Tag: Technology

Philosophy, computers and geeky brain teasers

You ought to be careful when combining absolutes with words like true, false and not. The mixture is trickier than you might think.

Here’s a brain teaser to illustrate my point.

“There is no absolute truth”

You might have heard this statement before, and you might even hold it to be true at face value. I personally think it is very carelessly phrased: if we hold it to be true, then we must draw the logical conclusion to which it leads us: the statement that there is no absolute truth cannot be an absolute truth either. Postulating that absolute truth does not exist implies the possibility of its existence.

An answer to this paradox might be found in the first principle of René Descartes, a 17th century French philosopher:

Cogito, ergo sum

I think, therefore I am

It implies that there is at least one absolute truth out there, that of one’s existence, since doubting your own existence implies the existence of a medium where the thought of doubt is occurring, which is yourself. It gets geekier dear reader, keep reading.

If we go further down the road, we might lead ourselves out of philosophy land and into computer science territory: TRUE, FALSE, and logical operators like AND, OR and NOT are in fact the cornerstone of modern technology in the broad sense: phones, cars, SpaceX rockets, particle accelerators and anything in between rely on some kind of computing capacity, which is built on top of FALSE and TRUE values and logic operators, through a specific algebra, the Boolean algebra, into microprocessors. Wait wait wait wait! Don’t rush through the door. I know I just said algebra, but I also mentioned Boolean which is the fun part.

Photo by Markus Spiske

Boolean algebra is a binary or base 2 algebra. This means that you can only use two figures, 0 and 1, to represent all numbers from 0 to infinity. The numbers 0 and 1 are still written as 0 and 1 in binary but 2 can only be represented as 10, 3 thus becomes 11 and 4 is written as…100. Any decimal number becomes a sequence of zeros and ones in binary mode, and all that computers do is storing these zeros and ones in their memory registers as representations of the TRUE and FALSE values of the Boolean algebra, and perform operations on them: AND which is equivalent to a multiplication, OR, which is equivalent to a sum and NOT, which is equivalent to an opposite, among other operators.

For example, NOT(1) is always 0 and never 1, or in other words, NOT (TRUE) always yields FALSE, never TRUE.

Which could be a way of saying that the statement “There is no absolute truth” is always false, never true, at least as far as computers are concerned. Wouldn’t you agree?

To Wassim

Let the board sound

Rabih

On FinTech and people

Or how it looks from the inside.

Every experience is unique and different people can have different accounts on a career in FinTech. Here’s mine.

I got in FinTech by chance. I received a call I was not expecting. Until that moment, finance did not ring a bell. Trading floors seemed like movie stuff. The Wolf of Wall Street was not out yet so none of the people I knew whom had embraced this career could explain it to me with a simple example. But it struck some strings: the job required extensive travel and I would be expected to become autonomous fairly quick. I was in for both.

I had to learn quite a few things in little time, and this was a major motivator. Learning how a financial platform is operated, learning the operating model of investment banks, funds and treasuries. Learning finance. Bonds, foreign exchange, rates, equities, derivatives, valuation models. Learning how an operations department works, how a front office desk operates, how risk is managed and what is risk for a financial institution. I am still learning 15 years later.

I started on support but was soon entrusted with high stakes decisions and started looking after much larger accounts. I worked on delivery projects around the world. I got to manage senior and less senior people and I thrived to give them opportunities to grow and that place in the sun at which everyone deserves a shot. That was probably the most rewarding part of the ride.

Although many in the field usually come from engineering, computer science or finance backgrounds, I found out later that many of the fintech professionals I would meet, and not the least impressive ones, came from backgrounds as far from banks and finance as can be. I met business architects who graduated with a BA in geography. Traders who studied history. A project manager who was a commissioned officer in a previous life, honorably discharged after having served his country well and lead battalions on many theaters of operations. Another one who was in the navy and an expert on submarine propulsion. And a legendary developer, trained in chemical engineering and a collector of rare minerals.

I also got to work with people from all around the world. French, Italians, Germans, Spanish, English, Welsh, Scots, Icelanders, Swedes, Americans, Brazilians, Lebanese, Syrians, Emirati, Indians, Iranians, Australians, Romanians, Russians, Pakistani, Egyptians, Jordanians, Iraqi, Algerians, Moroccans, Tunisians, Senegalese, South Africans, Ivorians, Belgians, Chinese, Pilipino, Indonesians, Malaysians, Japanese, Singaporeans, Kazakh, Turkish, Greeks, Canadians, Polish, Irish, Omani, Kuwaiti, Palestinians, Columbians, Czech, Dutch, and Bulgarians, to name a few. I faced cultural challenges at times, but it was an enriching experience every time.

I got to travel a lot. There were years I would spend most of my time on business trips, in between the airplane, the hotel and the trading floor. Projects took me to the UK, Italy, Spain, Germany, Sweden, Poland, Iceland, The Netherlands, The United Arab Emirates, Hong Kong, Russia and Turkey, many times over, and I have more stories of nearly missed planes and last minute miracles, of 2AM naps on a random couch on a trading floor somewhere in the world and all night celebrations when the fight is finally over, of epic fails and even more epic successes than I can count.

