It seems to me to be naive to believe that a bunch of computers running software built by humans will compete perfectly to create a perfect market, the hypothet

It seems to me to be naive to believe that a bunch of computers running software built by humans will compete perfectly to create a perfect market, the hypothetical "efficient market". Instead what you would probably arrive at is an arms-race of retail investor-accessible HFT systems competing for investor dollars. That arms-race would just lead to a market even more arbitrary than the one we have now where the HFT systems are using fundamentals and at the same time learning about the trading patterns of the other systems indirectly to exploit them. Investors would be investing in the trading system instead of the real market, it would be reduced to gambling on the race instead of investing in the market. My personal opinion is the HFT systems of today add zero value, as argued in the article. The liquidity provided by them is an illusion as they skim a cut off between the original seller and their buyer on the two ends of the trades they perform.