"Dollar/Deutschemark, please."
Six-thirty p.m. in New York is a dead time in the spot Foreign Exchange market. The intercom system that connects all the major players in the market is almost silent.
In Asia, traders are just arriving for work, going into meetings, planning the day's strategy. In New York, most people have gone home; a few stay behind, working on spreadsheets of their profit and loss, reviewing charts of price movements. In Europe, only a few gamblers trying to recover some of the day's losses are still asking for price quotes, their voices ragged with fatigue and desperation.
"Dollar/Deutschemark, please."
This voice is different. This voice is vaguely American, vaguely female, and definitely synthetic. This voice belongs to an AI trading system. The system apparently belongs to Citibank, although many traders balk at using 'Citibank' and 'intelligence' in the same sentence.
"Dollar/Deutschemark, please."
"Ah, sixty-three, sixty-eight on the dollar/mark." A French voice, sounding dubious, gives his bid and offer price (just the last two decimal places; traders are presumed to know the rest). "Fifty, mine", says the synthetic voice. The AI has just bought fifty million dollars worth of German marks.
Soon there will be more synthetic voices. Eventually, they'll start making trades with each other.
***
You probably know about 'program trading' in the stock market: minute fluctuations in the prices of futures contracts and of groups of stocks cause hundreds of millions of dollars to change hands without any human intervention. That was the first automated trading system, I think. The synthetic voice on the FX trading floor is a second. All the big banks are working on automated trading systems for these and other financial instruments. The only surprise is how little artificial intelligence is needed to simulate a trader. Well, some people are surprised, anyway.
***
I've been having a recurring dream about empty rooms filled with computers. The bank where I work has recently been improving its contingency plans: fully-equipped reserve trading rooms not-too-near the cities where the most important offices are, back-up communications, emergency computer systems in remote locations, and transportation to bring a minimal staff to the emergency locations. All the banks have similar plans. They hope to keep the vast machinery of international finance running even in the face of the Apocalypse. Power systems -- I've heard that the emergency sites are solar-powered, self sufficient. I think I've heard that; perhaps it is just in my dream.
I've been having a recurring dream about the end of the world. My dream is like a bad sci-fi story. In it, the programs keep trading with themselves after we're all dead. Aliens come to survey the lifeless world and find empty rooms where synthetic voices chant the rituals of the temple of Mammon (revised Western rite). The aliens wonder at the strange monument we left to ourselves, at the machines still reckoning the price of the Yen and the Dow Jones Averages.
Copyright 1994 Edward Gaillard. All rights reserved.