Even Relatively Simple Pricing Algorithms Systematically Learn to Play
"Despite all this attention, few writers looked closely at the work which sparked Wright’s interest in urban simulation in the first place. Largely forgotten now, Jay Forrester’s Urban Dynamics put forth the controversial claim that the overwhelming majority of American urban policy was not only misguided but that these policies aggravated the very problems that they were intended to solve. In place of Great Society-style welfare programs, Forrester argued that cities should take a less interventionist approach to the problems of urban poverty and blight, and instead encourage revitalization indirectly through incentives for businesses and for the professional class. Forrester’s message proved popular among conservative and libertarian writers, Nixon Administration officials, and other critics of the Great Society for its hands-off approach to urban policy. This outlook, supposedly backed up by computer models, remains highly influential among establishment pundits and policymakers today."
"To inform this policy debate, in a recent paper (Calvano et al. 2018a) we construct AI pricing agents and let them interact repeatedly in controlled environments that reproduce economists’ canonical model of collusion, i.e. a repeated pricing game with simultaneous moves and full price flexibility. Our findings suggest that in this framework even relatively simple pricing algorithms systematically learn to play sophisticated collusive strategies. The strategies mete out punishments that are proportional to the extent of the deviations and are finite in duration, with a gradual return to the pre-deviation prices."
3. An opaque algorithm scoring system may determine whether a doctor gives you pain medication.
"Over the past year, powerful companies such as LexisNexis have begun hoovering up the data from insurance claims, digital health records, housing records, and even information about a patient’s friends, family and roommates, without telling the patient they are accessing the information, and creating risk scores for health care providers and insurers. Health insurance giant Cigna and UnitedHealth's Optum are also using risk scores. There’s no guarantee of the accuracy of the algorithms and “really no protection” against their use, said Sharona Hoffman, a professor of bioethics at Case Western Reserve University. Overestimating risk might lead health systems to focus their energy on the wrong patients; a low risk score might cause a patient to fall through the cracks."
"Maybe we poor welfare women will really liberate women in this country. We've already started on our own welfare plan. Along with other welfare recipients, we have organized so we can have some voice. Our group is called the National Welfare Rights Organization (N.W.R.O.). We put together our own welfare plan, called Guaranteed Adequate Income (G.A.I.), which would eliminate sexism from welfare. There would be no 'categories'-men, women, children, single, married, kids, no kids-just poor people who need aid. You'd get paid according to need and family size only and that would be upped as the cost of living goes up. As far as I'm concerned, the ladies of N.W.R.O. are the front-line troops of women's freedom. Both because we have so few illusions and because our issues are so important to all women-the right to a living wage for women's work, the right to life itself."
5. Extremely 5IT exploration of an early Canadian dial-up system.
"In 1978, the Canadian government introduced a videotex service that would enable the transmission of interactive text and graphics by way of a standard phone line connected to a specially adapted TV set. Field trials of the Telidon service began throughout Canada the following year. The largest was Bell's Vista trial, which put decoders in 500 to 1000 households across Ontario and Quebec. Users could retrieve news updates and weather reports; they could shop and bank remotely. Among its information providers, which you'd select from an onscreen directory and punch into the keypad like a TV channel, were corporations and interests such as The Bay, Encyclopedia Britannica and the Toronto Star. A decade before the first web browser — predating the popularization of the home computer, even — Telidon was a public-facing proto-internet."
"There was no photo sharing, no News Feed, no apps, no games, no events. TheFacebook, in those first few months, was merely a database of profile pages of other people at Harvard. It combined the insularity and intimacy of an elite college with the user-generated network-effect frenzy of what was just beginning to be called Web 2.0. I’d been on the internet for more than 10 years at that point, and I’d never seen anything spread like that, not even Harvard’s anonymously run local filesharing movie server, Llama, or its other less couth filesharing server, which distributed porn. TheFacebook conquered Harvard immediately and completely, and then it did precisely the same thing over and over again, whether it was with fishermen in Tamil Nadu or bus drivers in Ontario or high schoolers in Sarasota. Everything about Facebook has changed from then to now, except Mark Zuckerberg and the network’s ability to spread. "
+ Eloise Westbrook and Ruth Williams lead it off, and they are both amazing speakers.
[even relatively simple pricing algorithms systematically learn to play]