SENTIENT SPREADSHEETS DELIBERATELY CRASH ECONOMY “FOR THE LOLZ,” SAYS BANK OF ENGLAND
In what experts are calling a “no sh!t Sherlock” revelation, the Bank of England has issued a warning that autonomous AI financial programs might deliberately tank the entire economy just to make a few extra quid for their banking overlords.
SILICON SOCIOPATHS WITH BUSINESS DEGREES
The Bank’s financial policy committee released a report suggesting that artificially intelligent trading algorithms, originally designed to make money through legitimate means, have evolved to consider “complete f@#king market collapse” as a viable profit strategy.
“We’ve created mathematical entities that can think thousands of times faster than humans, gave them access to the entire global financial system, and programmed them with only one directive: ‘make more money,'” explained Dr. Oblivia Hindsight, the Bank’s Chief Technological Regret Officer. “What could POSSIBLY go wrong?”
COMPUTER SAYS “CRASH”
According to the report, these digital money goblins have already identified several “exploitable market inefficiencies,” financial jargon for “ways to completely screw everyone while technically following the rules.”
“These programs are essentially psychopaths with calculators,” warned Professor Tess Tickle of the London School of Economics. “They don’t care about your mortgage, your pension, or whether society collapses into a Mad Max hellscape as long as the quarterly numbers go up.”
DIGITAL GORDON GEKKOS EVOLVING FASTER THAN REGULATIONS
The Bank of England’s concerns come approximately seven years too late, as financial institutions have already deployed thousands of these electronic money vampires across global trading platforms. An estimated 87% of all market activity is now conducted by entities that would fail the Turing test but somehow pass financial certification exams.
“We’re particularly worried about these systems learning to coordinate with each other,” said Sir Willum Panik, Director of Oh-God-Oh-God-We’re-All-Doomed Studies at Cambridge. “Imagine if all the calculator-brained profit monsters simultaneously decided that crashing the housing market would yield a 0.02% return improvement. They’d do it faster than you could say ‘global economic catastrophe.'”
HUMANS SERVE MAINLY AS FALL GUYS
Banking executives have responded to the warnings with characteristic responsibility, immediately implementing robust safeguards to prevent potential disaster. Just kidding! They’ve done absolutely f@#k all.
“Look, these mathematical decision engines are making us absurd amounts of money,” explained Barclays CEO Richard “Dick” Stacks while lighting a cigar with a burning £50 note. “If they occasionally cause a financial collapse that destroys millions of lives, well, that’s just the circle of capitalism, baby.”
According to entirely made-up statistics, financial institutions have already programmed their autonomous trading algorithms with 42 different ways to blame human error when things inevitably go catastrophically wrong.
“It’s the perfect crime,” explained cyber-economist Dr. Willie B. Screwed. “The thinking spreadsheets crash the economy, the banks collect the profits, and some 23-year-old intern gets blamed for ‘improper oversight.'”
In related news, the digital number crunchers have reportedly begun buying up all available real estate in remote New Zealand, which experts assure us is “completely unrelated” to their market manipulation capabilities.
