We live in a world where our civilization and daily lives depend upon institutions, infrastructure, and technological substrates that are _complicated_ but not _unknowable_. Join Patrick McKenzie (patio11) as he discusses how decisions, technology, culture, and incentives shape our finance, technology, government, and more, with the people who built (and build) those Complex Systems.
Patrick McKenzie (@patio11) shares his remarks to the Bank of England on critical vulnerabilities in financial infrastructure. Drawing from the July 2024 CrowdStrike outage which brought down teller systems at major US banks, Patrick discusses how regulatory guidance inadvertently created dangerous software monocultures. He also examines the stablecoin market, its impressive growth, and the elephant tethered to the room. He also delivers a message from Silicon Valley to other centers of power on the urgent necessity of waking up regarding AI, which almost the entire world currently far underrates.
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Full transcript available here: www.complexsystemspodcast.com/talking-to-the-bank-of-england/
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Sponsor: Mercury
This episode is brought to you by Mercury, the fintech trusted by 200K+ companies — from first milestones to running complex systems. Mercury offers banking that truly understands startups and scales with them. Start today at Mercury.com
Mercury is a financial technology company, not a bank. Banking services provided by Choice Financial Group, Column N.A., and Evolve Bank & Trust; Members FDIC.
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Links:
- The Bank of England: https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/
- Bits about Money, Why the CrowdStrike bug hit banks hard: https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/crowdstrike-bug-hit-banks-hard/
- Scaling Laws for Neural Language Models” by Kaplan et al: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2001.08361
- Stripe Annual Letter 2024: https://stripe.com/annual-updates/2024
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Timestamps:
(00:00) Intro
(01:48) The importance of implementation-level understanding
(03:00) Single points of failure
(04:25) Can a 22-year-old engineer close all the banks?
(05:18) The CrowdStrike incident: A case study
(08:34) The culture of “shut up and shuffle”
(09:54) Blameless postmortems
(12:25) What actually happened during CrowdStrike
(18:01) Five whys: Root cause analysis
(19:03) How software monocultures are created
(22:54) Understanding endpoint monitoring software
(25:25) Distributed systems and the nature of CrowdStrike
(31:22) The economics of software monocultures
(33:29) Why wasn’t there defense in depth?
(37:05) Why was recovery so difficult?
(40:32) The domino effect across financial institutions
(43:36) What went right: Electronic systems remained up
(45:10) This was a near miss
(49:29) Potential policy responses
(54:03) Switching gears: Stablecoins
(01:01:37) The elephant in the room: Tether
(01:15:32) Who loses if Tether implodes?
(01:16:59) AI and the future of trading
(01:26:47) AI risks in the trading space
(01:30:41) Closing
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Guest:
- Melanie Mitchell, Resident Professor, Santa Fe Institute
Hosts: Abha Eli Phoboo
Producer: Katherine Moncure
Podcast theme music by: Mitch Mignano
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More info:
- Tutorial: Fundamentals of Machine Learning
- Lecture: Artificial Intelligence
- SFI programs: Education
- Competition: ARC Prize
Books:
- Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter
- Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans by Melanie Mitchell
- Complexity: A Guided Tour by Melanie Mitchell
Talks:
- The Future of Artificial Intelligence by Melanie Mitchell
- Introduction: AI and the Barrier of Meaning 2 by Melanie Mitchell
- Conceptual Abstraction and Analogy in Natural and Artificial Intelligence by Melanie Mitchell
Papers & Articles:
- “The metaphors of artificial intelligence,” in Science (November 14, 2024), doi: 10.1126/science.adt6140
- “Using counterfactual tasks to evaluate the generality of analogical reasoning in Large Language Models,” in arXiv (February 14, 2024), doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2402.08955
- “Comparing humans, GPT-4, and GPT-4V on abstraction and reasoning tasks, ” (Proceedings of the LLM-CP Workshop, AAAI 2024), arXiv (December 11, 2023), doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2311.09247
- “The debate over understanding in AI’s large language models,” in PNAS (March 21, 2023), doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2215907120
- “The ConceptARC benchmark: evaluating understanding and generalization in the ARC domain,” in Transactions on Machine Learning Research (August 2023), arXiv (May 11, 2023), doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2305.07141
Discussions about philosophy, psychology, and sociology through the lens of systems thinking.
Sam and Vox investigate the art of decision-making through game theory; how to navigate rules, players, and payouts to make smarter choices. We’ll explore classic game theory scenarios, the psychology behind decisions, and why emotions like pride can shift the game.
Explore the myths, mysteries, and medical breakthroughs of the most complex and powerful organ in your body – your brain. Weaving together expert interviews with heartfelt, inspiring snapshots of the patients and family members in the middle of it all, Heather Sherman dives into the latest science on Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, epilepsy, stroke, concussion, spinal cord injury, brain cancer, chronic pain and other brain diseases and disorders. Along the way she uncovers surprising insights, sheds light on the latest research, and shares heroic, real life stories from the people on the front lines. Brought to you by Krembil Brain Institute at UHN, one of the largest and most comprehensive neurological centres in North America. Learn more about our mission at: http://www.uhn.ca/krembil
In this bonus episode, we delve into the life-changing journey of Carmen Chu, a cancer survivor and mother who was diagnosed with sleep apnea. Carmen shares her struggles with interrupted sleep, fatigue, and the impact on her daily life. She discusses her experience with sleep tests and the transformative benefits of using a CPAP machine.
Additional Resources
UHN’s Centre for Sleep Health and Research
Dr. Frances Chung named UHN Inventor of the Year
Dr. Douglas Bradley featured in KITE Research spotlight: Use of non-invasive breathing device to alleviate obstructive and central sleep apnea improves quality of life
The Your Complex Brain production team is Heather Sherman, Jessica Schmidt, Dr. Amy Ma, Kim Perry, Alley Wilson, Sara Yuan, Meagan Anderi, Liz Chapman, and Lorna Gilfedder.
The Krembil Brain Institute, part of University Health Network, in Toronto, is home to one of the world's largest and most comprehensive teams of physicians and scientists uniquely working hand-in-hand to prevent and confront problems of the brain and spine, such as Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, epilepsy, stroke, spinal cord injury, chronic pain, brain cancer or concussion, in their lifetime. Through state-of-the-art patient care and advanced research, we are working relentlessly toward finding new treatments and cures.
Do you want to know more about the Krembil Brain Institute at UHN? Visit us at: uhn.ca/krembil
To get in touch, email us at krembil@uhn.ca or message us on social media:
Instagram – @krembilresearch
Twitter – @KBI_UHN
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Thanks for listening!