Computers need binary inputs and thus the AI encourages us to see things in black and white. Such false ce

Back in the 1990s a colleague used to pronounce on the annual “Red Glasses Award’ designed to highlight the most egregious examples of rent extraction from gullible management teams for corporate ‘rebranding’.

There is a corner of the FT that continues to do sterling work as financial journalists, having alerted us to, inter-alia, Wirecard, Greensill, Softbank, (especially with We Work but also some of the other egregious actions of the former Deutsche Bank traders) and now also Ark Investment Management, the active ETF fund house that has grown dramatically in the last few months (not coincidentally we suspect since founder Cathy Wood resolved her dispute with her minority owner/chief US distributor).

Normally on April 1st in the UK we would expect to see various spoof articles in the paper and on the TV, but on the basis that almost everything announced over the last 12 months might previously have been considered utterly unbelievable, it’s difficult to see how anyone could come up with something sufficiently ridiculous as to actually compete with what passes for real life in 2021.

We live in a world in which we are increasingly ‘given the opinions we are supposed to hold’. One antidote to this is to apply the logic of received opinion number one to situation number two. This results in some interesting, if sometimes uncomfortable, results, in effect, rather awkward thought experiments or ATEs as we shall call them.