Steve Hsu points me to this essay which discusses ‘high-frequency trading’, How to Make Money in Microseconds. This might elicit a takfir from my friends at the Singularity Institute, but that piece makes me less ill-disposed to a Butlerian Jihad. A lot of this stuff on the margins and frontiers of finance reminds me of intragenomic conflict or cancer; entities and phenomena which are generally proposed to serve as means toward particular ends develop their own internal logic and ends through a co-evolutionary “arms race” in their own domains.
Against the “Thinking Machines”