Has the market peaked?

economic

GreatApe wrote: »

What are houses worth if its as easy as picking a design on a website and hitting print and some bots get to work and builds it in 48 hours?

What are the oil and gas companies worth if the bots drive the price of installed solar and batteries down 10x?

What are the car companies worth if the bots drive the cars so we need 1/4th as many vehicles produced?

What are the consumer goods companies worth when anyone can start up a fully automated factory producing the same things?

What are agri businesses worth if agriculture goes fully automated. You just log into google maps select an area pick the crops and hit farm.

What are telecommunication companies worth when tech advances to the point of not needed nodes and works on say mesh networks?

What is samsung or apple worth when the most basic generic phones are 10 x better than current best of class phones? There is only so much resolution our eyes can see and only so much speed of loading a browser our brains can detect. I am still using a 6 year old laptop just because it does everything I need.

What is facebook worth if there is much less of a need to advertise. For instance car companies advertise but if the future is self drive uber type affair then the car companies have no need to advertise to the public. Likewise car insurance or AA breakdown cover or Autotrader none of them need to advertise in a self drive fleet world

But who will own all this technology? Will it be equally shared for every single person on the planet?

Or will it be the few who invented the tech/brand etc who owns and runs it and the rest of us have to pay to use the services? If we have to pay for it we will need to be productive in some way (but not nearly as much as now since nearly all the jobs would be gone and so perhaps the cost to use all this tech for the end user would be close to zero but not zero). Even after all this tech there are certain things which have value from its productivity like prostitution. Sex robots will never be able to replace the real thing.

GreatApe

economic wrote: »

But who will own all this technology? Will it be equally shared for every single person on the planet?

Could go either way, my guess is if it is concentrated in the hands of a few then that will be a bad road. It is the god technology whoever gets their first has dominion over earth. So I would hope it is distributed

Or will it be the few who invented the tech/brand etc who owns and runs it and the rest of us have to pay to use the services? If we have to pay for it we will need to be productive in some way (but not nearly as much as now since nearly all the jobs would be gone and so perhaps the cost to use all this tech for the end user would be close to zero but not zero). Even after all this tech there are certain things which have value from its productivity like prostitution. Sex robots will never be able to replace the real thing.

What if you could not tell the difference between human and bot?
Take the extreme lets say you grow a biological body minus the brain. In the skull a computer with some software. Is that a human or a robot?

economic

GreatApe wrote: »

Could go either way, my guess is if it is concentrated in the hands of a few then that will be a bad road. It is the god technology whoever gets their first has dominion over earth. So I would hope it is distributed



What if you could not tell the difference between human and bot?
Take the extreme lets say you grow a biological body minus the brain. In the skull a computer with some software. Is that a human or a robot?

If that were possible then it will take a lot longer then 20 years. We do not even know everything there is to know about our brains.

Look how far we have come in 20 years. A lot, we did not even have the internet 20 years ago at a mainstream level it is now. But is this change really that significant? Going from humans not able to produce fire and producing fire was a much bigger step and that took a lot longer then 20 years. same with going to the first ever electrical device.

If you can make a humanoid that is perfectly indistinguishable from a human then we have just copied the brain (along with the rest of the body which would be easy to do). The brain is just a huge bunch of neurons processing if/while/else statements through chemical/electrical interactions. what about consciousness (if it really even exists)? I guess we will know more what consciousness really is if we are to replicate a human with a humanoid.

GreatApe

economic wrote: »

If that were possible then it will take a lot longer then 20 years. We do not even know everything there is to know about our brains.

Look how far we have come in 20 years. A lot, we did not even have the internet 20 years ago at a mainstream level it is now. But is this change really that significant? Going from humans not able to produce fire and producing fire was a much bigger step and that took a lot longer then 20 years. same with going to the first ever electrical device.

If you can make a humanoid that is perfectly indistinguishable from a human then we have just copied the brain (along with the rest of the body which would be easy to do). The brain is just a huge bunch of neurons processing if/while/else statements through chemical/electrical interactions. what about consciousness (if it really even exists)? I guess we will know more what consciousness really is if we are to replicate a human with a humanoid.

Once you get software that can design and create everything gets much faster. At that point you could potentially condense a thousand years of progress into a few years.

So while we can probably agree that in 1,000 years we will have solved pretty much everything (modern science and tech is really only about 100 years old) the question really becomes will the exponential information age continue and will AI increase that further so that 3,000 years of human invention and information is condensed to 30 years?

economic

GreatApe wrote: »

Once you get software that can design and create everything gets much faster. At that point you could potentially condense a thousand years of progress into a few years.

So while we can probably agree that in 1,000 years we will have solved pretty much everything (modern science and tech is really only about 100 years old) the question really becomes will the exponential information age continue and will AI increase that further so that 3,000 years of human invention and information is condensed to 30 years?

