Page 6 - Unlikely Stories 3

Omega

CEO: Well? Did you find out who they are?

CCLO: Yes, I finally pieced it all together just a few days ago. Now it
really makes sense. Omega was started five years ago by a college
student, Don Tingley, working in an artificial intelligence laboratory
in Berkeley. His idea was to teach a computer program the syllabus of
the master of business administration curriculum at his university.
Then he also gave it a complete history lesson in the operation of
every major trading market in the world, and gave it all the real-world
data for currency exchange, banking regulations, foreign languages,
time zones, political risk—all the variables various researchers had
been working on in his lab.

EDO: Why?

CCLO: I would guess that it was partly a challenge, a sort of hacker’s
amoral tinkering, and possibly, as his creation began to learn the
ropes, an attempt by Tingley to beat Wall Street and enrich himself.
He continued to feed in data and documents, ultimately finding
himself reduced to the role of a researcher digging up information
the program needed but could not itself access. There must have
come a day when it told him more money could be made through
mergers and acquisitions than by recapitulating the sort of
programmed arbitrage that was already running most markets. So he
incorporated.

CFO: So Omega is just this guy Tingley implementing decisions
made by a computer?

CCLO: That’s how it started. He found a state in which registering an
S-corporation required only one person, and Omega—which is also
the name of the A.I. processor he created—functioned, so to speak,
as a silent partner. It knew everything about the way things worked,
was able to model scenarios at the speed of light, and made decisions
that were optimal. The rules, as we are all aware, are built for our
convenience; their de facto application is as obvious to a literate
machine as they are to any human actor looking for a way to tilt the
playing field. Whatever we could get away with, it could, too. And
better.

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