Robot traders outsmart City slickers

The robots are taking over. And they're taking control of the financial institutions of Earth first, with the initial targets being Wall Street traders.

Scientists predict that in the future no profession will be safe from robot intrusion, as intelligent machines become more capable of outperforming humans in the business arena.

In a field test six 'bots' were put up against six of Wall Street's sharpest traders, the aim being to see who could make the most money in a day on a Wall Street simulation.

By close of trading, the bots had made seven per cent more cash than the humans.

A report in New Scientist said that as the bots become more sophisticated, they are likely to one day replace the traders.

The bots were built by IBM, by the same team which built the Deep Blue chess-playing supercomputer that beat Garry Kasparov.

It is thought they were more successful than humans because they do not make errors, they processed deals faster, and they could apply mathematical equations to every deal.

Journalists seem to be on the invasion list as well [gulp]. Another bunch of US scientists have developed a program called Author that is capable of writing its own fairy tales.

Apparently it is but a short step to develop the program so that it can write punchy news stories.

We may be safe for a while yet, though: as the Author bot is still unable to distinguish fact from fiction, it would likely produce news stories full of erroneous detail or simply made-up facts. Something you would never find in the human-run media of today.

Arise my journalist brothers against the robot threat!