Wharton Professor Predicts Financial Traders Will Be First To Notice AGI Emergence

According to Cointelegraph, Wharton professor and author Ethan Mollick recently suggested that financial traders would be the first to notice if artificial intelligence (AI) becomes smarter than humans. Mollick shared his views on the X social media platform on September 24, sparking numerous responses from the cryptocurrency community. Mollick's comments focused on artificial general intelligence (AGI), a term for an AI system capable of performing any task a human could, given the proper resources. He implied that the potential to dominate the global financial market through an advanced AI system would be irresistible for the organization behind it. Mollick stated, “If AGI is achievable, the very first people who will know it will be traders who will suddenly find all of their good strategies & trades don’t work anymore, and that an unknown firm is on the winning side of all of them.” While there is no scientific benchmark for when or how a regular AI system would become an AGI system, some companies involved in AI development claim that human-level AI will be possible within a few years. In some scenarios, scientists predict that AGI could emerge from the combined efforts of many developers in a self-evolving manner that may even surprise its creators. Such an AI system could infiltrate the financial trading system, potentially through cryptocurrency or altcoin manipulation, and conduct coordinated mass trading efforts across digital assets. This could also occur within stock markets or banking systems of any networked nation. However, if the development of AGI requires continuous human oversight and guidance, traders might not be the first humans affected by its emergence. One AI developer recently questioned, “If OpenAI’s o1 can pass OpenAI’s research engineer hiring interview for coding — 90% to 100% rate — then why would they continue to hire actual human engineers for this position?” They added that “every company is about to ask this question.” The first sign that machines have become as capable as humans might be when companies stop hiring engineers and developers.