the sudden exposure of the deterioration of facebook, the chaos in securities markets, the wobble in the market bubbles, the insane policy of the federal reserve, the collapse of massive retailers … i am 90% sure that we are headed for a self-imposed recession in late 2018 and early 2019 … the explosion of social media and the advertising industries as an economic engine is probably the most damaging because it has been the least grounded and least understood … i think we are looking at a second dot com implosion … and another giant gaping hole is the rise of robots in financial markets … robots and the statistical modeling algorithms they use only “learn” using historical data and they all “learn” using the same fundamental methods and therefore they all make the same mistakes at the same time and they drive financial markets in massive waves that exist on much more grandiose scales compared to their fallible yet risk averse human counterparts … humans learned risk aversion after 2 billion years of evolution … the robots are 100% unevolved and have 0 risk aversion … also, “artificial intelligence” doesn’t learn at all … first of all it isn’t intelligence, it’s machine learning and secondly what we call learning is actually training similar to the way evolution trained amoebas to chase bacteria …