If the market is more efficient when trade is slowed down so most participants can interpret the available information then what is the value of HFT?
It is supposed to serve a different purpose, but IMHO it serves little purpose that benefits the general public, which, again IMHO, is the purpose of having a stock market.
This seems to be a common thing for NASDAQ to halt trading. Can NASDAQ halt trading any time my stocks start doing poorly?
The purpose of it is reasonable enough. If news is being released, they halt trading so that you don't have to worry about people on one news site getting the news 10 seconds ahead of people on another news site, or traders trying to guess the entirety of the news as it is revealed a word at a time.
Basically you plan to release earnings at a particular time, everybody knows this, trading is halted, the entirety of the report is released, people are given a short time to skim the relevant parts, and then people can resume trading having some semblance of having digested the news. That keeps the market more efficient rather than having big swings as people guess at what others might or might not have figured out that they haven't noticed in the news yet.
The same is true of sudden stock movements. It could be a computer glitch. Or it could be insider info. Halting trading lets everybody catch up with the true state of the market, and then everybody gets to start off on a reasonably equal footing. If the issue was a computer glitch humans have a chance to step in and ensure they are trading based on their sense of the actual value of the company.
As was pointed out already, if the fundamentals are bad, nothing is going to help you.
Uber's small enough now it doesn't matter because they're only going after the folks with money...
This has happened in other areas of the economy as well. Previously there was a monopoly that charged inflated prices to most of the population, and subsidized prices to a small part of the population. Then somebody comes along and competes for the profitable majority and ignores the profitless minority, which then causes a loss for the former monopoly.
I think the real problem is that this is a lousy way to provide services to the poor/etc. Just make the service provider free-market and run things super-efficiently. Then have the government pay the price for the poor, so that it comes out of taxes and not from the provider's profits. Then when a competitor comes along it is no big deal because the original company can compete fairly, and if prices are driven down it helps the poor and taxpayers.
That is also why I don't like the whole idea of subsidizing job creation, or even the minimum wage. Let companies be operated with brutal efficiency. Then take care of the people who can't get a job, rather than getting somebody to hire somebody they otherwise would not. Instead of a minimum wage, have basic income. Give people enough money to live on (simply) whether they work or not. Then employers will have to offer a decent working environment or pay to entice people to actually work - since nobody is desperate for food an employer who doesn't offer a decent deal will simply be unable to hire people. Somebody who effectively gets $9/hr to stay at home isn't going to spend 40 hours a week working at Walmart for $1 more per hour.
All true. Still, it would be unwise to take off without a set of charts. It would be like taking off with only one engine - there is no reason you couldn't do it (given enough runway), but the whole point of having the extra engine is so that you can afford to lose it.
And then someone has to print some of those books on a regular basis. And then someone has to dispose of them when they expire. And the pilots probably carry regularly updated information for every airport in the countries they might fly in, whether they go to that airport or not.
Well, for safety purposes they really need access to info for any airport they might come within range of. For a long flight, that is a LOT of airports.
The EFB can trivially store all that data globally, and also make it far more accessible. If they break through clouds and just want to navigate visually, one button pulls up the sectional/WAC chart for the area, vs having to dig up a rarely-used chart that they might not even carry otherwise.
The other side of this is that paper charts are falling into such disuse that they're becoming harder to even come by.
That's why even extremely rich space tourists go to them instead of financing development of vehicle of their own like Elon Musk is trying to do right now.
Not really disputing the facts here, but this isn't really an apples-to-apples.
It is like calling somebody stupid for building their own plane when it is far easier and cheaper to just buy a ticket on an airliner. That would be true if the only goal were to get from point A to point B, but people who build things usually have other goals.
I don't have an irrational hate for Uber... I have a well reasoned dislike for a company who says "la la la, we're not listening, your laws don't apply because we're awesome".
The thing is, most people likely to consume their services would rather have them operating just as they are than otherwise. It is a bit of an irony given that we're a democracy, but stuff like this happens all the time. We have speed limits that almost nobody follows, and yet they aren't changed. The issue is that laws often do not reflect the political will of the population.
So, just about everybody is starting to just ignore laws in these cases and dare anybody to do anything about it. People just speed, and politicians know that if they actually tried to enforce the speed limits rigorously it would be political suicide. Companies like Uber operate, and if anybody messes with them it causes them a bunch of backlash. Presidents just work around Congress, and there isn't much that Congress can do about it, since they'll never get the supermajority required for impeachment. Judges just override gay marriage laws passed in states, and they get upheld.
