What AI Cannot Do — According to Felix Bick

If Chapter 9 of How Not to Get Scammed by AI Trading Apps establishes what legitimate AI trading looks like, Chapter 10 does the equally important work of establishing hard limits — what AI fundamentally cannot do, no matter how sophisticated the underlying technology becomes.

Felix Bick is direct about this: AI models are pattern-matching systems trained on historical data, and they cannot predict genuinely novel events — regulatory shifts, geopolitical shocks, black-swan market crashes — any better than a well-informed human, and in some ways worse, since they can be overconfident in patterns that no longer hold.

The book makes a particularly sharp point about risk and return: AI cannot eliminate the fundamental trade-off between the two. Any legitimate strategy offering higher expected returns necessarily carries higher risk of loss. A platform claiming “high returns with zero risk,” Bick writes, is not describing an advanced AI system — it is describing a mathematical impossibility, packaged as one.

Perhaps the most important insight in this chapter concerns verification, not prediction. Bick points out that AI cannot verify its own outputs are being fairly reported to you. Even if an underlying trading engine were genuinely real, nothing prevents an operator from simply displaying fabricated numbers on your account dashboard rather than reflecting actual trades. This distinction — between what a model theoretically does and what a user is actually shown — is, in Bick’s words, the central mechanism of most AI trading app fraud.

That single insight reframes much of what follows in the book: the danger isn’t usually that the AI doesn’t work as claimed — it’s that there may be no real trading happening behind the display at all.

This chapter is essential reading for anyone evaluating an AI-branded trading product, and it’s exactly the kind of clear, mechanism-focused explanation that makes How Not to Get Scammed by AI Trading Apps by Felix Bick such a genuinely useful resource.