The death of public pensions

Pensions are probably the most challenging issue public finances have faced in the last century. The public warranty systems that were designed to support our elders for 20 years now have to cope with a life expectancy getting closer to 90. The whole pay-as-you-go pension models will struggle to survive.

And you may wonder, what does Artificial Intelligence have to do with this economics problem? Is a computer going to pay my pension when I retire? Unfortunately, an application is not going to pay and save for you any time soon, but there are start-ups who think they can provide better retirements, change the whole pensions’ paradigm and apply AI for designing pension schemes.

And how is artificial intelligence approaching pensions?

Behavioural Finance is the biggest challenge financial planners have to face, it is the irrational component that push us to take decisions that are not logical or based on evidence. Only very experienced financial planners are able to isolate behavioural biases out of their customers and help them successfully. Obviously, those skilled advisors are not working for public pension systems.

An Artificial Intelligence robot could sort this out. A machine planned to identify irrational patterns on savings, can tell us in 2016 which consequences  our actions will have in 2046. This robot’s intelligence would learn case after case, isolating the best saving schemes for every individual’s needs, and striking out our irrational ideas, based not only on our words and thoughts, but on the constant flow of behaviour that our digital data carries.

This whole new way of planning the future will have significant changes in finance. Efficiency will be key in the system, and public pensionscould become obsolete because of their rigidity. The AI would tell us how much we should save based on our life patterns, level of earnings, but also life expectancy, our personal health habits, the size of our family, the kind of trips we like taking, and so forth.

The main question now is; are our governments spotting this opportunity and adapting to the new paradigm before the pay-as-you-go system arrives to a violent end?.

Artificial Intelligence -Experiment 2

An Experiment......do not click

Be Right Back… After I die.

What is a person? The most obvious answer would be a combination of physical and psychological parameters that define a human being.

Now, think about how you interact with most people on a daily basis. You speak to your friends on Whatsapp, you call your parents, you hear about your relatives’ lives on Facebook. Does this mean that the XXI century human being will no longer be physical?

The digitalization of our communications and life aspects brings about a creepy thought: the companies that have access to our data easily know everything about us: how and to whom we speak, what we like, what we buy, who we care about, and much more. And, since you are reading MachinaAI, you are already aware that they know how our intelligence works. Did you connect the dots? Our personality can now be replicated.

In a not so long future, the organizations that control our data could create our alter ego on an electronic device, mimicking our voices and frequently used expressions!

This step would be a significant milestone for humans, as we would no longer have to accept death, and denying it could become common. Calling or texting your deceased husband, wife, father or daughter will become possible.

Dying in the future will be a mere physiological need, and our personalities and intelligences will be kept forever. This means that all this plausible developments also have a happy side: mental and personality disorders could become a thing of the past, and Alzheimer would no longer erase a mind out of this world.

After all, sometime in the near future we could all meet in San Junipero, and  up until now technology has brought us a better world to live in.

Mirror Mirror On the wall…..do I look like a criminal or is it just false

While this bad rhyming might not make much sense to you now, these were the first thoughts that entered my mind when I read the most recent news on Artificial Intelligence. Two Chinese researchers, Xiaolin Wu and Xi Zhang from Shanghai Jiao Tong University, have recently published a paper on Automated Inference on Criminality using Face Images http://bit.ly/2gCnooR. Their paper is about whether computers can detect if a human being is a criminal by analysing his or her facial features. An interesting read do check it out.