The younger traders were full Homo sapiens. They’d been harvested from the tiny slice of the population identified early in life as having a gift for higher-order thinking. Many had gone to math camp in high school. Almost all had excelled in computer science or math at MIT, Harvard, Princeton, or Stanford. They were less socially adept than the older traders, because they could afford to be. Now that trading was done machine-to-machine, it mattered less how well traders negotiated with other people. What mattered was their ability to help the machine replace humans in financial markets—either
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