Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

"only AI is still working endlessly."

"fully automatic Capitalism $$", which is the title of episode 14 of "Shell attack Mobile team S.A.C." directed by Kenji Kamiyama.

This episode tells the story of the death of Yokose, an investor. In his lifetime, he manipulated electronic money and stock markets in a game-like way and harvested a lot of money. To cope with his death, he developed a fully automated stock trading AI to take over his job.

Because he has no relatives or friends and seldom appears in public, his every transaction in the stock market is a symbol of himself. As long as AI is still in operation, the outside world is full of imagination about him. So a few months after his death, no one found him dead.

The Shell Mobile team cartoon was created in 1989, while S.A.C. The series of animations began in 2002. When the time comes to 2022, many of the technical conditions described in the works are already mature. although the development of the science and technology tree in the real world is not the same as that in literary works, the semantic body and electronic brain are not popular, and Cyberger has not become the social normal, but to some extent, the technological totalitarian system similar to that of AI developed by Yokose is running in reality.

Some companies have begun to hand over the real estate business to AI, and these AI landlords are reshaping the way houses are bought and rented, thus changing everyone's life.

When it comes to landlords, many workers do not have a good impression of stereotyped landlords, and online posts about "how to fight wits with landlords" abound. For many people, perhaps the best landlord is a "non-existent" landlord.

Imagine the process of renting from a "non-existent" landlord: upload an identity on a rental website, do face authentication, and AI shows you around the house via video or VR, sending you a message asking about your intention. When you decide to rent a room, you only need to make the payment online, and AI will send you the lease contract and a series of house passwords, the whole process can be done without talking to anyone.

In fact, this is not just in the imagination, now AI landlords are using sophisticated algorithms to bring earth-shaking changes to people. Companies that do this kind of business are keen to use the word "Imagine" to entice consumers to imagine an ideal lifestyle and pay in the atmosphere created by the imagination.

Imagine Homes, based in the United States, is one such company. It was founded in 2016, but the rental business has spread to many post-industrial cities with a large number of single houses, such as Pittsburgh, Cleveland and Minneapolis, and there are thousands of houses to be rented on the website. the web description tries to show the process of "painless" renting.

Electronic password system and online rent payment are two major selling points. Take the first-tier cities in China as an example. Generally speaking, after excluding intermediaries, most landlords and "second landlords" are local small companies or self-employed. They have an in-depth understanding of the local housing market and have the ownership or use rights of a small number of houses in a small concentrated area.

Landlords who intend to continue to expand their business not only have to maintain the houses they are currently renting, but also spend time looking for new properties and opening up new markets, which requires a lot of labor costs.

But LinkedIn says Imagine Homes has only more than 30 employees, who have never opened offices in any city, but manage thousands of houses in eight states through AI.

Moreover, AI landlords not only manage and maintain all the houses currently in operation, minimize the consumption of human resources, but are also rapidly acquiring new properties. According to the search results of its website property catalogue, the company buys dozens or even hundreds of new properties every year.

As the website says, "it is our duty to buy and manage houses and provide our customers with a flawless rental experience throughout the process, all of which depends on technology, the data won't lie, and we won't." AI landlords are using data tools to find and buy homes quickly.

Just as AI uses data analysis to find quality companies worth investing in, so does AI landlord's algorithm, which builds models based on the distance between the house and the job center, traffic conditions, the attractiveness of the community, the convenience of nearby facilities, building types and maintenance needs, and selects houses worth buying.

Because AI's decisions are reliable enough to let go of manpower checks, deals tend to be done in a very short period of time.

Usually, only a few hours after the homeowner releases the house for sale, the AI landlord will make a cash offer in front of all human buyers. A deal with an AI landlord has two advantages. The offer is more attractive and eliminates the hassle of home visits, which allows sellers to sell their homes to AI landlords in a very short period of time.

