Penguin Business MoneyGPT: AI and the Threat to the Global Economy

Okay, I admit. I've been reading Jim Rickards books since Currency Wars inn 2010. He has written about money and "the death of money." About war games, the pandemic, international trade, gold (and more gold), and much more. And now he tackles GBT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer). Essentially, these are computer models that learn how to do things, only at speed-of-electrons faster than human wet-ware.So far, so good. If you're into coding and this level of tech, you'll love the book. It's eye-candy. And if you're barely fluent in this new lingo, read it anyhow because you'll learn something and I mean important.Here's my takeaway: GBT takes much decision-making out of human hands, and places the work inside a computer system. (trading the stock market, for example.) And if one or two or a few, or even a whole lot of people do this, it's a thing and won't change the world too much. But what happens with rapid growth towards widespread adoption? You know, the "everybody is doing it" approach. Well, if everybody is doing it, then everybody's systems will make much the same sort of decisions, only much faster. That's because, in many scenarios, many people's systems "learned" their decision-tree processes in much the same way. And at this point, all the decision-steps are happening very fast, moving towards same or very similar outcomes. Which means that you can get flash-moves up or down. As in, eg, a market meltup or a market meltdown. And it's all happening outside of the time frame of human judgment. That is, the systems move so rapidly that there's no time for human wisdom to look at things and say, "Hey, something's out of whack here. Don't make that move."Nope... By the time the human eyeballs and brain cells begin to intervene, the damage may be done. And in this sense, Rickards gives us all a serious lesson of caution about where this new GPT idea can go. Plus, this is before the proverbial Bad Actors (market scammers, criminals, state-level players like military orgs) do their nefarious thing.I can't restate the entire book here. There's all of the foregoing, and much, much more. In this sense, the book is definitely worth a read, and will offer plenty of thinking. Plus, check out the end-notes, which are deeply thorough and astonishing in breadth. Definitely a thoughtful, well-written, provoking tome. Add this one to your Jim Rickards library.

Ai rusks and dangers

I’ve read a lot of Jim Rickards’ work, yet this book is a surprise. The subtitle speaks of a “threat” – which makes the book sound like a downer but in fact it reads like an exhilarating back-and-forth between Rickards and AI that spans the world from China to the Situation Room to the NYSE to an American home.Rickards brings a huge amount of learning to the book (the “Selected Sources” list at the end of the book runs 24 pages!) spanning Homer, Aristotle, Poe, Heidegger, Alan Greenspan, Andy Warhol, Marshall McLuhan, Kissinger, Kubrick and a dazzling number of articles, books and academic papers I’d never have time to read. Yet all of the book is very readable, a page-turner.The book is full of observations like “When a robot trains on propaganda, it repeats propaganda” and “Showing that a deep learning machine is not as successful at innovation as a child makes a powerful case for excluding such machines entirely.” Rickards warns: “Never anthropomorphize the math.”Yet Rickards says AI is here to stay. My favorite sections of the book are the deep dives into history, computer “hallucinations” (or “confabulations” as Rickards clarifies) and even an excellent exploration of art beginning with Marcel Duchamp (Jim has long advised fine art as an investment and he knows his stuff).And of course Rickards’ advice about how to get and keep your money is useful for everyone from the beginning investor to someone rich enough to need to put their wealth in many different places (and Jim knows those places).Last of all, this is a book written with clarity and honesty. For all his intelligence, Rickards never speaks down to his readers. He is patient and they will learn a lot about AI, the world and money. And Jim is humble enough to end with “If there are any mistakes in this book, they’re on me.” If there are mistakes in this book, I didn’t see them. This book is a must-read at the right time.

If you're curious about how AI is changing the game in the financial world—and what that means for all of us—this book is defintely worth a read.Rickards does an amazing job of breaking down complex ideas into something that's easy to understand, providing background into the explosive rise of AI tools like GPT-4 to the deeper implications these technologies have on global finance and national security.He also highlights the potential pitfalls of relying too heavily on AI without human oversight—like how automated selling could lead to rapid market crashes or how lack of AI oversight could escalate global conflicts. But he also emphasizes the importance of staying informed and proactive. It's a wake-up call, but one that comes with a roadmap.If you're interested in finance, tech, or just want to get a handle on where the world could be headed with AI, give this book a read. Highly recommended!

The first chapter is as good as the scripts of some of Hollywood’s best “crash” movies like Margin Call and Big Short. Jim has the best grasp on why new technology inevitably lead to sharper and faster crashes in financial markets — he also understands the limitations of this technology, since AIs are all built on the same data sets it leads to a sort of market groupthink that can create chaos faster than human systems can respond to. Super thought provoking and fascinating book from one of America’s most critical financial thinkers