Is your investment advisor a replicant? That's right, a robot disguised as a human. You may remember movies like Blade Runner (where Harrison Ford had to find the replicants) or Westworld (where the cowboys were robots) or even Alien (where the ship's scientist was a robot disguised as a scientist, with disasterous results for the crew). It's a familiar plot twist in many sci-fi movies.

But perhaps the scariest replicant discovery would be finding out that your advisor is running an algorithm in his or her head rather than rely on sapien level consciousness to evaluate investment opportunities. Consider the following: facebook runs an algorithm to maximize eyeball time spent looking at a screen. They do it by trying to figure out what makes you look at that screen. Think of mirror neurons, a neuron that fires both when a human or animal acts and when the human or animal observes the same action performed by another. Facebook wants you to want Facebook.

With AI the plot thickens. AI can now proactively discover what you like, perhaps more quickly than you know, by combining thousands of activities observed on you, to create one huge algorithm that is an approximate digital representation of your consciousness. It goes two ways: one, you are the recipient of what it tells you and two, they are the recipient of what you tell it. Here's the question: to what extent are you -- the viewer, the product of "them" the influencer (be it facebook, AI generated content, or a fin-fluencer). And to what extent do you think that your "knowledge" is just a repitition of what the alogorithm is pushing to your mind.

OK, not you, your investment advisor. Go talk to your advisor. Listen to what they say. Bullish on stocks? Bearish on bonds? A recession with Trump tariffs; now no recession? How much of that view came from a study of financial markets? How much was just "received wisdom" from an algorithm that generated a point of view that was "served" via a server to your advisor? Who is talking? Or, what is talking?

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