"increases the liquidity if the market for everyone else"

That's just it. The whole premise is pretty absurd. The market, the actors, everything. It's so far removed from literally anything remotely human. It's the financial equivalent of an infinite sea of AI bots producing CVs and research papers which are only being evaluated and read by other bots.

If you step away from it all for a second, what the hell is the endgame of this whole hustle.

I mean, efficient allocation of capital is the overarching goal. HFT is either a facilitator of that or a perverse byproduct, depending on who you ask.

At any point in time yes, this is an accurate description. When you integrate over time it’s not. At the end of the line it’s people betting with advanced tools for execution of their bets. Behind the mathematical beauty of risk free and arbitrage, there is a reality of someone, somewhere making a bet at end of a line of contracts. And there is also someone making the opposite bet. Markets are not disseminating information but beliefs as a proxy for information, and as such they are much more human than you would think. The end game is a network of beliefs, livelihoods, politics and petty or grand aspirations, the same mess as in any organisation. The only reason you question the futility of this one specifically is that it’s a clean room abstraction of the futility embedded everywhere. I would call it futility as a service.

Your analogy isn't applicable here. What the OP was trying to get at is that even an individual who doesn't know anything about markets, HFT, liquidity, etc can still benefit from high liquidity from HFT (since it allows for transactions to occur sooner and quicker). In the AI example, the implication is that the final product isn't benefiting consumers.

An individual who doesn't know anything about markets should not be trading, nor would they care about liquidity in the slightest.

It was always the only end game. AI on quantum computers is the ultimate computing technology — basically the final research technology in our made up little game of Civilization.

Anytime you create technology that sufficiently replicates the creators, you end up with the spirit of the creator embodied in the technology. So, of course digital brains are going to do weird things like crossword puzzles and sodoku at scale, because it's the same kind of useless shit we do to entertain ourselves.

You get into this conversation whenever you dive hard into cyberpunk, which is so many, many things. Even the Internet itself started out that way. The endgame started as a game, and it will end up being a game, played by our creations as odd mirrors of their creators.

I think there's a lot of people who subscribe to doing the same thing to save the planet, of which I have a keen interest. Solarpunk is the name of that movement, and it also has similar crazy ideas.

We're inventing digital brains. It's literally an architecture designed to be removed from being anything remotely human as it's a mimic or replacement technology for intellectual capacity.

If you really take a step back, the endgame is crazier than just bots producing content merely for other bots to consume (which basically describes the vast majority of scientific papers these days too, ironically). When you take that absurdity and multiply it by tens of thousands in terms of efficiency, the whole system we're building looks WILD and almost inconceivably strange to the way we do things now.

I know this is only tangentially related, so I appreciate your understanding that I already understood that and wrote this anyways. :)