People just don't want to deal with the process necessary to change the laws, so the laws reflect the will of special interests that can navigate the process and get the laws established. People will instead just ignore the law, and everybody just goes along with it one way or another.
Im sure most of these companies feel like its worth the PR, until they realize shipping through an unregulated, unlicensed, un-insured third party is a great way to watch $12,000 worth of shoes and purses go from the back of a prius to a roaring bonfire on youtube.
You do realize that big companies monitor their vendor's performance, and only work with vendors that do a good job.
At my workplace we really don't care how the outside vendor gets the job done for stuff like this as long as they get it done. We care about performance, not process (except at the interfaces with us).
If Uber starts losing items, they'll go out of business. Heck, if they can't give their customers (the big vendors) visibility into where their stuff is at all times, they'll never get the business in the first place.
Nobody needs to regulate UPS. The big companies that use UPS already know how well they operate.
Requiring a restart is a Windows trait. I was hoping that my Linux installations would be better than that.
Er quite, though I was specifically referring to restarting PulseAudio, which takes a second not the entire computer. If the base underlying init process needs a restart, well, that's a different kettle of fish.
FWIW, the only time I restart systemd is to update the kernel, or I guess systemd itself (though the kernel changes more often and thus I can usually lump the latter in with the former). If you do live-patch your kernel, then you can do the same with systemd - it has a command to re-exec itself while preserving state.
I'm sure it isn't perfect, but it is as robust as anything else I've used on Linux. There are fairly few daemons that I've never seen need a restart sometime in the last 10 years.
As for #2, it doesn't really work that way. The govt didn't bail out ANY retirement funds (at least not private sector ones, nor any mutual funds and similar, money markets, etc). There were some people made whole for certain things out of FDIC or other insurance, but presumably they were paying for that via the premiums coming out of their returns, so its not QUITE a bailout, though perhaps the premiums are subsidized. So in the final analysis the problem isn't that the investors are too big to fail, its the firms themselves that get the bailouts.
Of course the retirement funds weren't bailed out. They didn't have to be, because the companies they invested in were bailed out instead. If the various investment banks were allowed to fail then they'd probably all crash and so would everything all those retirement funds were invested in. THAT is why those companies were too big to fail in the first place.
If investments were just a toy for the wealthy then we could let them play their games and take their haircuts. The problem is that the investment sector affects everybody, so we have no choice but to intervene when things go wrong. That gives us the right to prevent things from going wrong in the first place, even if it means the rich can't play their games any longer...
Just because you have everything recorded, doesn't mean it's useful, though.
While I agree with many of your points, often these records become important after the fact.
Suppose I have a record of every letter sent from anywhere to anywhere. Then somebody blows up a building or whatever and are now known as a terrorist. The database allows you to obtain a list of every letter that had his address somewhere on it. Or any letter sent to a suspicious address which originated in his vicinity even if it didn't have a return address (such as if it were dropped in a mailbox). That kind of information can be useful to expand a network of suspects.
It is like having a record of every phone call for the last 30 years. It is hard to look at call patterns and tell who is a threat. However, if somebody blows up a building you can figure out who their college roommate was, or who they dated in middle school. All kinds of relationships that would not be obvious if you just talked to somebody's neighbors or looked at their recent credit card / phone history become apparent. Maybe their former girlfriend works for the TSA and was on duty when a terrorist slipped past security, but there weren't any phone calls between them in the last 10 years. That is a lead that might become apparent with long-term record retention that would be missed without it. Of course, such techniques inevitably involve looking into the cases of people who are almost certainly innocent. If the girlfriend wasn't involved, pursuing her might mean neglecting other leads that are real threats.
Data is just data. However, there is a lot you can do with a targeted search once you know what you're looking for.
Whether all the pictures are also retained is a completely different story. 10 years ago, I'd have said, "No; too expensive." But storage costs have plummeted, so nowadays, maybe so.
Last month, The New York Times reported on the practice, which is called the Mail Isolation and Tracking system. The program was created by the Postal Service after the anthrax attacks in late 2001 killed five people, including two postal workers.
Well better lock up the potheads and dealers and send them to the rape factories right?
