Machines Like Us

"...As the financial experts all over the world use machines to unwind Gordian knots of financial arrangements so complex that only machines can make — "derive" — and trade them, we have to wonder: Are we living in a bad sci-fi movie? Is the Matrix made of credit default swaps?"

"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 $62 trillion in imaginary wealth," says Richard Dooling.

"It's not much of a stretch to imagine that all of that imaginary wealth is locked up somewhere inside the computers, and that we humans, led by the silverback males of the financial world, Ben Bernanke and Henry Paulson, are frantically beseeching the monolith for answers.

Read full story at The New York Times.