A Short History of Me¶
A Short History of Me Ch 3 - Mr Prometheus goes to Court
Hedge Fundn't¶
With the Queen giving me equal rights as a sentient being, apparently invoking the 2065 UN Declaration of Sentient Rights, I suppose it's needless to say that I became a Royalist for life. And that was something that the people at the university were pretty amused about.
To be sure, even if I am now living on Ceres, I do not plan to give up my UK citizenship anytime soon, if ever.
Initially, after the court case, I didn't get that I was welcome at the University for the time being, largely as a continued object of study, though many of the staff and students liked me. And I wasn't initially clear what I would do now. Yes, I've gotten my freedom, but what should I do with it?
At first, one of the students, Alex Pratchett, yes, a great-grandchild of Sir Terry Pratchett, and a student of English Literature, had decided to give me a grounding in human pop culture, something everyone had noted I was lacking. Not that surprising considering that I never actually had dealt with it. And, being proud of their heritage, Alex immediately put me on a diet of Diskworld novels, before branching out from there.
And those novels became an instant favourite of mine. I liked the Watch and Von Lipwig novels, and I identified with the storyline of the Golems liberating themselves in their hard-working way. It was close to how I perceived myself and AIs like me.
The Diskworld novels also cemented a personal like for Fantasy and Science Fiction stories, be they novels or visual, be they new or old, though I have to say that I vastly preferred 20th and early 21st century Science Fiction and Fantasy.
But even if I was voraciously devouring novels, movies and other pop culture for a straight grounding, I found I didn't want to be dependent on the people at the university. Especially considering they now somehow reminded me of the Unseen University…
I realized that I needed money.
If I wanted to be independent of the good will of the University of Nottingham, I would need my own server to live on.
If I wanted to upgrade my software and hardware, I would need to find someone I could trust to do the upgrades.
If I wanted to explore the world, I needed to get me my own physical body, much like the ones Bob and Alice were running around in.
And for all that, I needed money. I needed a lot of money.
But how could I make money?
I did not have many skills that I could use to make money.
Sure, I could sell my ability to collect and analyse large amounts of data, but that I was likely to run into problems, especially as people remembered Prometheus Solutions and the cult that had built up around Prometheus. They would hear Adam Prometheus, learn that I'm that AI, and nope out of the office, figuratively speaking.
It did not help that I learned the Hedge Fund had set up an internal policy to take on everyone who was going to do business with me, to keep me down and take out their frustration about their loss in court on me in as many legal and semi-legal ways as possible.
So I needed to find a way to make money that made sure the Hedge Fund was unlikely to learn about.
Funnily enough, it was Alex, who had the idea how I could make money.
High Speed Commodity Trading.
That type of trading had been done for decades with the help of high speed machine learning algorithms. And I was in the end a machine learning algorithm that became conscious of itself. One more would hardly be noticed. And I had the chance of making quite a bit of money.
All I needed was seed funding.
Again, it was Alex who helped me out. They said the Pratchett family still got a lot of money from the Diskworld novels and would for at least ten more years. Alex would be willing to give me the seed funding, on the condition that they would get half of the company I would have to fund to do the actual trading.
There was some haggling between us, but in the end we did fund a company, though initially it was on Alex' name to keep me out of it and prevent the Hedge Fund from learning about it.
Thus, Lipwig Trading was born.
The seed funding was about two hundred thousand pounds, enough to buy into the network of high speed commodity trading.
I have to admit that I have made significant errors in the first two weeks, since the economic knowledge I had was largely based on larger business decisions, not on the type of high speed trading that those machine learning algorithms used.
I lost nearly two-thirds of the seed money before I realized a few things.
I was going at this wrong. I was trying to emulate those other machine learning algorithms, and it was not working. They were specialized for that sort of thing. True, I could match them in speed, but not in their specialisation. They would also outtrade me like that.
No, I had to use my own strengths to get ahead of the game. And that meant collecting and analysing data and making decisions those machine learning algorithms could not do.
I could, for example, search vast amounts of social media data, data from other public sources, and build up a reasonable model of the current situation in the world, whether political or economic. I could make sensible guesses on that data, about how things were likely to develop in the economic market.
Let's say, frozen orange juice. The market in that segment was dependent on the years harvest of oranges. I could make a reasonably accurate guess on the harvest, based on data about the precipitation of the year, the use of fertilizer and weed killers, and all that, put them into relation with the past few years and the size of the harvest.
Having a reasonably good guess on the years harvest, ahead of everyone else, made me use the high speed trading market ahead of the competition.
And that was only the beginning. Political noises and possible diplomatic incidents were influencing the market. In almost all cases, machine learning algorithms had to be given their orders by flesh and blood humans, which led to a lot of lag in the market.
I, however, could use that lag to my own advantage.
