Matthew Mather’s Darknet Shows Reality Is Not Far From Fiction

Last week, Financial Sense interviewed Matthew Mather, a former tech CEO turned best-selling author of novels such as CyberStorm, Darknet, and most recently Nomad. Mather’s books explore the dark possibilities of new technologies, ranging from cyberwarfare, assassination networks, to ‘virtual corporations’ run by artificial intelligence. Although his plots are fictional in nature, Mather explained that much of the technology he writes about either exists or is currently in development.
In his novel, Darknet, Mather writes about a Wall Street broker, Jake O’Connell, who gets caught up in the invisible world of assassination markets, virtual currencies, and ‘chatbots’ that can fool people into thinking they are real human beings. While Mather invents his dystopian vision of the future in Darknet, the novel is ‘based on real-world technologies,’ says Mather, ‘whether or not the average person is aware of them.’
When it comes to the financial world, many hedge funds make immense amounts of money with varying types of AI and high-frequency trading technologies, and it appears less and less outlandish to imagine AI systems replacing humans on Wall Street, says Mather, as they have in recent years. Financial Sense host Cris Sheridan points out that just earlier this year, in an extremely rare and candid interview, the founder of one of the world’s most profitable investment firms, Renaissance Technologies, credited AI and pattern recognition technology for their phenomenal success.

This post was published at FinancialSense on 11/23/2015.