Past Visions of Artificial Futures: One Hundred and Fifty Years under the Spectre of Evolving Machines

The influence of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Artificial Life (ALife) technologies upon society, and their potential to fundamentally shape the future evolution of humankind, are topics very much at the forefront of current scientific, governmental and public debate. While these might seem like very modern concerns, they have a long history that is often disregarded in contemporary discourse. Insofar as current debates do acknowledge the history of these ideas, they rarely look back further than the origin of the modern digital computer age in the 1940s-50s. In this paper we explore the earlier history of these concepts. We focus in particular on the idea of self-reproducing and evolving machines, and potential implications for our own species. We show that discussion of these topics arose in the 1860s, within a decade of the publication of Darwin's The Origin of Species, and attracted increasing interest from scientists, novelists and the general public in the early 1900s. After introducing the relevant work from this period, we categorise the various visions presented by these authors of the future implications of evolving machines for humanity. We suggest that current debates on the co-evolution of society and technology can be enriched by a proper appreciation of the long history of the ideas involved.Comment: To appear in Proceedings of the Artificial Life Conference 2018 (ALIFE 2018), MIT Pres

Commentary : demographic changes and international factor mobility

Population

Latin America and Foreign Capital in the Twentieth Century: Economics, Politics, and Institutional Change

Latin America began the twentieth century as a relatively poor region on the periphery of the world economy. One cause of a low level of income per person was capital scarcity. Long run growth via capital deepening requires either the mobilization of domestic capital through savings, or large inflows of foreign capital. Latin America's capital inflows were large by global standards at the century's turn, and even up to the 1930s. But after the 1930s, Latin America was not so favored by foreign capital as compared with other peripheral regions for example, the Asian economies. The Great Depression is conventionally depicted as a turning point in Latin America for commercial policy and protectionism, thus marking the onset of import substitution and a long-run increase in barriers in international goods markets. However, this paper argues that policy responses in the 1930s, and subsequent decades of relative economic retardation, can be better understood as the cause and effect of the creation of long-run barriers in international capital markets. To support this notion, I discuss the quantitative extent of these barriers and their effects on economic growth. As for causality, I argue that the political economy of institutional changes in the 1930s in the periphery might be understood in similar terms to those economic historians have used to discuss the macroeconomic crisis in the core. Such a political-economy model might thus have universal (rather than core-specific) use. It might predict the 'reactive' and 'passive' responses by periphery countries to external shocks, and the persistence of such shocks in the postwar period. In conclusion, I touch on the important implications of these ideas for the current situation in Latin America, where recent policy reforms aim to undo the last sixty years of isolation and reintegrate Latin America into the global economy.

Foreign Capital in Latin America in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries

This paper examines the history of foreign investment in Latin America in the two centuries since independence. Investment flows to the region were sometimes large and always volatile. Symptoms of overborrowing, sudden stops, debt, default and crises have been evident from the beginning. In general the economies in the hemisphere struggled for most of the nineteenth century to develop reputations for macroeconomic stability and sound finance, and foreign capital was thus repelled for the long periods. In the twentieth century, most of the region, like the rest of the world, turned inward and against foreign capital markets, a policy trend that emerged in the interwar period and has only recently begun to reverse. These historical perspectives shed light on the region's current relative isolation and its future economic challenges.

Potential Pitfalls for the Purchasing-Power-Parity Puzzle? Sampling and Specification Biases in Mean-Reversion Tests of the Law of One Price

The PPP puzzle is based on empirical evidence that international price differences for individual goods (LOOP) or baskets of goods (PPP) appear highly persistent or even non-stationary. The present consensus is these price differences have a half-life that is of the order of five years at best, and infinity at worst. This seems unreasonable in a world where transportation and transaction costs appear so low as to encourage arbitrage and the convergence of price gaps over much shorter horizons, typically days or weeks. However, current empirics rely on a particular choice of methodology, involving (i) relatively low-frequency monthly, quarterly, or annual data, and (ii) a linear model specification. In fact, these methodological choices are not innocent, and they can be shown to bias analysis to-wards findings of slow convergence and a random walk. Intuitively, if we suspect that the actual adjustment horizon is of the order of days then monthly and annual data cannot be expected to reveal it. If we suspect arbitrage costs are high enough to produce a substantial band of inaction' then a linear model will fail to support convergence if the process spends considerable time random-walking in that band. Thus, when testing for PPP or LOOP, model specification and data sampling should not proceed without consideration of the actual institutional context and logistical framework of markets.

A Century of Purchasing-Power Parity

This paper investigates purchasing-power parity (PPP) since the late nineteenth century. I collected data for a group of twenty countries over one hundred years, a larger historical panel of annual data than has ever been studied before. The evidence for long-run PPP is favorable using recent multivariate and univariate tests of higher power. Residual variance analysis shows that episodes of floating exchange rates have generally been associated with larger deviations from PPP, as expected; this result is not attributable to significantly greater persistence (longer halflives) of deviations in such regimes, but is due to the larger shocks to the real-exchange rate process in such episodes. In the course of the twentieth century there was relatively little change in the capacity of international market integration to smooth out real exchange rate shocks. Instead, changes in the size of shocks depended on the political economy of monetary and exchange-rate regime choice under the constraints imposed by the trilemma.

Globalization, Trade, and Development: Some Lessons From History

Recent research in international economic history has opened up new lines of enquiry on the origins of globalization, as well as its causes and consequences. Such findings have the potential to inform contemporary debates and this paper considers what lessons this body of historical work has for our current understanding of the linkages between trade and development.

The Purchasing Power Parity Debate

Originally propounded by the sixteenth-century scholars of the University of Salamanca, the concept of purchasing power parity (PPP) was revived in the interwar period in the context of the debate concerning the appropriate level at which to re-establish international exchange rate parities. Broadly accepted as a long-run equilibrium condition in the post-war period, it was first advocated as a short-run equilibrium by many international economists in the first few years following the breakdown of the Bretton Woods system in the early 1970s and then increasingly came under attack on both theoretical and empirical grounds from the late 1970s to the mid 1990s. Accordingly, over the last three decades, a large literature has built up that examines how much the data deviated from theory, and the fruits of this research have provided a deeper understanding of how well PPP applies in both the short run and the long run. Since the mid 1990s, larger datasets and nonlinear econometric methods, in particular, have improved estimation. As deviations narrowed between real exchange rates and PPP, so did the gap narrow between theory and data, and some degree of confidence in long-run PPP began to emerge again. In this respect, the idea of long-run PPP now enjoys perhaps its strongest support in more than thirty years, a distinct reversion in economic thought.

The sleekest link algorithm

How does Google decide which web sites are important? It uses an ingenious algorithm that exploits the structure of the web and is resistant to hacking. Here, we describe this PageRank algorithm, illustrate it by example, and show how it can be interpreted as a Jacobi iteration and a teleporting random walk. We also ask the algorithm to rank the undergraduate mathematics classes offered at the University of Strathclyde. PageRank draws upon ideas from linear algebra, graph theory and stochastic processes, and it throws up research-level challenges in scientific computing. It thus forms an exciting and modern application area that could brighten up many a mathematics class syllabus