What I've been thinking about recently though is that the problems HFT companies work on may have unexpected benefits in other fields. For instance they are working on things like machine learning, transmission speed, long range networking, mathematical modelling, and software. If we were to ban HFT we would lose the potential upside of all this. In the words of NN Taleb, this sort of 'stochastic tinkering' is primarily how scientific progress is made.
What I've been thinking about recently though is that the problems HFT companies work on may have unexpected benefits in other fields. For instance they are working on things like machine learning, transmission speed, long range networking, mathematical modelling, and software. If we were to ban HFT we would lose the potential upside of all this. In the words of NN Taleb, this sort of 'stochastic tinkering' is primarily how scientific progress is made.