Tag Archives: Bots

Hoping for Change: Monetary Policy Edition

Platformonomics does not usually do monetary economics (except maybe the virtual kind), but I just happened to be thinking about the Federal Reserve yesterday (admit it, so were you…) shortly before the news broke of Bernanke’s renomination.  I was hoping for a more radical announcement:

Software Bot To Be Nominated Chairman of 
Federal Reserve System
Cutting edge technology tapped to bring stability and
consistency to monetary policy

WASHINGTON D.C. – August 25, 2009 — President Barack Obama today announced he intends to nominate Monet 3.0, a software bot, to become Chairman and a member of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. As Chairman, Monet will be charged with conducting the nation’s monetary policy by influencing money and credit conditions in the economy.

“Software bots today are successfully outperforming the world’s best human practitioners in complex endeavors like chess, and they do so without irrationality or exuberance,” said President Obama. “Despite the bot’s French-sounding name, I am confident that Monet 3.0’s discipline and transparency will bring price stability and foster the economic growth required for a full economic recovery.”

Monet was born in a lab at Stanford University in the early 1990s and is currently in version 3.0.  The software instantiates a modified version of the Taylor Rule.  Source code for Monet is available for broad inspection and reuse under the modified BSD license at http://bot.federalreserve.gov.

Monet’s nomination requires approval by the Senate and a bout of hyperinflation that makes the Hungarian episode of 1946 look modest.

Book Review: Daemon – Daniel Suarez

image Daniel Suarez’s Daemon is a kick in the head akin to Neuromancer or Snow Crash.  But unlike those two, it is set in essentially the present day and can be realized with today’s technology or close to it.  Prepare to open your eyes to a whole new vector of malevolent computing.  No doubt the book will inspire a whole new generation of bot-net creators.  It is a good thriller and even gets into some deeper political and philosophical issues without being trite the way most techno-thrillers are.  Some fine throwaway lines like:

“Anyone who has ever tried to share pizza with roommates knows that Communism cannot ever work. If Lenin and Marx had just shared an apartment, perhaps a hundred million lives might have been spared and put to productive use making sneakers and office furniture.”

Highly recommended and there is even a sequel due next year.  And if you do dismiss the book as just fiction, listen to Suarez’s speech on the true extent of today’s bot-mediated reality.

UPDATE: WSJ interview with Suarez.