Food for Thought: The nature of Consciousness, artificial intelligence, and how we see Finance

Hi Fintech Architects,

The “Food for Thought” entries are thought provoking morsels that take us outside the Fintech box.

Recently, we’ve really enjoyed learning about artificial intelligence and consciousness.

The question of consciousness goes to the root of why we build, what we create, and how we decide what is valuable and what is not. And if we can control our self-conception and the modeling we do of the world, the texture of life becomes better. A recurrent theme in our writing is that systems don’t care about their agents per se. There are many game theoretical equilibria where agents suffer, but systems perpetuate. So figuring out how an agent within a system reflects on happiness is paramount. To this, cognitive scientist Joscha Bach says:

Happiness is a cookie that your brain bakes for itself

If you do one thing after receiving this email, find three hours in your schedule to listen to the conversation between AI practitioner Lex Fridman (no relation!) and Joscha. It is a…