I disagree with the premise that most of our financial decisions are algorithmically driven. The majority of my spending goes toward necessities that I have little to no control over - mortgage, groceries, utility bills, insurance, fuel, maintenance, and so on. I'd imagine it's the same for most people. Very few of my purchases are something I've actively decided to buy.
this post was submitted on 01 May 2025
-31 points (17.0% liked)
Showerthoughts
35252 readers
667 users here now
A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.
Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts:
- Both “200” and “160” are 2 minutes in microwave math
- When you’re a kid, you don’t realize you’re also watching your mom and dad grow up.
- More dreams have been destroyed by alarm clocks than anything else
Rules
- All posts must be showerthoughts
- The entire showerthought must be in the title
- No politics
- If your topic is in a grey area, please phrase it to emphasize the fascinating aspects, not the dramatic aspects. You can do this by avoiding overly politicized terms such as "capitalism" and "communism". If you must make comparisons, you can say something is different without saying something is better/worse.
- A good place for politics is c/politicaldiscussion
- Posts must be original/unique
- Adhere to Lemmy's Code of Conduct and the TOS
If you made it this far, showerthoughts is accepting new mods. This community is generally tame so its not a lot of work, but having a few more mods would help reports get addressed a little sooner.
Whats it like to be a mod? Reports just show up as messages in your Lemmy inbox, and if a different mod has already addressed the report, the message goes away and you never worry about it.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
You could argue that that price of these things is determined by 'the market' which can be algorithmically driven and thus automated to AI potentially
Fair enough.... I meant more in the sense of investment/pension funds. Or the fact that the actual value of the bills in our pockets is driven up or (more frequently) down and probably so does the interest rate of your mortgage or the price of your fuel. And maybe not for you, but the algorithms on social media do have influence on what company you choose for your insurance.
I've had similar thoughts. Feels like money is a bit like gravity, at some point it's completely out of control and distorts the normal rules.
I like the comparison. We used to think of the Economy like this hard-to-control, vital but occasionally dangerous natural force, like Gravity. The showerthought was that with the advent of machine models, money has started becoming sentient and making decisions without us.
That's not a true statement. It's barely coherent. But it's kinda got a kind of surreal charm to it... like with a bit of work you could turn it into a great science fiction story or a thought experiment.
Thanks! I'll try longer showers.
So.... there was some kind of thought experiment about an AI that was optimized for making paperclips and it took over the world... I never really got the point of that one.
But if you've ever called tech support at a big company, at some point you realize you're not talking with people, but with scripts that someone wrote and are forcing the people to read. So: how about a steampunk novel in which a company becomes "sentient" because everything is automated through business processes, including executive decisions? This sounds like something that might already have been done, so you'd have to do some background reading.
Alternately, I believe sophisticated algorithms are used to predict market trends... but imagine if one of those algorithms begins defining itself in such a way that "something happens".... I dunno this one requires a bit more thought...
I think that's already uncomfortably close to reality.
A fully AI company was already tried as an experiment. There is also a company that appointed an AI CEO but I suspect this one is a publicity stunt. The experiment was a "failure" by the way, with AI agents only completing less than 20% of the tasks in the fake company and with some hilarious mishaps. But 20% of a company tasks being done in full autonomy by (not specifically trained) AI is scary.
Right now, various socials are full of AI generated fake engagement, images and videos. Meta is offering AI-powered ads. The obvious question I see asked every time, also here on Lemmy, is: if most of Facebook becomes a zombie world where comments and fake engagement is all LLMs, who would buy those Meta ads? That question was actually what inspired this wildly successful (-27 votes and counting!) showerthought of mine: this fake engagement only makes sense if Meta thinks we'll give AI more and more agency to choose the products we buy and (eventually) buy them on our behalf. So it's going to be AI convincing other AIs to buy. Our money becomes sentient, so to speak,
Crazy talk, right? Well....
Awesome! Facebook becomes nothing but AI, undergoes a singularity, and sucks capitalism in with it. Then we can just put it all in a box, bury it, and the rest of us live in utopia.