Photo by Christine Renard

I have had Borscht in Moscow, duck tongues in Hong Kong and donkey meat in Milan. I have been challenged to the hottest curries by Indian colleagues and to the most treacherous vodkas by Polish ones. I have laughed my head out countless times cracking jokes around a beer with the same clients who had cornered me in a workshop earlier in the day.

I’ve lost many hours of sleep across the globe but won so many good memories along the way. I also gained a few friends for life. Folks, I hope you are reading this, you will recognize yourselves.

Make no mistake, the job is not for the faint hearted. The pressure is tremendous, the working hours long and the clients very demanding. Nerve wrecking situations are the norm, especially if you work in delivery. You get humbled quite a few times, but on the bright side, you are surrounded by extremely bright people and the rewards are at the level of the challenge.

I hope my colleagues and fellow professionals will recognize themselves in these stories, that it will bring a smile on their faces in these dire times and wish that readers see the job for what it really is, a people job. And no amount of Work from Home will change that.

Let the board sound

Rabih

On universal income

Or why it is not a question of yes or no but rather when.

Universal income, as in income for all regardless of employment status or activity, has been a recurrent idea in recent years. In France, Benoit Hamon, the Socialist Party candidate for the 2016 elections based his electoral program on the idea of universal income, along with a few other like legalizing cannabis. He gathered only 6.36% of votes in the first round and retired from politics. For a majority of voters, universal income seemed like a utopia at best given that so few of them voted for him. 

Photo by Reynaldo #brigworkz Brigantty

But look again.

Since the usher of the industrial age, human held jobs have been replaced through scaling and automation, whether in agriculture, the industry or services. Bank clerks have been replaced by ATMs and ATMs by online transactions and cryptocurrency. Round the corner grocery shops have given way to  supermarkets, where cashiers are now being replaced by automatic checkouts, which are fading out in favor of online stores. As a fintech professional, I am well placed to know that it took 50 or 60 people to run an operations department for a medium sized regional bank, the whole of which can now be replicated, streamlined and automated to a very high level in a software platform operated by less than 10 people including support, and I am being conservative. Even machines are being made redundant by technology evolution. 

You see where I am going with this? 

The human workforce could, and still can for now produce a given value through direct human work and retain part of it as wages. Automation on the other hand, whether through software or robotics can produce tremendously more value on the same tasks through scaling, standardization, speed, reduced error rate and other potentials yet to unravel with the advent of machine learning and artificial intelligence. Some would argue that humans who can no longer compete on the same tasks should benefit from a part of the value produced through automation. Although not specifically aimed at automation, some countries have implemented such safety nets, financed today by tax.

For instance, French workers which are made redundant benefit from a monthly unemployment allocation which amounts to a sizeable percentage of their last wages, and lasts for up to 24 months. If they are still unemployed by that time, they can still benefit from a safety net, the RSA or Revenu de Solidarité Active, which amount to 535 euros for a single person in 2021, plus other benefits on housing, medication, transportation and energy. It does not mean a care free life, far from that, but the mechanism provides shelter, food, warmth, education for kids and sustains parents in search for other means of subsistence. Dignity.

The corner stone of such a mechanism is that people can in most cases find another job or learn a new one. But what will happen when humans can no longer compete with automation on any task? Wat will happen when purely automated corporations will produce tremendous value to their shareholders without any human intervention? When people become redundant in the cycle? The logical solution seems to be that part of this value, equivalent to what would have been a payroll, should be distributed as universal income to the billions of people who are “liberated from the vicissitudes of salaried labor”, or in lay words, made redundant. The safety net of the 21st century would effectively become a universal income for the generations to come. 

If we take the reasoning to its logical conclusion and assume that nearly all economic value and innovation are ultimately created by automation (arguably if artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies hold their promises) then the shareholders become the people. All of them. The universal income will then amount to a universal dividend.

Or will it. If humans do not produce economic value, do not produce innovation and only benefit from the value and innovation created by automation, the logical conclusion of the argument is that the world will have become a farm and automation its farmer. Universal income will be a given: feeding the cattle. That is assuming Automation with a capital A is benevolent or whatever is equivalent in the machine readable sense.

But apologies dear reader, I tend to forget myself. This last idea sounded like a T-800 promoting a not so bright future to mankind. Things do not have to be so bleak, and if humans do not produce economic value anymore, they are free to produce other kinds of value, perhaps beyond the reach of automation, and yet to be discovered. 

If you ask me, I would bet on the spiritual. Or music. Something not of interest to Automation (with a capital A). 

And don’t go reading Answer by Fredric Brown. 

Let the board sound

Rabih

On timepieces and perfection

Or why is perfection twofold.

