Any Quants You Want Surveying?

It seems that most financial trades these days are carried out between computers - which reminds me of the old joke about answer phones having a better relationship than the people who own them. It is not possible to work out whether the assertion that the "Quants [fed] the beast ever more intricate lines of code" is true but I suspect that it is. Why should trading programs be any different from all the other wonderful bits of spaghetti which rule our world these days? With the recent Turing Tests in the news, I am beginning to wonder if the first truly intelligent machine will actually arise by default from the random sets of complexity that seem to have got away from their creators. Of course such a haphazard creation will have all the faults that plague our imperfect minds. This chimes wonderfully with the evolutionary argument that points out that the imperfections in the natural world are proof that evolution is random and uncontrolled. I suppose if any nebulous financial mind arising from these automatic trades should really come about, then like the bomb in Dark Star it might start analysing its own purpose in life. Maybe this has already happened and the mind that exists considers itself far superior to its creators and has decided to bring the market down. I can't quite believe that yet; I suspect that the current chaos and short-termism is just the result of there being no difference between sheep and share owners. (The rest of this paragraph was a descent into manic and irrelevant ideas and has therefore been deleted).

We were really quite disappointed in Stephen Fry in America. I suppose it was diverting but you really expect more in the way of analysis. It may have been the editing but my let-down was because Fry had said he was not going to pander to the general British idea of Americans and then did just that. The glaring sentence was a glib summing-up of the creation of the IMF and the world bank at a hotel that looked like the one on The Shining but was actually Mount Washington Hotel. Never mind, a comedian of the semi-same ilk - Griff Rhys Jones - has been doing a wonderful job of guiding us round The World's Greatest Cities. This obviously proves that liking something is all a matter of it reaching your expectations.