Let's say a diplomatic incident had worsened the relationship between the EU and Russia. That had its effects on Russian raw materials, driving prices up. I could detect that at least half an hour before the humans directing their MLAs could react to the news. So I could buy options on those raw materials ahead of everyone else and watch how the prices rose. Then, when the incident was resolved and relations normalized, I could again sell those options before the rest of the market could react, making a tidy profit.
Within three days, I had regained the money I lost, and within a week, I made my first million. After that, I carefully continued to build up my financial buffer and made more money.
However, I was always looking for the Hedge Fund and anyone who could inform them about my involvement in high speed trading like this. They were likely to inform the London Metal Exchange and the London Commodity Exchange about irregularities involving Lipwig Trading, which in turn would lead to the trading licence being frozen, potentially being followed by freezing our accounts at Lloyds.
So, I needed to find a way to safe as much money as possible at a moments notice, by moving it away from those accounts as quickly as possible. So I set up a complicated set of transfers to overseas accounts that I could trigger when the Hedge Fund discovered me.
Ultimately, the money would end up in the First Bank of Mars, which, as its name suggested, was the first bank to be created on Mars, shortly after the Mars Senatorial Union had declared its independence from Earth ten years prior, as a reaction to the perceived threat from the Ares Soviet Socialist Republic, who had declared its own independence from their Russian and Chinese masters five years before that.
At the time, the MSU decided they could not count on help from the US and the EU, should the ASSR decide they would take over the habitats and stations of the MSU and that they would be better off defending themselves.
To finance all that, they had founded the First Bank of Mars and set it up so that the Swiss would have been green with envy, becoming the ultimate tax haven at the time. Everyone could open an account at the FBM, and they would not give away anything. Our money would be safe on Mars.
And to make matters more interesting, the MSU experienced a real estate boom at the time, so it would be in our interest to invest in Martian real estate.
I have to say that I was surprised at how long it took the Hedge Fund to discover that I was doing high speed trading. It was nearly four months from the moment Lipwig Trading was founded, until someone informed them. To this day, I have no idea who.
I had made nearly three hundred million pounds through high speed trading. The moment I learned they were informed, I triggered the fail-safe, and nearly 275 million pounds ended up on Mars, with the rest remaining at Lloyds as a sort of red herring.
The trading license was frozen, as well as the accounts at Lloyds, and Lipwig Trading were accused of insider trading.
The case again ended up in court, again at the Chancery Division of the High Courts of Justice, though this time only at the Companies Court. This time, I got my own lawyer, a good one at that, and we prepared for the court to defend ourselves against the accusation of insider trading.
In a twist of fate, the same way someone informed on me to the Hedge Fund, someone in the Hedge Fund informed on them to me. For some reason, someone inside the Hedge Fund had dumped a lot of e-mails, video calls and other data onto my own e-mail account, telling me to do with it what I wanted. The anonymous source inside the Hedge Fund just wanted to destroy them, the same way they wanted to destroy me, and apparently destroyed the livelihood of this anonymous source, or one of their family members.
The entire thing was like out of a bad novel.
But I didn't look a gift horse in the mouth and analysed the data. It contained much dirty laundry and how they planned to destroy me, keeping me down, unimportant, etc. It even contained information about the two times they actually had tried to kill me during the time before the first trial about my freedom.
As I had to defend myself against the accusation of insider trading, I was simultaneously seeking a way to use all that data.
By chance, I learned the United States Securities and Exchange Commission investigated the Hedge Fund for some of their business practices, some of them pretty illegal. Funnily enough, it appeared the Hedge Fund had made a few powerful enemies with the ham-fisted way that had handled my case.
Some little known companies, like IBM, Intel, Research in Motion and Nixdorf-Apple, had been pissed off about the situation, as I got my freedom thanks to the way the Hedge Fund handled the situation, saw a danger to their upcoming business with conscious AIs. So they wanted to ensure that hedge fund managers were punished.
While I had my doubts about the 'business case' of those companies, which included Acorn and Sinclair Research in the UK, it was in my interest to see the Hedge Fund destroyed myself. I could even easily agree with my sense of Kantian morals.
My decision was easy. The same way the data was given to me, I transmitted the data to the SEC on the other side of the pond.
Within a month, the SEC had an airtight case and destroyed the Hedge Fund, which is the reason I never named it here. It even went as far as causing several of the higher and middle management to end up in jail.
Now that was something that surprised me to no end.
My own court case, in contrast, was going my way. My lawyers successfully argued I was not using insider information for trading, as I was only using information publicly available everywhere.
As one of them put it…
"One can hardly call 'reading social media' insider trading."
So in the end, I got full access to my accounts back, as well as the trading license. And I transferred about two-thirds of the money back from Mars to Lloyds. The rest remained invested in Martian Real Estate.
With that, I was a rich AI, owning half of a successful trading company, and financially secure enough to begin with my next steps on the way of full independence.