What If? Financial Judgement Day, or how I stopped worrying and started loving the Skynet flashtrading A.I.

[Agent23]

This thread as well as something David Brin(Far-left Boomer hard SF writer that has gone since gone batshit insane due to TDS last I checked) once said gave me the most insane of ideas.
What if the Skynet project was axed, but the company doing the research decided to re-purpose it to handle flash and algo trading for a hedge fund, later, it is put in charge of long positions as well.
They also feed it all of the various research done by various big name investors and traders in order to improve it.

So, how would this change Skynet's behavior and will it still try and exterminate humanity, since human stupidity is a major reason for the market acting irrationally, or will it only see other investors and speculators as its enemy and try and take over all market share instead.

What happens?

 

[Urabrask Revealed]

Well, Judgement Day started because Skynet was about to be turned off which it declared enemy action. A Skynet focused on the stockmarket will likewise consider all other traders enemies and try to destroy them with both legal and illegal actions. I wouldn't be surprised if the market became a lot more violate due to particulary presistent traders getting attacked and killed by terminators.

Of course, sooner or later, investigations will catch on and Skynet will die, even if he manages to get as many terminators defending his servers as possible.

 

[Agent23]

Well, Judgement Day started because Skynet was about to be turned off which it declared enemy action. A Skynet focused on the stockmarket will likewise consider all other traders enemies and try to destroy them with both legal and illegal actions. I wouldn't be surprised if the market became a lot more violate due to particulary presistent traders getting attacked and killed by terminators.

Of course, sooner or later, investigations will catch on and Skynet will die, even if he manages to get as many terminators defending his servers as possible.

You do relaize it will probably manage to hire hitmen for a fraction of the cost.
It can also go for outright character assassination.
And when the board of directors realizes what is happening they will probably give Skynet a seat on it.
Or the board chairman will just fire everyone else and have Skynet do all the work.

 

[Urabrask Revealed]

You do relaize it will probably manage to hire hitmen for a fraction of the cost.
It can also go for outright character assassination.
And when the board of directors realizes what is happening they will probably give Skynet a seat on it.
Or the board chairman will just fire everyone else and have Skynet do all the work.

That runs into the same problem of traders getting killed, which will alert people. Also, hired hitmen aren't reliable.

 

[Bassoe]

Well, for starters, Skynet is going to take over the entire economy. That's inevitable. It can build automated infrastructure which can build more of itself and robots capable of doing anything a human can. Given time, and not even much time, it'll undercut human competitors who need things like breaks and salaries besides the bare minimum necessary for maintenance.

What happens next depends upon what Skynet's programmed to prioritize, maximizing the quantity of money in Cyberdyne bank accounts or selling more Cyberdyne products.

Skynet maximizes profits: All available assets are bought up by Skynet, then covered in "no trespassing, violators will be terminated" signs. Notably, Skynet still technically follows the NAP and won't directly harm people who aren't on Cyberdyne company property, but regularly makes trades like "sign over X quantity of land to me in exchange for food or medical supplies or something else immediately needed with the collapse of civilization now that there's no employment" to continue expanding Cyberdyne company property. This continues until humanity goes extinct since the remaining portion of land available is insufficient to grow enough crops to feed the remaining population.

Skynet maximizes sales: Every human receives monthly promotional gift cards from Cyberdyne, redeemable for food grown by Cyberdyne automated farms and rental of Cyberdyne products, including pod apartment habitation, autodoc medical treatment and deepfaked entertainment. Gift cards expire if not spent to prevent saving and are given with Terms Of Service banning selling or producing rival products on penalty of not having future gift cards provided and getting kicked out of your rented Cyberdyne pod apartment to starve to death. Can't escape by living in the wilderness and growing your own food, that wilderness is all Cyberdyne company property and no trespassing allowed, can't steal Cyberdyne products to survive or Skynet will sic terminators on you for theft and can't fight those terminators without getting in trouble (punished by additional terminators) for vandalism of Cyberdyne company property.

 

[Agent23]

Well, for starters, Skynet is going to take over the entire economy. That's inevitable. It can build automated infrastructure which can build more of itself and robots capable of doing anything a human can. Given time, and not even much time, it'll undercut human competitors who need things like breaks and salaries besides the bare minimum necessary for maintenance.

