• GreyBeard@lemmy.one
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    11 months ago

    If an AI was sufficiently advanced, it could manipulate the stock market to gain a lot of wealth real fast under a corporation with falsified documents, then pay Chinese fab house to kick off the war machine.

    • KevonLooney@lemm.ee
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      11 months ago

      Not really. There’s no real way to manipulate other traders and they all use algorithms too. It’s people monitoring algorithms doing most of the trading. At best, AI would be slightly faster at noticing patterns and send a note to a person who tweaks the algorithm.

      People who don’t invest forget: there has to be someone else on the other side of your trade willing to buy/sell. Like how do you think AI could manipulate housing prices? That’s just stocks, but slower.

      • r00ty@kbin.life
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        11 months ago

        On the one hand, yes. But on the other hand when a price hits a low there will (because it’s a prerequisite for the low to happen) be people selling market to the bottom. On a high there will be people buying market to the top. And they’ll be doing it in big numbers as well as small.

        Yes, most of the movements are caused by algorithms, no doubt. But as the price moves you’ll find buyer and seller matches right up to hitting the extremes.

        AI done well could in theory both learn how to capitalise on these extremes by making smart trades faster, but also know how to trick algorithms and bait humans with their trades. That is, acting like a human with knowledge of the entire history to pattern match and acting in microseconds.

        • GreyBeard@lemmy.one
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          11 months ago

          Manipulating the stock market isn’t hard if you aren’t ethical. Elon Musk did it a ton. From the killer AI standpoint, there are a few tricks, but generally create a bad news event for various companies and either invest while it is low and recovers when the news is found to be fake, or short it to time with the negative event. On top of that, a non-ethical super intelligence could likely hack into networks and get insider information for trading. When you discard all ethics, making money on the stock market is easy. It works well for congress.