It is interesting to see that as technology advances, predictions of the past become more and more true, though they may not necessarily look like what the predictors originally thought.
In this case, I think of the network is the computer. It's been for a while, but not yet completely, but it's becoming even more so as time passes.
Slight devil's advocate episteme: what about an even-further generalization? How about: the market is the computer?
Not only is the network essentially imbricated with/in the market, but recognizing the market in the role of the computation also means recognizing the roles of all of the different functional components, not just the mechanical/computational "atoms". Basically, I think that thinking this way lets us treat supply-demand basically as a messaging layer.
That fails the sniff test. Markets are made up of agents that want things. Computers only want what humans say they should want, so computers are simply the agents of humanity.
You can't abstract out supply and demand, at least, not forever. Abstraction is something you do to things so that you don't have to cognitively deal with them, they're predictable.
Humans will act predictably for as long as it makes sense for them to do so. Your business model will eventually fail because nobody will want your product / service anymore. Or they won't want exactly how you're delivering it. Or they'll have decided that X company is more reliable.
Someone has to keep on top of what the people supplying the business with life-sustaining revenue actually want. It can't ever be a machine, unless those machines actually become sentient, which is a completely different discussion. The person can use machines, but they can't actually be a machine.
People spend money, not algorithms. People may delegate to algorithms, but it's always a person in the end.
I think there's some questions to be asked about this, but the main one is this claim:
> Abstraction is something you do to things so that you don't have to cognitively deal with them, they're predictable.
The word "predictable". What does it mean to be predictable? Are periodic trends with micro-variations considered to be predictable? In that sense, might it not be possible to Fourier-decompose some time-series into a sufficiently-"predictable" set of frequencies?
But actually, I'm not even sure if this qualification is needed. If an abstraction is basically just a way to treat a bunch of events as a single idea, then what if the abstraction isn't something telling you how you should act, but instead something telling you how you should react?
Another assumption, I think, is that the market is human, i.e. because there are affective dimensions and bounded rationalities in the economy that make it unpredictable. This is true right now, but is that inherent to the market? You can argue that even an automated agent has "humanity", in the sense that it is essentially imprinted with their creator, but how much longer will this hold? It's asymptotic, but won't there be a threshold at which the humanity of machines made by machines, with many steps removed, becomes negligible?
If any other kind of agent can make market moves, then that agent has to supplant humans at the 'top'.
For example, the pet market is absurdly large. What drives this market? The actual needs of animals? Of course not. It's the wishes of humans that make that market as big as it is.
It doesn't even have to be that humans are smart enough to control the new market-playing agents. It can also be that human desire can so vastly dwarf whatever external agency has a wish to be in the market that the whole industry ends up catering the wishes of the humans.
Right now, human desire drives the market for robots. Can you even imagine a point at which robots could develop enough agency to even come close to supplanting the human desire for more and better robots? When does the tail stop wagging the dog here?
People sometimes forget the sheer scale of human economies. Sure, maybe your pet non-human agent might be able to command a few hundred thousand in market activity. Is it even going to be notable over all the other existing types of non-human agency already on the market, like pets and HFT?
Thanks for sharing that view. I have a theory on the same kind of reasoning : marketing combined with instant purchase capabilities (online buying and fast shipping) transformed the mass consumers into testers. Items are built, marketed, discovered, bought, shipped and reviewed faster, which allows "experimentation" with consumers. The mass consumers market is a giant lab, paid by the consumers.
In this case, I think of the network is the computer. It's been for a while, but not yet completely, but it's becoming even more so as time passes.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Gage