to believe in their hunch or they're writing things off because they suspect market manipulation. How do youcode a hunch? Better yet, how do you code a hunch that you can't later systematically take advantage of?"

"The biggest problem we've got to solve for is how to establish trusted lines of informational security, how to prevent anything from just getting cluttered with junk data," Caleb said. "We've got to find a way to still reliably get new data while ...

... simultaneously preventing bad data from getting in, corrupting the long view."

Over the course of the next month, about a dozen of us hammered out a possible plan on how to get it done, but none of us liked the trajectory it took us on as a planet or a species to get there and back, because it involved actively making thingsworse for a while, and we weren't entirely convinced that everything would recover.

The further out you're looking, the harder it is to get details right, but if we're right, there's going to be a decade or two of borderline fascism done in a way that would make even George Orwell nervous. Millions of people saying, "You have no right to tell me how to live my life, but I haveevery right to tell you how to live yours," and seeing no irony or problem with the statements. And these people will become so tribal that their ability to compartmentalize facts will border on insanity.

The problem is, the more we looked at it, the more we realized it wasn't just possible, it wasnecessary if we were to survive the coming challenges of the next hundred years.

What we began developing was, as best as I can describe it, a mental flu shot for the human condition. Yes, we were going to make things worse for a while. We were going to introduce tenets of cult philosophy into the mainstream for a while. We'd already seen people beginning to do the start of that, with this thing called "the Human Potential Movement." People who felt like they should be at great odds with ...