The Stock Market Becomes an AI

While Wall Street is waiting on Washington to agree to an economic stimulus and rescue plan to prevent battered markets sliding even further, something really odd is happening. The NYSE is going all-in on algorithms.

The New York Stock Exchange this week has closed its trading floor to humans which means it's fully automated as of the week of March 23rd, 2020.

In many ways Covid-19 is accelerating the emergence of new AI systems and surveillance tech in places like China.

AI is Booming While Humans Stay at Home

On the last day of 2019, an artificial intelligence warning system run by Toronto startup BlueDot flagged a news report from China about a mysterious pneumonia strain in the city of Wuhan. The system, which sifts through 100,000 articles and online posts daily in 65 languages, alerted BlueDot’s human employees.

A NYSE without humans means even humans are no longer required to tweak the algorithms. The stock market is taking on "ghost in the machine" relevance to the future of trading, as AI investment in healthcare has never been higher.

An AI system developed by Chinese tech giant Baidu uses cameras equipped with computer vision and infrared sensors to predict people’s temperatures in public areas. The system can screen up to 200 people per minute and detect their temperature within a range of 0.5 degrees Celsius. The AI flags anyone who has a temperature above 37.3 degrees. 

While the pandemic could impact 15 to 30% of American jobs in the short-term, AI won't be impacted in the same way. Microsoft and Adaptive Biotechnologies are working together to study how the human immune system responds to the COVID-19 coronavirus. 

• Microsoft will provide its cloud and machine learning technology to help make sense of the samples. 
• Adaptive has a broad mission of learning how the human immune system reacts to a library of illness, and eventually developing a kind of “immune checkup” for patients.
• Adaptive said it will kick off (in April) a virtual clinical study by collecting de-identified blood samples from people who have been diagnosed with or recovered from COVID-19. Providence, a health system with more than 50 hospitals, is also participating in the project.

China's AI NWO of surveillance capitalism is also adapting faster than Tech companies of other countries, leaping ahead. As China apparently advanced in social distancing, it's economy has a headstart in rebounding and investing further in AI.

 China will continue to assert “prolific dominance” this year, as it races against the US and other countries for global leadership in areas such as AI, bioengineering and space exploration, according to an American think-tank.

All-electronic trading means a stock-market AI that's fully automated, if you will. It shows just how pervasive algorithms in finance have become. The facilities that are closed are the NYSE equities trading floor and NYSE American Options trading floor in New York, and NYSE Arca Options trading floor in San Francisco.

Chinese researchers say they have developed an artificial intelligence tool that can assist doctors to make choices (life & death) about Covid-19 patients. That doesn't sound so different from Google's ability to predict patient outcomes. In a world of radical adaption by the pandemic, solutions that are AI based appear to be thriving.

A Chinese startup that makes driverless delivery vans says it has seen demand skyrocket amid the COVID-19 outbreak. Neolix's founder, Yu Enyuan, told Bloomberg that the firm saw a notable uptake in vehicles purchases from firms including Chinese e-commerce giants JD.com and Alibaba, both of which have reportedly invested billions in driverless-delivery technologies.

Social distancing for people appears to be pushing demand for automation and predictive AI. An automated stock-market is a fair example of this. It's not just passive algorithms though. Robots are also making interactions with and treatment of sick patients easier.

Powerful surveillance tech — including facial recognition-enabled cameras and drones — are also helping find people who might be sick or who aren’t wearing masks. Big data solutions with apps have also led Taiwan, Singapore and China to better control the outbreak of the pandemic.

No Taiwan is not part of China, it's better than China at mitigation and containment. It's own version of the CDC is now in demand as Taiwan has shown a world-class ability for containment protocols and SOPs that have saved its economy and education system months of recovery time (so far).

Coronavirus Stimulates Surveillance Technology Sector

• The pandemic is fueling surveillance capitalism and tech the likes we have never seen before.
• Flying drones to make sure people are wearing masks, facial-recognition cameras, and making people download software to track their location have suddnely become standard practice globally.

China has dramatically ramped up its data-collection efforts in its efforts to stem its coronavirus outbreak. It was already the world leader.

A NYSE trading floor without humans is not surprising today, though it might have been even 5 or 10 years ago. The world is changing and AI is set to become more important in more crucial decisions globally.

AI's prominence isn't temporary though, unlike a pandemic or a new virus. Once changes are set in, we'll likely never go back. The NYSE is carefully monitoring the spread of COVID-19 and has robust contingency plans, in other words, there's an algo for that. What humans were once needed for, now are just a bonus to have.

Israeli AI startups are piggy-backing on China's pivot to surveillance capitalism and the likes of Google are all-in too. The race for the cloud by firms such as Amazon, Alibaba, Microsoft and Alphabet are really races to own the infrastructure where AI-as-a-service will be taking place.

Artificial intelligence is typically presented in Hollywood movies as a human-hating robot in a doomsday scenario. But when AI is what can save you in a pandemic, the tables are turned, automation booms as humans become unemployed.