On a tangent, the fact that we can't even control crime in prison says a great deal about the ineffectiveness of our approach to crime. Heck, I'm sure they can't even keep drugs out of prison.
I absolutely hate ethical thought problems. They're always presented with a limited number of actions, with no provision for doing anything different or in addition or anything like that. Give me an actual situation, and let me ask questions about it that aren't answered with "no, you can't do that".
They're done that way to distill a matter down to the essence. The same issues apply to complicated situations, but they are far more convoluted.
Is it OK to force people to pay taxes so that others can have free health insurance? If they refuse to pay their taxes is it OK to imprison them, again so that others can have free health insurance? Is it ethical to pay $200k to extend the life of somebody on their deathbed by a week when that same sum could allow a homeless person to live in a half-decent home for a decade? Does it make a difference if the person who will live a week longer is happy and healthy for that week? Is the lottery ethical?
Every one of these issues is controversial, and ethical thought problems try to distill them down to elementary values problems, in the hope of shedding light on how to handle real-world ones where there are many more possible outcomes.
Well, the army and Robin Hood might take issue with your statements.:) Nobody actually follows those rules rigidly in practice.
It isn't really enough to just have a list of rules like "don't kill." You need some kind of underlying principle that unifies them. Any intelligent being has to make millions of decisions in a day, and almost none of them are going to be on the lookup table. For example, you probably chose to get out of bed in the morning. How did you decide that doing this wasn't likely to result in somebody getting killed that day, or did you not care? I didn't give it much thought, because if I worried about causal relationships that far out I'd never do anything. But, when should an AI worry about such matters?
We actually make moral decisions all the time, we just don't think about them. When we want to design an AI, suddenly we have to.
We are not machines, it would be sad if we lost the humanity that makes us special.
Well, the fact that not everybody would agree with everything you just said means that none of this has anything to do with the fact that you're human. You have a bunch of opinions on these topics, as do I and everybody else.
And that was really all my point was. When we can't all agree together on what is right and wrong, how do you create some kind of AI convention to ensure that AIs only act for the public benefit?
I'm suggesting competition between markets. In the end the providers who best serve the people who actually make and lose real money, not the pure speculators, will determine what rules they want to follow, and it won't be the crap rules that Goldman and such want.
That would work if:
1. People could actually control what markets their money got invested in. Last time I checked I had no control over where my pension is invested. If my company's pension fund is wiped out, that is a problem for me.
2. Governments actually let people lose their money when they make bad choices. However, because of #1 they really can't do this. Plus so many people make bad choices they couldn't even really let it happen even if it were completely voluntary.
When markets are "too big to fail" then they need to be regulated so that they don't fail.
I'm definitely a fan of minimal intrusion. I'd have taken much more market-based solutions to most of the financial crisis problems, such as splitting up large banks (more competition, nobody is too big to fail on their own), or making bailouts much more powerful (government eminent domains company, reorganizes with only an interest to the national economy and no care of shareholders, and they do everything they can to find a basis for suing every previous executive of the company, then in the end the company is IPOed to get it out of the government's hands, the government recoups all its costs first, and then if anything is left over it goes to previous debtholders followed by shareholders). Because of collective idiocy I still think that markets are going to need to be regulated.
And that would be the reason I said "some" Nazi activities and not "all" Nazi activities. I certainly find them abhorent, but if you take a strictly utilitarian view then things like involuntary experimentation on people could be justified.
Logically, yes...
Morally, no...
We are not Vulcans...
That was my whole point. We can't agree on a logical definition of morality. Thus, it is really hard to design an AI that everybody would agree is moral.
As far as whether we are Vulcans - we actually have no idea how our brains make moral decisions. Sure, we understand aspects of it, but what makes you look at a kid and think about helping them become a better adult and what makes a psychopath look at a kid and think about how much money they could get if they kidnapped him is a complete mystery.
What I would suggest is that the barrier to entry for establishing different markets should be kept as low as feasible, and it should be relatively easy for order flow to move between one and another.
I'd argue the opposite. I'd encourage one set of rules for markets to operate under, and make it illegal to trade securities in any other way. Flash crashes and such are a threat to the national economy (just look back at 2008). The markets certainly should be regulated in a way that helps to stabilize them. It would also make things like transaction taxation easy to implement, and eliminate a lot of forms of fraud and tax evasion. Any security would be traded in exactly one market, and you own however many shares of it the exchange says you own.
