What is the fastest way for a robot with superhuman capabilities to make money?
worldbuilding.stackexchange.com
worldbuilding.stackexchange.com
I considered boxing, but you probably have to pay too many dues (timewise) first. But you can be signed and stuck out on a baseball field pretty quick; signing bonuses, etc. Tennis? Basketball? Soccer (in one of the places that calls it football)? Golf?
Where can you get a signing bonus and start hauling in the big money right away?
Also worth mention, I have heard recently that there is a way to break PHP, hack Pornhub and earn $20k!
edit: just out of curiosity, why was this answer disliked by somebody? cuz I said Yankees? soccer? athletics rather than nerd dreams? Cu-uz, I still think this is the best answer I have seen.
The fun of the question is to engage in the speculation. The question didn't identify how much it was necessary to earn, and all the people saying "gambling" aren't saying how much is being talked about, etc.
Even if you are a "lucky phenom kid" in baseball, you aren't all that famous till you establish a bit of a track record; plenty of journeymen players remain completely unkown, and our people-smart robot could calibrate his goodness (he's not even stronger than a human, he just has fast reaction times)
I'm not trying to weasel out of your point, it's a good point, I'm trying to weasel into this thing being an interesting question, and find some parameters that would find an interesting answer.
I'm still looking for the answer to, what does our economy recognize quickly and reward greatly, and how quick are we talking, and how greatly are we suggesting, and ok, how obscure can you remain?
I think "super smart high end real estate broker" is lucrative and not that "famousy", and perhaps within the easy win range of this robot, but it's deathly dull so what would actually be a good, robust, and fun answer?
6-8 decks would be hard to figure out until maybe halfway through. Could do some analysis on the probability of a face card though that would really pay off towards the end of the shoe.
You're thinking in terms of human constraints; that's not what this hypothetical was about.
I suppose you could say you could subscribe to and read all the news tickers more quickly? but you'd still have the problem of knowing what to do with the info, like you'd still have to realize how a 1 degree warmer temperature someplace would affect the banana crop, along with you'd have to know everything single thing everybody else in the world knows about their local industry, which the description didn't really say you could do.
To put it another way, IBM didn't conclude that they should plug their Jeopardy winning supercomputer into the market and let it trade stocks. To put it another nother way, the "perfect market hypothesis" says the best you are going to do is what the market is already doing, which is a good thing, it stops you from falling behind, but it doesn't put you ahead.
Now, you might say "what about Warren Buffett", but that's probably more along the lines of the robot's buy and sell people skills, like maybe go into real estate and be a super good salesman coaxing people to buy where there is a lot of sloppy money on the table. There is not a lot of money lying around the stockmarket; while we hear of winners, they are always balanced by losers, and nobody yet knows if the two can be separated in advance.
Renaissance would refute that point
if this robot could do approximately what Renaissance has been already doing, that would not create wealth, that would take Renaissance's milkshake and share it for two, or worse, by creating competition, dry up Renaissance's milkshake for both. i.e. the money that Renaissance is making is not "lying around to be taken", it's already being wrung out of the market, and is being picked up and put in somebody's pocket, Renaissance's.
And for perspective, what Renaissance has been doing for all the time it has existed (65 billion in 25 years is your unicorn) is less than what Apple did, less than what Microsoft did before that, less than Berkshire Hathaway, etc. Facebook... Google... Uber is already closing in on Renaissance's value in a fraction of the time and in terms of trendline will blow past it. "Money lying on the floor of the stock exchange" is nothing compared to actual value creation.
Still, Renaissance is a pretty good gig for some uber mathnerds who realize they don't actually have other ways to create value (as our robot does) so I'd give it a bump for low opportunity cost.
the stock market is one of our most efficient markets, that's why it attracts big money, the money is safe; if you are manipulating the stock market to make it unsafe, you're going to attract attention. Better to manipulate as a rug merchant in a bazaar.
When we designed an artificial limb, we "discovered" how useful pain is. We really need some skin that could discover on their own collisions with other objects, that should not be there, but are.
If you can self-heal from the worst of injuries, you don't need to feel pain.
I imagine the brain would evolve to ignore pain since the people who feel it less would have an advantage over the ones who feel it even if both were self-healing. We already have a version of this with adrenaline to numb the pain so that we can get out of a dangerous situation.
Play poker.
Trade currency.
In any case, break in to a modern biotechnology lab with everything needed for genetic engineering. Create a highly infective biological thing (not necessarily a virus) that, after infection, creates a biological circuitry that makes a human perfectly obedient after some defined signal. A much simpler versions of that already exist [0]. Now just start infecting people and use their resources to spread it even wider. Even if a small part of a population is immune it's not a problem.
Few days at most and you own everything.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavior-altering_parasites_an...
This robot has a brain that is a supercomputer all self contained within that runs off small amounts of oxygen. Since it has such a high level of intelligence it should be able to blueprint itself.
Once the robot is able to recreate itself, it could go 2 ways, either selling off parts of it like compact supercomputers, or build an army of other superhuman robots and take over the world.
To get started however, a bit of online gambling is probably necessary to get the required funds.
Maybe some capabilities should be removed from this robot?
The intriguing part for me was simply the question "assuming you could win/succeed at any endeavor, what endeavors deliver how much reward how quickly?" i.e. not about the robot at all, but what will our economy quickly discover and reward, because "building a better Amazon than Amazon" or a better Microsoft or IKEA would still take decades to pay off.
Option the rights to Hollywood and big money is yours. Spend it on replacing the diodes down your left hand side.
Optimistic answer: The robot wakes up and tries to find a bank. The robot goes to downtown San Francisco and can't find any, eventually asking a bald man wearing a strange-looking red and black leotard where the nearest bank is.
"Bank? I don't believe there have been any banks here for some time." The man talks to you and quickly finds out the robot is from another time. He smiles wryly, and begins, "The economics of the future are somewhat different; you see, money doesn't exist in the 24th century..."
The "fastest way" is to be superhuman isn't it?
He also sounds like the sort of candidate many startups are looking for in their job ads. So there's that.