The Fear Index

Quarry knew in his heart that this was true. He had allowed technology to enfeeble him. He was like some lazy driver who had become entirely reliant on parking sensors and satellite navigation to get him around town.

In fact, the reverse is happening. We have plenty of spare, unintelligent human capacity to do those simple, menial jobs, often for very long hours and poor pay. Instead, the humans that computers are replacing are members of the educated classes: translators, medical technicians, legal clerks, accountants, financial traders.

Intelligent life on a planet comes of age when it first works out the reason for its own existence. —RICHARD DAWKINS, The Selfish Gene (1976)

Moore’s Law? This states that the number of transistors that can be placed on an integrated circuit—which basically means memory size and processing speed—will double every eighteen months, and costs will halve.

asperity

“Fear is historically the strongest emotion in economics. Remember FDR in the Great Depression? It’s the most famous quote in financial history: ‘The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.’ In fact fear is probably the strongest human emotion, period. Whoever woke at four in the morning because they were feeling happy?

Learn from me, if not by my precepts, at least by my example, how dangerous is the acquirement of knowledge, and how much happier that man is who believes his native town to be the world, than he who aspires to become greater than his nature will allow. —MARY SHELLEY, Frankenstein (1818)

liquidity replenishment points, or LRPs. In her subsequent testimony to Congress, the chairman of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission explained that LRPs are best thought of as a “speed bump” and are intended to dampen volatility in a given stock by temporarily converting from an automated market to a manual auction market when a price move

A man may have his heart filled with the blackest hatred or suspicion, or be corroded with envy and jealousy; but as these feelings do not at once lead to action, and as they commonly last for some time, they are not shown by any outward sign