BBC - Blogs - Adam Curtis

/NO-FUTURE

  • Adam Curtis - NOW THEN (BBC blogs)
    http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/posts/NO-FUTURE

    ALADDIN is the name of an incredibly powerful computer network that is based in a tiny town called East Wenatchee - it’s in the middle of nowhere in Washington State in North America.

    Aladdin guides the investment of over $11 trillion of assets around the world.

    This makes it incredibly powerful. Aladdin is owned by a company called Blackrock that is the biggest investor in the world. It manages as much money as all the hedge-funds and the private equity firms in the world put together. And its computer watches over 7% of all the investments in the world.

    (...) its aim is to not change the world - but to keep it stable. Preventing any development thats too risky. And when you are moving $11 trillion around to do that -it is a really important new force.

    But it’s boring. And there is no story. Just patterns.

    (...) It is the modern world of power - and it’s incredibly boring. Nothing to film, run by a cautious man who is in no way a wolf of Wall Street. It’s how power works today. It hides in plain sight - through sheer boringness and dullness.

    No wonder we find it difficult to tell stories about it.

    Une promenade dans le monde du #secret, de la #surveillance, de l’analyse booléenne, d’#ELIZA, du #big_data et de la #prédiction, où l’on voit un vieux sujet de Duncan Campbell (le futur découvreur d’Echelon), l’histoire d’Ethel Voynich (fille de George Boole), et bien d’autres merveilles des archives de la BBC.

    et au final ce montage d’Adam Curtis
    http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p023kq11

    • un article du Financial Times (11 juillet 2014) met en garde contre le pouvoir de ce logiciel Aladdin :

      BlackRock’s Aladdin : genie not included - FT.com
      http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/300145d2-0841-11e4-acd8-00144feab7de.html

      Aladdin has been described as BlackRock’s “central nervous system” but what is less well-known is that the operating platform also acts as the brains at some 60 other financial firms which altogether handle a whopping $14tn worth of assets.

      At banks, investment managers and trading outfits around the world, Aladdin’s genie is hard at work analysing portfolios, running stress test scenarios and generally employing BlackRock’s “collective intelligence” to perform a whole host of financial functions.

      (...) the increasingly significant role that Aladdin and its 25m lines of code plays in the wider financial markets has, with notable exceptions, largely been overlooked. (...)

      A brief look at the history of the financial markets is enough to provide cause for concern. Black-Scholes, Intex (a program used to analyse mortgage bonds), Gaussian Copulas and Value-at-Risk (VaR) models spring readily to mind as examples of formulas and software that were lauded as cutting-edge risk management tools, but proved to be fraught with their own dangers.

      #algorithme #finance