The process of selling a house is simple and stress-free. I received a fair price, and their response is very fast, I would like to recommend this company to others. The "selected feedback" from Imagine Homes's official website can be said that human beings should praise new technologies, which make convenient housing rentals and transactions a reality. Passwords replace keys, payments are done online, and everything is automated, and AI meets demand perfectly, both for tenants who want the perfect rental experience and for homeowners who want to sell their existing properties quickly, doing exactly what they claim to be-reshaping the way they buy and rent their homes.

However, probably no matter the tenants who pay the rent online or the owners who have just sold the house and got the transaction online, they don't care too much about who will profit from their rent and house in the end.

According to Reuters, these companies that offer single-family residential rental services usually have relationships with one or more investment groups. Imagine Homes is inextricably linked to Colchis Capital, a well-funded investment company. For example, the legal representative of the former and the executives of the latter have the same name, and the registered address of Imagine Homes is the address of the office of the investment company, and so on.

On Colchis Capita's website, they introduced themselves as "technology and data-driven alternative investment companies focused on single-family leasing, finance and venture capital." Perhaps this sentence can be interpreted like this: an investment company that is only interested in house rental automation and the simplification of real estate transactions. Obviously, real estate investment is their job.

Colchis Capita recently invested in a company that uses AI to make mortgage decisions to use technology to provide shortcuts to real estate transactions. This means that AI landlords will not only help companies own more and more properties, but have also been able to form a paradigm in which more large companies with deep resources can replicate this practice around the world, understanding and manipulating the market from a distance without using manpower, bringing the industry one step closer to the technological totalitarianism described in countless cyberpunk works.

In the society described in the Shell attack Mobile team, human beings upgrade their bodies to machines, but while upgrading their bodies, they also hand over their physical authority to technological oligarchs. Ordinary people can not even maintain their own body on a daily basis, and can only allow themselves to be controlled by large companies and groups with capital and technology.

On the other hand, AI landlords push up real estate market prices by constantly buying small, old houses and foreclosed homes that should be affordable to buyers, thereby driving up real estate market prices and making it more out of reach for low-and middle-income groups to own homes.

This means that when rising house prices cause more people to lose their home ownership, landlords can raise rents unscrupulously. At this time, the individual has almost completely lost the right to choose to refuse or withdraw. Just like when you upgrade your usual software, you can only be forced to follow suit.

In fact, among the many companies that use AI landlords for fully automated house leasing and real estate transactions, Imagine Homes is only a small emerging company. Many of these companies have quietly developed into behemoths.

A search of the websites of several AI real estate companies shows that the largest Invitation Homes has more than 80,000 properties in 16 cities and American Homes has nearly 60,000 homes in 22 states.

A company called Arrived Homes goes a step further, not only offering a fully automated rental experience to tenants, but also selling shares in the house to real estate investors on its website, dragging everyone into the speculation.

It is claimed that it aims to provide people with a better way of real estate investment, but wealth does not appear out of thin air. The operation of the capital market has its own laws, some people harvest wealth through market laws, while others lose all their money in this digital game. Democratic Congressman Khanna has called for legislation against the financialization of real estate. The Cincinnati city government has also introduced a policy in which the government buys houses and rents them out to tenants in the form of comfortable housing, to resist the entry of AI investment, but with little success.

The real estate market dominated by capital and technology may not escape the cycle of "boom-bust-resale". Every bursting of a bubble will carry a large number of ordinary people to ruin.

Just like Yokose Yuanyuan's stock AI, it not only maximizes profits, but also brings the maximization of hatred. It maliciously manipulated the stocks of small companies, accelerated the bursting of the bubble, and wiped out a large number of investors, so he became the object of hatred. At the end of the show, Phil, the killer hired by the violent group, arrives belatedly, and when he intends to impose sanctions on him on behalf of the poor, he finds that he has passed away first, and only AI is still working endlessly.

The physically dead Yokose's thinking and understanding of the capital market is integrated into the AI, so that he can continue to be active in this numbers game as a speculator. However, even though he earned a house full of gold in his lifetime, all he could take away after his death was only a small coin to pay for the passage across Sanduchuan.

This article is from the official account of Wechat: game Research Society (ID:yysaag), author: Qimu cake

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