The other day I was browsing through TechCrunch looking for inspiration for my new blog and I came across the article “Dow Jones said that Google was buying Apple, and the bots bought it”. Turns out Dow Jones shot some fake news out in the world saying that Google was buying Apple for $9 billion – and the bots bought it. Apple’s stock went up around $2.

Now this made me think, if it is that easy to influence the trading algorithms that run our economy, isn’t it dangerous? What if people want to manipulate it in a negative way? I did some more research and found another article this one was from the Business Insider: “The Pentagon is worried about hackers causing a stock market crash”. Here the author argued that” manipulating stocks higher is a time-honored game that routinely receives kudos from all around” but what happens when hackers try to influence the algorithmic trading in a negative way? What happens when hacks result in stock prices actually falling in a major way?  According to the author this is when the Pentagon will intervene with all its power. Right now the Pentagon is working with various players from the stock trading industry “to figure out how hackers could unleash chaos in the US financial system” and how they can act to fight this.

Indeed this is a logical thing to do but to me it’s funny how the Pentagon only intervenes when there is a negative influence on the prices. From an opportunistic point of view I could understand, but is this this correct ethical way? Should governments tolerate everything that brings up stock prices and is thus “good for the economy”? This would mean that players that have the technical knowledge to do so could easily get economic benefit in contrast to people that would not have this. I think the whole industry, especially now that algorithms are running most of it, should get a thorough review on how it is regulated and when it should be intervened. What do you think? Let me know in the comments!

Sources:

https://techcrunch.com/2017/10/10/dow-jones-said-that-google-was-buying-apple-the-algos-bought-it/?ncid=rss&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=sfgplus&sr_share=googleplus&%3Fncid=sfgplus

http://www.businessinsider.com/pentagon-stock-market-crash-darpa-2017-10?IR=T

In today’s world, information technology plays a vital role; it’s changing everything around us, from the way people work to the way we spend our free time. We have seen very fast paced growth in IT and this growth can have either good or bad influence on society. In this post I will be discussing the impact that information technology has had on society especially how it has changed the way we work and what jobs we do. My goal with this post is to provoke a little discussion about this impact – do you perceive it as only positive or do you see the negative aspects of it too?
Digitalization has changed the way companies and people work. Nowadays, we try to make almost everything automated which entails that most (physical) jobs have been made obsolete. Furthermore, with the rise of Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence machines can now also think and learn better than humans, which is why many experts say that most cognitive intensive jobs will be replaced by machines as well. However, we need people that understand how these machines work, and most importantly can program these machines.
This will entail two major changes in the workforce. Firstly, physically intensive jobs as well as light cognitive jobs will be replaced by machines – the reason being is that computers and machines can do most of these things way faster than people. Secondly, there will be new jobs for people that can program, develop and design software and hardware – the machines and computers that do our “easy” jobs still need to be controlled by someone. If they crash, somebody needs to fix it.
Summing up, I personally don’t think that the rapid growth of IT, and our extensive implantation of it, is a negative thing. As long as the people keep developing themselves and adjust to the technological advancements there will always be work for everybody. So instead of being afraid of digitalization, we should embrace it.