ALL THINGS BIG AND SMALL 2.0

SUPERINTELLIGENCE by NICK BOSTROM (non-fiction): This book posts the various scenarios on the topic of an Artificial Intelligence (AI) machine turning into a Superintelligence and taking over the human race. Not science fiction but based on current technology's projected development into the future. Scary and chilling when you consider that great minds like Bill Gates, Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk have already given warnings on the dangers that can happen when an AI gets out of control. We have already experienced the great improvement in the intelligence of search engines, translation software, speech recognition and image recognition in recent years. This is just the beginning The author shows the the various technical scenarios where a machine AI becomes powerful enough to break free from its human programmers, command resources to exponentially improve its own capabilities, destroy other competing AI and go on to plot a takeover of the human race. In this boo...

EVOLUTION IN NATURE: LESSONS FOR YOUR LIFE. Nature did not have a plan to make a tiger, a horse or Man. It just happened along the way. Everything in this space-time Universe evolves; including your Life. Evolution is survival of the fittest. But it is not strength or intelligence that determines fitness for survival. It is the ability to adapt to the ever-changing environment. Those who are able to constantly adapt, survive. Because Evolution has no pre-determined plan n or a targeted path. Evolution is open-ended. It meanders along adapting to its ever-changing environment. It is affected by, and in turn affects the environment (and its inhabitants). [Coevolution and Feedback Loops]. In the same way, your Life is not pre-determined but meanders along, affected by events and people, and in turn affecting events and people in a feedback loop. What you will be tomorrow depends on what you do today. And what you do tomorrow makes you what you will be the day after tomorrow. ...

The daily gyrations and noise of the financial markets are these days exacerbated by algorithmic machine-trading. In addition, the high inter-connectedness of global markets and availability of instantaneous information leads to high correlation between all asset classes: equities, bonds, commodities and currencies; leading to higher and higher volatility via feedback loops until it crashes (nothing goes on forever  in such Chaos theory models). Like what happens when your electric guitar's signal feedback to the amplifier turns into a howl. Taking a longer term view helps in taking away the noise to view the fundamentals. The chart below shows US interest rate changes from 1965 to the present, as represented by the yield on 10-tear Treasuries. Superimposed on it, the Dow Jones Industrial Average and Singapore's Straits Times Index. The chart scale is logarithmic and changes are in % for comparability. The second chart shows yields for 5-years so that details can be vi...

The media, analysts, fund managers and assorted pundits have been increasingly strident about China's huge debt overhang amounting to trillions of dollars; warning that it will trigger a financial and economic crisis not only for China but the world soon. We have seen the effects of the current China slowdown on everything from demand for iron ore to demand for luxury goods, as China's economy forms a larger and  larger part of the world economy. The current economic slowdown in China is the result not only of the ongoing Chinese government;s economic structural reforms but also of years of monetary quantitative easing (QE); beginning with the mega economic stimulus of late 2008 which pumped US$600 billion into the economy. This cheap money fuelled the economy, resulting in an overheated real estate sector, over-investment in manufacturing, wasteful projects, underutilised infrastructure. China's demand for commodities such as oil, coal, iron, steel and agricultural co...

COMPARING GDP AND ECONOMIC GROWTH OF COUNTRIES IN THIS REGION WITH RELATIVELY SIMILAR POPULATION SIZE* * Numbers from  www.tradingeconomics.com Attached snip of a spreadsheet compares Australia, Taiwan and Malaysia. These three countries are relatively similar in population size but their GDP, and GDP growth rate are very different because they are different types of economies at different stages of growth, impacted by different factors: 1. Australia: A mature economy, reliant on export of its natural resources and agricultural commodities. But still a force to be reckoned with. A GDP of US$1.4 trillion for a population of just 23 million- more than the GDP of Indonesia (population 250m. GDP US$889bn) Vietnam (popn 92m, GDP US$186bn) and Philippines (popn 102m GDP US$285bn) 2. Taiwan: Now a backwater because of China's rise? Its GDP of US$530bn is still larger than Malaysia's with an almost similar population size, but its growth rate is negative. Bu...

The Intelli-Menu Generator is a smart menu generator for a one-pot rice meal accompanied by soup. Style of cooking is Chinese and ingredients are mostly found in Chinese cuisine. In its current version the algorithms for combination and selection of ingredients is basic. But later versions will have memory (so as not to repeat a menu or have a big similarity in ingredients between rice dish and soup). User will also have the ability to input by a points system his/her preferences for each ingredient, and system will have output that  has a minimum score. The system is flawed because it does not have human sense of taste and balance between ingredients and it often ends up being too imaginative for human taste or output bizarre combinations like liver and flower crab soup or mud crab with slice beef and chestnut. Probably the only way to improve it is to provide feedback from its human owners via a rating at the end of each meal. Over time the neural network will learn what the ow...

Why do financial markets rise and fall with every announcement of how a country's economy fared? Why does the media consult economists for their views, and why do views invariably differ, sometimes by quite a lot? Singapore's Ministry of Trade and Industry forecasts the Singapore economy to grow between 1- 3% for 2016. Is this information useful? A 2% admission of possible margin of error is a lot. 2%  of Singapore's GDP of about US$300 billion is US$6 billion. Enough to give each of our 3.27 million citizens US$1,834.00 So what is the value of economic forecasting particularly when it is always being revised up and down as the situation changes? Rationale for still coming out with forecasts: 1. No matter how unreliable macroeconomic forecasts are policy makers still need to have forecasts for decision-making and planning. They cannot rule out the uncertainty but they can do Scenario Planning viz. if scenario A, then do this scenario B then do that. 2. At leas...