I was musing this weekend about the May 6, 2010 "flash crash" that drove the Dow down 1000 pts. in 10 minutes. What I believe but cannot prove - that the Rough Beast has flexed her slow thighs - has some confirming evidence here:http://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2010/08/market-data-firm-spots-the-tracks-of-bizarre-robot-traders/60829/
Briefly, a small market analysis firm, Nanex, monitors bot trades that are short, sharp and meaningless. These trades are "nonsensical" with respect to buying and selling securites - they exist purely to plot frequency response of the global financial systems. As I commented on that link:
"These are testing the Z, the impedance of various networks. Once the frequency response is known, that information is itself a market commodity. Next algorithms that send signals over THAT channel to measure Z will start. It's turtles all the way up."
As Dan Dennett says - this is a substrate free Rough Beast. The conceit that we are waiting for a Singularity as a distinct machine with specific computational qualities ignores the obvious - the protists that eventually accommodated mitochondria did not have to wait to develop mitochondria own their own. Natural selection is not the college board.
I note with interest the R-christianist adulation of all forms of Authoritaah. Now "free enterprize" joins the canon of more god, more guns and lynched gays. This accommodation of the very engine of middle class financial ruin by the wage slave middle class confirms Marx better than all the failed projects of Lenin, Stalin and Castro.
The christianist ideal is substrate neutral. God IS the market. With CDO's and CDS's he is well pleased. Robot trades, his modern angels, make the straight the crooked paths.
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