Just require that anything traded in the market be traded there exclusively. For additional effect, require by law that all trades within the country use a market that operates under these rules.
There is a lack of transparency...
I do agree with some of these concerns. This model does require trusting the market administrators, and they would be in a position to give tremendous advantage to any party with inside connections.
Keeping the book secret, is another requirement you have, but it is impractical, and is difficult to audit or enforce.
I have mixed feelings on whether it should be secret. If it weren't, then those particular issues go away but there are others that then come up. However, I don't have a problem with anybody voluntarily sharing information. They just shouldn't be required to do so. I'd also allow anybody to directly place trades - it shouldn't cost anything to directly submit orders to the exchange other than perhaps having a deposit or bond.
The solution to this kind of problem is to have trades executed hourly or even daily, but at a random time which is not disclosed in advance. There might be only general guarantees such as it being at least 6 hours after the last trade. So, sometime on Tuesday every trade will be executed, and it will be between midnight and midnight. The computer will freeze the book at a random moment, and then run through and execute every trade it can. The book is secret until this time, and published after this time. I could see an argument for allowing changes or not, so I'm not sure which is better, though obviously all sales are final.
Then the cost of price discovery will go up significantly.
Define "significantly."
Do we really need nanosecond resolution on stick price changes?
Do fluctuations at those levels REALLY reflect changes in the actual value of a company? At 4:01.000000001 PM is GM really worth 14.01, but at 4:01.0000000012 something changed and it is now worth 14.02? And what is the cost of having this "extra resolution?"
Think of it this way; Robot A and B -- the first one can never harm or kill you, nor would choose to with some calculation that "might" save others, and the 2nd one might and you have to determine if it calculates "greater good" with an accurate enough prediction model. Which one will you allow in your house? Which one would cause you to keep an EMP around for a rainy day?
Either is actually a potential moral monster in the making. The one might allow you to all die in a fire because it cannot predict with certainty what would happen if it walked on weakened floor boards, which might cause it to accidentally cause the taking of a life. Indeed, a robot truly programmed to never take any action which could possibly lead to the loss of life would probably never be able to take any action at all. I can't predict what the long-reaching consequences of my taking a shower in the morning might be. Maybe if I didn't create the additional demand for water the water company wouldn't hire a new employee, which means they'd be stuck at home unemployed instead of getting in the car and driving to work and getting into a fatal accident.
Sure, it is a ridiculous example. My point is just that we all make millions of unconscious risk evaluations every day and any AI would have to do the same. It requires some kind of set of principles beyond hard-coded rules like "don't kill somebody." AIs are all about emergent behavior, just as is the case with people. You can't approach programming them the way you'd design a spreadsheet.
Sure, but using some utilitarian models for morality some Nazi activities actually come out fine (well, their implementations were poor, but you can justify some things that most of us would consider horrific).
There is no moral justification for throwing babies alive into fires.
And that would be the reason I said "some" Nazi activities and not "all" Nazi activities. I certainly find them abhorent, but if you take a strictly utilitarian view then things like involuntary experimentation on people could be justified.
Suppose human experimentation were reasonably likely to yield a medical advance? Would it be ethical? If you treated 1000 people like lab rats (vivsections and all), and it helped advance medicine to the benefit of millions of others, would that be wrong?
Do those humans get a say in it? Depending on the situation, you might get people to volunteer. The problem is when you do it against their will.
Both situations present quandaries, actually. Is it ethical to allow a person to cause permanent harm to themselves voluntarily if it will achieve a greater good? If so, is there a limit to this?
How about when it is involuntary? If I can save 1000 people by killing one person, is that ethical, even if they explicitly tell me they do not wish to take part? You could actually make an argument for either position. You'll find many people who would agree with either position.
As I said elsewhere, I have no doubt that you can give an answer to these questions. The problem is that you can't get everybody else to give the same answer to these questions. That creates a dilemma for anybody creating an AI where moral behavior is desirable. Even with a defined moral code it would be difficult to implement, and the fact that we can't even agree on a defined moral code makes it all the more difficult.
Slashdot Mirror
If the market is more efficient when trade is slowed down so most participants can interpret the available information then what is the value of HFT?
It is supposed to serve a different purpose, but IMHO it serves little purpose that benefits the general public, which, again IMHO, is the purpose of having a stock market.
