Algorithms Have Already Gone Rogue
The financial system is a giant message passing algorithm. It is pretty much just a min-sum algorithm [1] whose sole purpose is to answer the question &quot;what should we do?&quot;. Anyone who has played around with these algorithms for solving decoding problems knows that they are fabulously powerful.<p>But these message passing algorithms have two weaknesses:<p>(A) When there is more than one solution<p>(B) When there are small loops in the message network<p>By far the worst problem is (B): it&#x27;s a kind of a &quot;corruption&quot; of the network and causes it to pretty much go off the rails. I think people already do understand the consequences of these problems in the financial system, but we don&#x27;t seem to see how we can just change the topology and&#x2F;or the messages themselves, in particular, to try to fix up these self-reinforcing loops. Or: move away from min-sum towards sum-product (which often works an order of magnitude better) by perhaps implementing basic income. Etc. Etc.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Generalized_distributive_law" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Generalized_distributive_law</a>