Artificial intelligence and the death of decision-making

That algorithms played a part in the financial crash of 2007, for instance, is well documented. In 2006, around 40% of all trades conducted on the London Stock Exchange were executed by computers, with this figure reaching 80% in some U.S. equity markets. For many economists and experts, the fact that transactions were made by "algos" written by quantitative analysts (or "quants" for short) was one of the main reasons why global markets built up so much risk prior to the collapse. As Richard Dooling--the author of Rapture for the Geeks: When AI Outsmarts IQ--wrote for the New York Times in 2008, "Somehow the genius quants--the best and brightest geeks Wall Street firms could buy--fed $1 trillion in subprime mortgage debt into their supercomputers, added some derivatives, massaged the arrangements with computer algorithms and--poof!--created