All the news that's fit to print in 140 characters. Like this post.
This seems to be a common thing for NASDAQ to halt trading. Can NASDAQ halt trading any time my stocks start doing poorly?
The purpose of it is reasonable enough. If news is being released, they halt trading so that you don't have to worry about people on one news site getting the news 10 seconds ahead of people on another news site, or traders trying to guess the entirety of the news as it is revealed a word at a time.
Basically you plan to release earnings at a particular time, everybody knows this, trading is halted, the entirety of the report is released, people are given a short time to skim the relevant parts, and then people can resume trading having some semblance of having digested the news. That keeps the market more efficient rather than having big swings as people guess at what others might or might not have figured out that they haven't noticed in the news yet.
The same is true of sudden stock movements. It could be a computer glitch. Or it could be insider info. Halting trading lets everybody catch up with the true state of the market, and then everybody gets to start off on a reasonably equal footing. If the issue was a computer glitch humans have a chance to step in and ensure they are trading based on their sense of the actual value of the company.
As was pointed out already, if the fundamentals are bad, nothing is going to help you.
Uber's small enough now it doesn't matter because they're only going after the folks with money...
This has happened in other areas of the economy as well. Previously there was a monopoly that charged inflated prices to most of the population, and subsidized prices to a small part of the population. Then somebody comes along and competes for the profitable majority and ignores the profitless minority, which then causes a loss for the former monopoly.
I think the real problem is that this is a lousy way to provide services to the poor/etc. Just make the service provider free-market and run things super-efficiently. Then have the government pay the price for the poor, so that it comes out of taxes and not from the provider's profits. Then when a competitor comes along it is no big deal because the original company can compete fairly, and if prices are driven down it helps the poor and taxpayers.
That is also why I don't like the whole idea of subsidizing job creation, or even the minimum wage. Let companies be operated with brutal efficiency. Then take care of the people who can't get a job, rather than getting somebody to hire somebody they otherwise would not. Instead of a minimum wage, have basic income. Give people enough money to live on (simply) whether they work or not. Then employers will have to offer a decent working environment or pay to entice people to actually work - since nobody is desperate for food an employer who doesn't offer a decent deal will simply be unable to hire people. Somebody who effectively gets $9/hr to stay at home isn't going to spend 40 hours a week working at Walmart for $1 more per hour.
All true. Still, it would be unwise to take off without a set of charts. It would be like taking off with only one engine - there is no reason you couldn't do it (given enough runway), but the whole point of having the extra engine is so that you can afford to lose it.
And then someone has to print some of those books on a regular basis. And then someone has to dispose of them when they expire. And the pilots probably carry regularly updated information for every airport in the countries they might fly in, whether they go to that airport or not.
Well, for safety purposes they really need access to info for any airport they might come within range of. For a long flight, that is a LOT of airports.
The EFB can trivially store all that data globally, and also make it far more accessible. If they break through clouds and just want to navigate visually, one button pulls up the sectional/WAC chart for the area, vs having to dig up a rarely-used chart that they might not even carry otherwise.
The other side of this is that paper charts are falling into such disuse that they're becoming harder to even come by.
That's why even extremely rich space tourists go to them instead of financing development of vehicle of their own like Elon Musk is trying to do right now.
Not really disputing the facts here, but this isn't really an apples-to-apples.
It is like calling somebody stupid for building their own plane when it is far easier and cheaper to just buy a ticket on an airliner. That would be true if the only goal were to get from point A to point B, but people who build things usually have other goals.
I don't have an irrational hate for Uber ... I have a well reasoned dislike for a company who says "la la la, we're not listening, your laws don't apply because we're awesome".
The thing is, most people likely to consume their services would rather have them operating just as they are than otherwise. It is a bit of an irony given that we're a democracy, but stuff like this happens all the time. We have speed limits that almost nobody follows, and yet they aren't changed. The issue is that laws often do not reflect the political will of the population.
So, just about everybody is starting to just ignore laws in these cases and dare anybody to do anything about it. People just speed, and politicians know that if they actually tried to enforce the speed limits rigorously it would be political suicide. Companies like Uber operate, and if anybody messes with them it causes them a bunch of backlash. Presidents just work around Congress, and there isn't much that Congress can do about it, since they'll never get the supermajority required for impeachment. Judges just override gay marriage laws passed in states, and they get upheld.
