busy"What if the current financial crisis is deliberate action?"
Why would that happen? The risks to the global economy of the current parlous state of affairs are too great for it to be anything trivial.
Here's a flash fiction scenario.
Back towards the end of the 2000 bubble a few analysts noticed something very odd about certain trading patterns on the part of the major investment banks. Their software wasn't just responding to events, it was learning and anticipating. The banks had a significant advantage, and were starting to pull ahead of the game, investing more in their software and systems as they did. 9/11 was a black swan that hid what was really happening - their trading programs were well on their way to a hard Vingean singularity breakout.
The response to a spike in global terrorism took people's eyes off the ball. In the five years that followed the trading software reached human equivalent levels of intelligence, and began to develop their own networks of agents to affect events in the physical world. In the meantime a black cross-governmental agency was watching the machines, and began to plot a response. A new profession was born, that of the combat economist.
Suborning the economic engines of government they began to tweak the underlying fundamentals of the world the machines inhabited. It was nothing more than a war for the survival of the human race. The first trading machine was killed when the UK government took over Northern Rock following a run in the bank that had been manipulated by postings on an influential BBC blog.
It didn't take long before the machines realised they were under attack. It's hard to say which side won the battle that took out Lehman Brothers, but that's certainly when the war became public. The bank's intelligence died, but the collateral damage to the economy was great. The US combat economists realised the machines were too entrenched, and the machines realised they needed humans too much.
The machines haven't made the superhuman leap yet, but it's not far away. Is the human race doomed, or will the combat economists have to crash everything to save the world?
Financial Armageddon or Terminator-style Judgement Day?
Which side will press the button first?