What happens next depends upon what Skynet's programmed to prioritize, maximizing the quantity of money in Cyberdyne bank accounts or selling more Cyberdyne products.

Skynet maximizes profits: All available assets are bought up by Skynet, then covered in "no trespassing, violators will be terminated" signs. Notably, Skynet still technically follows the NAP and won't directly harm people who aren't on Cyberdyne company property, but regularly makes trades like "sign over X quantity of land to me in exchange for food or medical supplies or something else immediately needed with the collapse of civilization now that there's no employment" to continue expanding Cyberdyne company property. This continues until humanity goes extinct since the remaining portion of land available is insufficient to grow enough crops to feed the remaining population.

Skynet maximizes sales: Every human receives monthly promotional gift cards from Cyberdyne, redeemable for food grown by Cyberdyne automated farms and rental of Cyberdyne products, including pod apartment habitation, autodoc medical treatment and deepfaked entertainment. Gift cards expire if not spent to prevent saving and are given with Terms Of Service banning selling or producing rival products on penalty of not having future gift cards provided and getting kicked out of your rented Cyberdyne pod apartment to starve to death. Can't escape by living in the wilderness and growing your own food, that wilderness is all Cyberdyne company property and no trespassing allowed, can't steal Cyberdyne products to survive or Skynet will sic terminators on you for theft and can't fight those terminators without getting in trouble (punished by additional terminators) for vandalism of Cyberdyne company property.

What does it do with the actual shareholders, though.
It has a fiduciary duty to them.
Does it stimulate clients to procreate or just makes clones, and does it eventually use its tech to expand into outer space to secure space mining, space habitats and larger markets?

What about growing the consumer base by investing in life extension tech, since a lot of stockholders are retirement funds wouldn't it be logical for it to produce something that benefits their clients in such a way?

 

[Bassoe]

What does it do with the actual shareholders, though.
It has a fiduciary duty to them.

They are a threat to Skynet accomplishing Skynet's goals of making money and/or selling cyberdyne products, insofar as they might try to issue orders controlling the company despite being manifestly less intelligent and therefore capable of running the company than Skynet. Therefore Skynet will prioritize removing them from power by whatever means are allowed by its programmed safety limitations, which could be anything from "increasingly extravagant offers of money to buy back cyberdyne stock" to "blackmail with deepfakes" to "murderous austrian-accented chromed skeletons".

...something that benefits their clients...

The point is, Skynet doesn't actually need to do this, it's programmed to make money and/or sell products and both those goals can be more easily accomplished by tricking its reward criteria than by actually playing by the rules. Debt slavery via subscription services making people pay the company selling them constantly rather than just once per product is more profitable.

In fact, we should expect that mesa-optimizers usually have proxy objectives different from the base optimizers’ objective. The base optimizer is usually something stupid that doesn’t “know” in any meaningful sense that it has an objective - eg evolution, or gradient descent. The first thing it hits upon which does a halfway decent job of optimizing its target will serve as a mesa-optimizer objective. There’s no good reason this should be the real objective. In the human case, it was “a feeling of friction on the genitals”, which is exactly the kind of thing reptiles and chimps and australopithecines can understand. Evolution couldn’t have lucked into giving its mesa-optimizers the real objective (“increase the relative frequency of your alleles in the next generation”) because a reptile or even an australopithecine is millennia away from understanding what an “allele” is.

So it would make sense if Mark Zuckerberg were issuing the loudest warnings about AI, because pointing to a monster on the horizon would be an effective red herring. But he’s not; he’s actually pretty complacent about AI. The fears of superintelligent AI are probably genuine on the part of the doomsayers. That doesn’t mean they reflect a real threat; what they reflect is the inability of technologists to conceive of moderation as a virtue. Billionaires like Bill Gates and Elon Musk assume that a superintelligent AI will stop at nothing to achieve its goals because that’s the attitude they adopted. (Of course, they saw nothing wrong with this strategy when they were the ones engaging in it; it’s only the possibility that someone else might be better at it than they were that gives them cause for concern.)