People just don't want to deal with the process necessary to change the laws, so the laws reflect the will of special interests that can navigate the process and get the laws established. People will instead just ignore the law, and everybody just goes along with it one way or another.
Uber is really just part of a much larger trend.
Im sure most of these companies feel like its worth the PR, until they realize shipping through an unregulated, unlicensed, un-insured third party is a great way to watch $12,000 worth of shoes and purses go from the back of a prius to a roaring bonfire on youtube.
You do realize that big companies monitor their vendor's performance, and only work with vendors that do a good job.
At my workplace we really don't care how the outside vendor gets the job done for stuff like this as long as they get it done. We care about performance, not process (except at the interfaces with us).
If Uber starts losing items, they'll go out of business. Heck, if they can't give their customers (the big vendors) visibility into where their stuff is at all times, they'll never get the business in the first place.
Nobody needs to regulate UPS. The big companies that use UPS already know how well they operate.
Requiring a restart is a Windows trait. I was hoping that my Linux installations would be better than that.
Er quite, though I was specifically referring to restarting PulseAudio, which takes a second not the entire computer. If the base underlying init process needs a restart, well, that's a different kettle of fish.
FWIW, the only time I restart systemd is to update the kernel, or I guess systemd itself (though the kernel changes more often and thus I can usually lump the latter in with the former). If you do live-patch your kernel, then you can do the same with systemd - it has a command to re-exec itself while preserving state.
I'm sure it isn't perfect, but it is as robust as anything else I've used on Linux. There are fairly few daemons that I've never seen need a restart sometime in the last 10 years.
As for #2, it doesn't really work that way. The govt didn't bail out ANY retirement funds (at least not private sector ones, nor any mutual funds and similar, money markets, etc). There were some people made whole for certain things out of FDIC or other insurance, but presumably they were paying for that via the premiums coming out of their returns, so its not QUITE a bailout, though perhaps the premiums are subsidized. So in the final analysis the problem isn't that the investors are too big to fail, its the firms themselves that get the bailouts.
Of course the retirement funds weren't bailed out. They didn't have to be, because the companies they invested in were bailed out instead. If the various investment banks were allowed to fail then they'd probably all crash and so would everything all those retirement funds were invested in. THAT is why those companies were too big to fail in the first place.
If investments were just a toy for the wealthy then we could let them play their games and take their haircuts. The problem is that the investment sector affects everybody, so we have no choice but to intervene when things go wrong. That gives us the right to prevent things from going wrong in the first place, even if it means the rich can't play their games any longer...
Just because you have everything recorded, doesn't mean it's useful, though.
While I agree with many of your points, often these records become important after the fact.
Suppose I have a record of every letter sent from anywhere to anywhere. Then somebody blows up a building or whatever and are now known as a terrorist. The database allows you to obtain a list of every letter that had his address somewhere on it. Or any letter sent to a suspicious address which originated in his vicinity even if it didn't have a return address (such as if it were dropped in a mailbox). That kind of information can be useful to expand a network of suspects.
It is like having a record of every phone call for the last 30 years. It is hard to look at call patterns and tell who is a threat. However, if somebody blows up a building you can figure out who their college roommate was, or who they dated in middle school. All kinds of relationships that would not be obvious if you just talked to somebody's neighbors or looked at their recent credit card / phone history become apparent. Maybe their former girlfriend works for the TSA and was on duty when a terrorist slipped past security, but there weren't any phone calls between them in the last 10 years. That is a lead that might become apparent with long-term record retention that would be missed without it. Of course, such techniques inevitably involve looking into the cases of people who are almost certainly innocent. If the girlfriend wasn't involved, pursuing her might mean neglecting other leads that are real threats.
Data is just data. However, there is a lot you can do with a targeted search once you know what you're looking for.
Whether all the pictures are also retained is a completely different story. 10 years ago, I'd have said, "No; too expensive." But storage costs have plummeted, so nowadays, maybe so.
They've been doing it for well over 10 years:
cite:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08...
Relevant quote:
Last month, The New York Times reported on the practice, which is called the Mail Isolation and Tracking system. The program was created by the Postal Service after the anthrax attacks in late 2001 killed five people, including two postal workers.
Well better lock up the potheads and dealers and send them to the rape factories right?
On a tangent, the fact that we can't even control crime in prison says a great deal about the ineffectiveness of our approach to crime. Heck, I'm sure they can't even keep drugs out of prison.
