The Rise of the (Financial) Machines

BartlebyScrivener writes "A New York Times Op-Ed quoting Freeman and George Dyson wonders if Wall Street geeks and 'quants' outsmarted themselves with computer algorithms to create the current financial debacle: 'Somehow the genius quants — the best and brightest geeks Wall Street firms could buy — fed $1 trillion in subprime mortgage debt into their supercomputers, added some derivatives, massaged the arrangements with computer algorithms and — poof! — created $62 trillion in imaginary wealth. It's not much of a stretch to imagine that all of that imaginary wealth is locked up somewhere inside the computers, and that we humans, led by the silverback males of the financial world, Ben Bernanke and Henry Paulson, are frantically beseeching the monolith for answers.'" The quoted essay from George Dyson is available at Edge.

Comments

Re:TFA perpetuates voodoo explanations

[AlXtreme]

I don't see what's so complicated about any of this. It's pure and simple fraud on the most massive of scales.

And here is some NYT contributer who wants to blame computers and the nerds. Sure, blame the scary robotic overlords. The financial collapse can't be the fault of ordinary humans, no sir!

This is just some attention-whoring author trying to use the financial crisis in order to sell more books (even though his book has nothing to do with the crisis). Nothing to see here, please move along.