There has been in our culture, in the past decade in particular, a group of reasonably smart people who hired incredibly smart people – mathematicians mostly – to design algorithms that exploit time/space phenomena such as latency to vacuum insane amounts of money out of the economy, for doing absolutely nothing except exploit systemic flaws in the digitised financial world. We’re talking about hundreds of billions of dollars, if not trillions, simply for hiring bright grad students, hurling some cash and some lap dances at them, then hitting the return key and making a billion dollars in a wink of an eye.