There will be a lot of hurdles. right now the AI that exists is very very basic and i would not even call it AI. How do we make AI think for itself? This requires Big Data. But how do we know the data is enough? What about if the data is "wrong".

There are computational/hardware restrictions as well. Sure processors and GPUs have improved vastly over the decades but how much computational power do we need to take AI to the next level exponentially? what about Moore's law? Im by no means an expert, you probably are more so, so i might be chatting !!!!.

Crashy_Time

ilovehouses wrote: »

I'm now..

VWRL - 46% - world tracker
ISF - 30% - UK tracker to give some home bias
IUKD - 7% - legacy holdings I can't be bothered to sell
VGOV - 17% - the lowest risk asset I can find

I used to have a portfolio of single shares and I've had a great few trading years since 2009 being well ahead of the world and local benchmarks but for the last two years I would've been better off with trackers. I've either lost my edge or stopped being lucky - either way I'm letting the world work for me now.

The UK weighting implies you still think you have an edge regarding the UK?

westernpromise

economic wrote: »

So are you saying avoid all UK contracts and stick to US? Are the US ones generally in backwardation vs UK?

Im looking at DBA (Powershares DB agri fund). Looks like it has all US contracts. Generally agri have been shorted to death by CTAs as they just follow trends with their algos. I would expect once a reversal of the trend to occur that Agri prices to shoot up. The problem is would i see a 50% decline first (some of it due to the significant contango) before a 100% rise in which case i've made nothing?

I am also looking at the base metal equivalent (DBB) which seems to be a lot better. Most of it is in Zinc which is in backwardation.

In the US the regulator regards all softs backwardation as symptomatic of market manipulation. When it occurs the CFTC expects exchanges to order players to exit their long positions until normal backwardation resumes. As a result it is unusual for backwardation to last very long. If it costs second month plus $100 to put stock into a warehouse, a physical player will never be allowed to collect the $100 because the regulation forces it to be $0 or as close as. Hence you can't sell stock for what it costs to put it there which limits the contract's utility as a delivery conduit and consequently also as a hedge.

The UK regulator has no such view on price or market structure, so backwardation is permitted up to the level of stock replacement cost. So a physical player can put stock into a warehouse and be confident that he can sell it later for what it cost to put it there.

If I were going to put on a position that always had to be long, I'd stick to UK I think. The CFTC approach limits the upside for no real reason.

GreatApe

economic wrote: »

There will be a lot of hurdles. right now the AI that exists is very very basic and i would not even call it AI. How do we make AI think for itself? This requires Big Data. But how do we know the data is enough? What about if the data is "wrong".

There are computational/hardware restrictions as well. Sure processors and GPUs have improved vastly over the decades but how much computational power do we need to take AI to the next level exponentially? what about Moore's law? Im by no means an expert, you probably are more so, so i might be chatting !!!!.

Humans are just made of about 1.2kg of brain there is no reason to suppose by chance humans evolved to have the absolute peak of intelligence theoretically possible. We are limited by DNA and also the size of our skulls. It is just a question of when not if humans create intelligences greater than our own.

An artificial intelligence can be electronic and run at 5 GHz rather than the brains 100 Hz
The artificial intelligence can be housed in a warehouse bigger than the worlds biggest building with billions of chips if necessary.

Moore law has already jumped a few times from one medium to another. First there were relays which got better and better. Then we jumped to vacuum tubes which also got smaller and better. Then we went onto silicon transistors and that has been great for about 40 years and maybe has another ten years to run. Its quite likely we will move onto another medium for information processing if we come to a point the current medium is not growing. Semiconductor industry is $500 billion globally there is a lot of money and resources to do the R&D needed to keep improving

I think its primarily a software problem at this stage.
If AI needs a computer a billion times faster than we have now
Well if the software was ready a company or government could say let's just build a billion computers in a huge warehouse rather than waiting 30 years for a single computer to become a billion times faster.

economic

westernpromise wrote: »

In the US the regulator regards all softs backwardation as symptomatic of market manipulation. When it occurs the CFTC expects exchanges to order players to exit their long positions until normal backwardation resumes. As a result it is unusual for backwardation to last very long. If it costs second month plus $100 to put stock into a warehouse, a physical player will never be allowed to collect the $100 because the regulation forces it to be $0 or as close as. Hence you can't sell stock for what it costs to put it there which limits the contract's utility as a delivery conduit and consequently also as a hedge.

The UK regulator has no such view on price or market structure, so backwardation is permitted up to the level of stock replacement cost. So a physical player can put stock into a warehouse and be confident that he can sell it later for what it cost to put it there.

If I were going to put on a position that always had to be long, I'd stick to UK I think. The CFTC approach limits the upside for no real reason.

Do you know if this is just restricted to softs? What about base metals?

westernpromise

economic wrote: »

Do you know if this is just restricted to softs? What about base metals?

Would be the same regulation in either case.

Incidentally I mean to say CFTC expects exchanges to order players to exit their long positions until normal contango resumes