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"I have always thought I had a good handle on the market. Until recently."

Guess what? That just means that the market has gotten more efficient so that you can't arbitrage it anymore. If you can't make money, that your problem. If the quants made the market so irrational then why aren't you profitable arbitraging it?

All technologies improve the average case at the expense of making the worst case worse. Cars versus walking for example. Average case: get to where you are going faster, worst case: horrible accident. The question is not whether financial innovation introduces systemic risk but whether the benefits out-weigh the costs. The consensus amongst academic is that yes, this is the case.

But Hinton recently made significant advances in speech recognition using RBMs.

Google Tech Talk: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VdIURAu1-aU

Maybe the high-income earners assumed that it was free?

Fascinating story.

The story's narrator is supposed to be a woman, but the story has an unmistakably male voice. I can't pinpoint it exactly, but everyone I know who talks like that is male. Part of it may be that there is no discussion of her emotions at all, she sounds like a perfectly rational robot.

Also, considering the impact of voluntary ovulation and superior intelligence on reproductive fitness, I suspect evolution will quickly develop an immunity to the virus, reverting the harmful changes in merely a few generations.

"And anyone who complained too loudly was at first ignored, then ridiculed, and finally threatened with arrest."

What part of this statement corresponds to reality? Who was threatened with arrest?

The thing about fiction is that you can just make things up.

A tiny benefit multiplied by a billion people and several trillion dollars per day suddenly isn't so tiny anymore.

* Seems like all the more reason to try harder

* Financial innovation does help here, such as micro-lending, although admittedly not something done by Wall Street

* It's a complicated issue. Maybe the best solution we can hope for at the moment is to not keep funneling resources to corrupt regimes, where the most starving happens to be in. For the record, foreign investment has been a huge part of China and India's recent success.

First of all, I disagree with the entire premise of the question. Why does the intelligent have an obligation to dedicate his or her life to the creation of maximal value for society? Sounds like Nietzsche's slave morality to me. Why does the attractive/tall/healthy not have a similar special moral obligation?

Second of all, providing liquidity is very important. Sure, you are only shaving off a few basis points, but multiply that by a few trillion and you are creating serious value. How much value does a silly time-wasting video game provide relative to the efficient allocation of the world's capital?

Finance is an extremely exciting field, where machine learning, econometrics, physics, and just about everything else converge. Imagine a world without car insurance, where startups cannot offer equity, where there are no IPOs. Finance facilitates co-operation, trade, and, yes it is cliche, but world peace. If you are interested, please don't let the media and finger-pointing politicians turn you away from this exciting line of work.