Planned Obsolescence

It began as all well-meaning ideas do -- as an effort to make life a little bit easier. This year I began building my own stock-picking artificial intelligence (AI) program. I created it to help me invest my savings and gave it a name: AlphaBean. But as AlphaBean became smarter and smarter, I eventually began to wonder: Could it replace me? My job involves studying companies and writing about them for the wider public. If AlphaBean could learn to invest, might it, or something like it, steal my job? Of course, I'm not the first person to create an investing algorithm. Algorithmic thinking about investing has existed for a long time -- much longer, in fact, than people normally think.