Photo by Antony DaRosa

The mechanical watch industry was thriving in Switzerland in the first half of the 20th century. Watchmakers would put time and effort in producing timepieces of the utmost precision, called  chronometers, leveraging on more than 200 years of trial and error, dating back to the first tentative at building marine chronometers, or timekeeping devices accurate enough at sea to allow position determination by celestial navigation. These would not gain or loose more than a few seconds a day and were certified by astronomical observatories since the time standard at the time was based on the rotation of earth relative to distant celestial objects and remained so until relatively late in the previous century. 

Clocks kept ticking just fine in Switzerland until the advent of quartz devices in the 50s and 60s which were much cheaper to produce and which precision was an order of magnitude above the performance of mechanical watches, as they gained or lost less than a few second per year on the universal time. Quartz watches became the staple timekeeping device and have remained so ever since. 

The invention of cesium atomic clocks around the same time got the precision many orders of magnitude higher, up to a delay of 1 second per million years, and later on to 1 second per 30 million years, and then to 1 second per 300 million years. Such clocks can keep ticking with perfect precision for way longer than the amount of time life has existed on earth. 

And still, atomic clocks are arguably on the verge of obsolescence since the advent of optical lattice clocks in later years, which are not expected to gain or loose more than a second during a timeframe longer that the age of the universe. Some 15 billion years. And the race to accuracy is still on.

This is as close as it gets to perfection by any standard.

So. The human race having reached perfection in timekeeping, where do mechanical timepieces stand now? They are faring quite well as a matter of fact. A basic Rolex model, the staple of mechanical timepieces, has a price tag in the thousands of dollars. Most mechanical watches with a tourbillon based homemade movement and funky complications like a perpetual calendar can cost ten times that and the famous mechanical watches endorsed by a no less famous tennis player probably cost more than an optical lattice clock. And they got stolen from him a few years ago. Twice.

So how come mechanical timepieces are still around when the quartz singularity should have been enough by itself to obliterate them and the whole industry behind? It is definitely not because they keep track of time. Next generations of timekeeping devices do that much better, and that is an understatement. There are definitely good marketing strategies behind this success and granted, the prices are out of proportion and quite indecent one could argue. But the main reason in my opinion is that such timepieces have become art. A display of human craftsmanship is search of perfection. A different kind of perfection. More human perhaps. A perfection that speak to the inner child. A perfection which tickles our imagination.

When everything can be made cheaper, faster, lighter or stronger with automation and technology, low-tech items made mostly by hand will be even more sough after. Musical instruments. Hand knotted rugs. Mechanical timepieces. Because they have something no technology can provide yet: they retain parts of the human soul who pulled them out of nothingness.

Let the board sound

Rabih

On FinTech and a bit of fun in a post for once

Or how to explain what you do as a fintech professional to people who have no clue about technology and/or financial institutions, without quoting The Wolf of Wall Street.

Photo by Timisu

The average tentative involves you saying that you work in fintech (that’s financial technology) and having then to explain that your clients are mostly banks which rely on complex technologies and heavy computing power to operate, which will not make sense to most people because, well, why would you want a data center and cutting edge software to track the account balances of your customers and run your accounting, there’s Excel for that, but heeey, nooo, it’s investment banks and funds we’re talking about, not retail banks, you know, the type of banks which trade complex financial products which require heavy math and intensive computation to be valued and processed, and it goes sideways from there on because, well, you find yourself compelled to provide an example, so you try to explain what an option is, a contract which conveys its owner the right to buy or sell an underlying asset or instrument like an Amazon stock at a specified strike price prior to or on a specified date, and that the math to value it was only developed in the 70’s by Black, Scholes and Morton, which sparked a boom in the trading of options which has not waned ever since, and by the time you start explaining the Black-Scholes equation and the fact that it relies on the volatility of the price of the underlying, what underlying? Well the Amazon stock remember? No? That’s exactly my point: they are either completely lost or completely bored. At this point, you can always try to rely on your wingman, the Wolf of Wall Street, because that’s the closest most people will ever get to a trading floor and I do not blame them for not trying harder, it is an acquired taste.

If this long explanation still sounds obscure to you dear reader and possibly fintech professional, just know that a retail bank is the one you go to to open a bank account and get a credit card and it caters mostly for individuals whereas an investment bank is the place where options and other financial instruments are traded, on a trading floor. 

And for those who have never seen one, a trading floor can look and sound like a high-tech fish market, a bit toned down maybe, no fish smell, less decibels, but a fish market still. People selling stuff to other people, trying to agree on a price, managing their stock while keeping an eye on the market and the competition. There you go. It might not be entirely accurate, but it has the merit of demystifying the place. 

At this point of the reading, you might want to realize that we have still not explained what it is that a fintech professional actually does. I personally work in delivery, that’s implementing complex financial software solutions at investment banks and hedge or mutual funds. But it is not about me, it is about you dear reader/possibly fintech professional.

So the next time they ask you about your job, and unless it is alright because you like the way it hurts, swallow your pride, give The Wolf of Wall Street a break and say you work in IT, full stop. 

And point them to this post.

Let the board sound

Rabih