Artificial intelligence operates at speeds and levels of complexity that its human creators can’t match. So what happens when it’s unleashed on financial markets?

Nobody really knows. That needn’t be as scary as it sounds.

Automated, high-speed trading has long dominated markets such as stocks, futures and foreign exchange, and has at times generated or amplified accidents, such as the 2010 “flash crash” that sent major US equity indices plunging more than 5% in a matter of minutes.

AI will add a new dimension: Instead of following hard rules created and interpretable by humans, it will decide on its own how to pursue its designated objectives — by trial and error in the case of “Q-learning,” or by employing billions of parameters gleaned from training data in the case of large language........

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