I absolutely hate ethical thought problems. They're always presented with a limited number of actions, with no provision for doing anything different or in addition or anything like that. Give me an actual situation, and let me ask questions about it that aren't answered with "no, you can't do that".
They're done that way to distill a matter down to the essence. The same issues apply to complicated situations, but they are far more convoluted.
Is it OK to force people to pay taxes so that others can have free health insurance? If they refuse to pay their taxes is it OK to imprison them, again so that others can have free health insurance? Is it ethical to pay $200k to extend the life of somebody on their deathbed by a week when that same sum could allow a homeless person to live in a half-decent home for a decade? Does it make a difference if the person who will live a week longer is happy and healthy for that week? Is the lottery ethical?
Every one of these issues is controversial, and ethical thought problems try to distill them down to elementary values problems, in the hope of shedding light on how to handle real-world ones where there are many more possible outcomes.
Perhaps, but I think we could get close for 90% of the world's population.
"Thall shall not kill" is a pretty common one.
"Thall shall not steal" is another, and so on.
Most humans seem to agree on the basics, "be nice to people, don't take things that aren't yours, help your fellow humans when you can, etc.
http://www.goodreads.com/work/...
Well, the army and Robin Hood might take issue with your statements. :) Nobody actually follows those rules rigidly in practice.
It isn't really enough to just have a list of rules like "don't kill." You need some kind of underlying principle that unifies them. Any intelligent being has to make millions of decisions in a day, and almost none of them are going to be on the lookup table. For example, you probably chose to get out of bed in the morning. How did you decide that doing this wasn't likely to result in somebody getting killed that day, or did you not care? I didn't give it much thought, because if I worried about causal relationships that far out I'd never do anything. But, when should an AI worry about such matters?
We actually make moral decisions all the time, we just don't think about them. When we want to design an AI, suddenly we have to.
We are not machines, it would be sad if we lost the humanity that makes us special.
Well, the fact that not everybody would agree with everything you just said means that none of this has anything to do with the fact that you're human. You have a bunch of opinions on these topics, as do I and everybody else.
And that was really all my point was. When we can't all agree together on what is right and wrong, how do you create some kind of AI convention to ensure that AIs only act for the public benefit?
I'm suggesting competition between markets. In the end the providers who best serve the people who actually make and lose real money, not the pure speculators, will determine what rules they want to follow, and it won't be the crap rules that Goldman and such want.
That would work if:
1. People could actually control what markets their money got invested in. Last time I checked I had no control over where my pension is invested. If my company's pension fund is wiped out, that is a problem for me.
2. Governments actually let people lose their money when they make bad choices. However, because of #1 they really can't do this. Plus so many people make bad choices they couldn't even really let it happen even if it were completely voluntary.
When markets are "too big to fail" then they need to be regulated so that they don't fail.
I'm definitely a fan of minimal intrusion. I'd have taken much more market-based solutions to most of the financial crisis problems, such as splitting up large banks (more competition, nobody is too big to fail on their own), or making bailouts much more powerful (government eminent domains company, reorganizes with only an interest to the national economy and no care of shareholders, and they do everything they can to find a basis for suing every previous executive of the company, then in the end the company is IPOed to get it out of the government's hands, the government recoups all its costs first, and then if anything is left over it goes to previous debtholders followed by shareholders). Because of collective idiocy I still think that markets are going to need to be regulated.
And that would be the reason I said "some" Nazi activities and not "all" Nazi activities. I certainly find them abhorent, but if you take a strictly utilitarian view then things like involuntary experimentation on people could be justified.
Logically, yes...
Morally, no...
We are not Vulcans...
That was my whole point. We can't agree on a logical definition of morality. Thus, it is really hard to design an AI that everybody would agree is moral.
As far as whether we are Vulcans - we actually have no idea how our brains make moral decisions. Sure, we understand aspects of it, but what makes you look at a kid and think about helping them become a better adult and what makes a psychopath look at a kid and think about how much money they could get if they kidnapped him is a complete mystery.
What I would suggest is that the barrier to entry for establishing different markets should be kept as low as feasible, and it should be relatively easy for order flow to move between one and another.
