According to MotherJones: Years of mistakes and bad
decisions led to the 2008 collapse. But when the next crisis happens, it may
not develop over months, weeks, or even days. It could take seconds….
….Traders' need for speed has grown so voracious that two
companies are currently building underwater cables (price tag: around $300
million each) across the Atlantic, in an attempt to join Wall Street and the
London Stock Exchange by the shortest, fastest route possible. When completed
in 2014, one of the cables is expected to shave five to six milliseconds off
trans-Atlantic trades.
But why stop there? One trading engineer has proposed
positioning a line of drones over the ocean, where they would flash microwave
data from one to the next like the chain of mountaintop signal fires in The
Lord of the Rings. "At what point do you say, 'This is fast enough'?"
asks Brent Weisenborn, a former NASDAQ vice president.
The acceleration of Wall Street cannot be separated from the
automation of Wall Street. Since the dawn of the computer age, humans have
worried about sophisticated artificial intelligence—HAL, Skynet, the
Matrix—seizing control. But traders, in their quest for that million-dollar
millisecond, have willingly handed over the reins. Although humans still run
the banks and write the code, algorithms now make millions of moment-to-moment
calls in the global markets. Some can even learn from their mistakes.
Unfortunately, notes Weisenborn, "one thing you can't teach a computer is
judgment…."
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