High Frequency Trading, Artificial Intelligence, and the Instabilities of Embodied Cognition

Long-persisting cognitive biological sub-systems, higher animal species, and social/institutional cognitive agents and agencies, have always closely paired cognition with regulation. Blood pressure, while necessarily responsive to physiological demand, must be kept within limits. The cognitive immune response must be prevented from excessive self-attack. The stream of consciousness must be held within riverbanks useful both to the individual and the social groupings within which each individual must operate. Institutional function must be held between the Scylla of inherited or learned Doctrine and the Charybdis of Law and Culture. Current HFT agents that pair high-speed trading algorithms with AI fluctuation prediction seem to have attained levels of effective embodiment and technical sophistication that far outstrip even the most advanced realms of air combat. Using formal methods, we find that, absent draconian regulation, increasingly sophisticated HFT-AI systems will, both individually and collectively, increasingly engage in highly punctuated 'sorcerer's apprentice' phase transitions characteristic of both intelligence and consciousness.