I'd argue the opposite. I'd encourage one set of rules for markets to operate under, and make it illegal to trade securities in any other way. Flash crashes and such are a threat to the national economy (just look back at 2008). The markets certainly should be regulated in a way that helps to stabilize them. It would also make things like transaction taxation easy to implement, and eliminate a lot of forms of fraud and tax evasion. Any security would be traded in exactly one market, and you own however many shares of it the exchange says you own.
There are lots of problems with this:
Arbitrage between different markets for one.
Just require that anything traded in the market be traded there exclusively. For additional effect, require by law that all trades within the country use a market that operates under these rules.
There is a lack of transparency ...
I do agree with some of these concerns. This model does require trusting the market administrators, and they would be in a position to give tremendous advantage to any party with inside connections.
Keeping the book secret, is another requirement you have, but it is impractical, and is difficult to audit or enforce.
I have mixed feelings on whether it should be secret. If it weren't, then those particular issues go away but there are others that then come up. However, I don't have a problem with anybody voluntarily sharing information. They just shouldn't be required to do so. I'd also allow anybody to directly place trades - it shouldn't cost anything to directly submit orders to the exchange other than perhaps having a deposit or bond.
The solution to this kind of problem is to have trades executed hourly or even daily, but at a random time which is not disclosed in advance. There might be only general guarantees such as it being at least 6 hours after the last trade. So, sometime on Tuesday every trade will be executed, and it will be between midnight and midnight. The computer will freeze the book at a random moment, and then run through and execute every trade it can. The book is secret until this time, and published after this time. I could see an argument for allowing changes or not, so I'm not sure which is better, though obviously all sales are final.
Then the cost of price discovery will go up significantly.
Define "significantly."
Do we really need nanosecond resolution on stick price changes?
Do fluctuations at those levels REALLY reflect changes in the actual value of a company? At 4:01.000000001 PM is GM really worth 14.01, but at 4:01.0000000012 something changed and it is now worth 14.02? And what is the cost of having this "extra resolution?"
Think of it this way; Robot A and B -- the first one can never harm or kill you, nor would choose to with some calculation that "might" save others, and the 2nd one might and you have to determine if it calculates "greater good" with an accurate enough prediction model. Which one will you allow in your house? Which one would cause you to keep an EMP around for a rainy day?
Either is actually a potential moral monster in the making. The one might allow you to all die in a fire because it cannot predict with certainty what would happen if it walked on weakened floor boards, which might cause it to accidentally cause the taking of a life. Indeed, a robot truly programmed to never take any action which could possibly lead to the loss of life would probably never be able to take any action at all. I can't predict what the long-reaching consequences of my taking a shower in the morning might be. Maybe if I didn't create the additional demand for water the water company wouldn't hire a new employee, which means they'd be stuck at home unemployed instead of getting in the car and driving to work and getting into a fatal accident.
Sure, it is a ridiculous example. My point is just that we all make millions of unconscious risk evaluations every day and any AI would have to do the same. It requires some kind of set of principles beyond hard-coded rules like "don't kill somebody." AIs are all about emergent behavior, just as is the case with people. You can't approach programming them the way you'd design a spreadsheet.
Sure, but using some utilitarian models for morality some Nazi activities actually come out fine (well, their implementations were poor, but you can justify some things that most of us would consider horrific).
There is no moral justification for throwing babies alive into fires.
And that would be the reason I said "some" Nazi activities and not "all" Nazi activities. I certainly find them abhorent, but if you take a strictly utilitarian view then things like involuntary experimentation on people could be justified.
Suppose human experimentation were reasonably likely to yield a medical advance? Would it be ethical? If you treated 1000 people like lab rats (vivsections and all), and it helped advance medicine to the benefit of millions of others, would that be wrong?
Do those humans get a say in it? Depending on the situation, you might get people to volunteer. The problem is when you do it against their will.
Both situations present quandaries, actually. Is it ethical to allow a person to cause permanent harm to themselves voluntarily if it will achieve a greater good? If so, is there a limit to this?
How about when it is involuntary? If I can save 1000 people by killing one person, is that ethical, even if they explicitly tell me they do not wish to take part? You could actually make an argument for either position. You'll find many people who would agree with either position.
As I said elsewhere, I have no doubt that you can give an answer to these questions. The problem is that you can't get everybody else to give the same answer to these questions. That creates a dilemma for anybody creating an AI where moral behavior is desirable. Even with a defined moral code it would be difficult to implement, and the fact that we can't even agree on a defined moral code makes it all the more difficult.