Models, Markets, and Artificial Intelligence: A Brief History of our Speculative Present

Halpern, Orit

Book Section

Orit Halpern

Models, Markets, and Artificial Intelligence

A Brief History of our Speculative Present

In: Breaking and Making Models, ed. by Christoph F. E. Holzhey, Marietta Kesting, and Claudia Peppel, Cultural Inquiry, 33 (Berlin: ICI Berlin Press, 2025), pp. 201–15

Open Access

Over the past four decades, the idea that both digital machines and human agents are networked intelligences and parts of self-organizing systems has not only shaped financial markets, but has also been incorporated into economic thinking and artificial intelligence. This has led to what Halpern calls the ‘financialization of cognition’, an economy of attention that reconfigures human agency and decision-making based on a model of contemporary finance and the digital economy.

Keywords: financial market; model; artificial intelligence; neoliberal economics; neural networks; machine learning; algorithm; Hayek, Friedrich

Rights: © by the author(s). Except for images or otherwise noted, this publication is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Part of Breaking and Making Models Containing:
Introduction / Christoph F. E. Holzhey, Marietta Kesting, Claudia Peppel
Models as Media of Worlding in Sadie Benning and Fernand Deligny / Astrid Deuber-Mankowsky
Abstraction as Strategy for Worldmaking / Julia Sánchez-Dorado
From Climate Model to Climate Fiction: Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future as Operative Literature / Ross Shields
The Slime Mould’s Many Bodies, or Modelling Networks with Physarum polycephalum / Maria Dębińska
Persistence: Model Asylum Narratives and a Recognizable ‘Transgenderness’ / B Camminga
The Statistical Cloud of Race: Lancelot Hogben’s Anti-Eugenics between Populations and Organisms / Ben Woodard
Crises in Modelling: Articulations of the Romanian Labour Market in the Long 1990s / Alina-Sandra Cucu
Models, Markets, and Artificial Intelligence: A Brief History of our Speculative Present / Orit Halpern
Large Language Models, Parrots, and Children: Modelling Speech, Text, and Learning Processes / Marietta Kesting
Modelling Institutions, Instituting Models: The Juridification of Politics and the Performative Power of Naming / Natascia Tosel
Aesthetic Modelling at the Limit of the Human Montage / Marta Aleksandrowicz
The Exophonic Lyric: A Poetics / Mark Anthony Cayanan
Towards a Genealogy of Moffie: Troubling the Binary Model of Understanding either Homosexuality or Homophobia as Un-African / Ruth Ramsden-Karelse

Title	Models, Markets, and Artificial Intelligence
Subtitle	A Brief History of our Speculative Present
Author(s)	Orit Halpern
Identifier	https://doi.org/10.37050/ci-33_08
Description	Over the past four decades, the idea that both digital machines and human agents are networked intelligences and parts of self-organizing systems has not only shaped financial markets, but has also been incorporated into economic thinking and artificial intelligence. This has led to what Halpern calls the ‘financialization of cognition’, an economy of attention that reconfigures human agency and decision-making based on a model of contemporary finance and the digital economy.
Is Part Of	Breaking and Making Models
Place	Berlin
Publisher	ICI Berlin Press
Date	May 20, 2025
Subject	financial market model artificial intelligence neoliberal economics neural networks machine learning algorithm Hayek, Friedrich
Rights	© by the author(s) Except for images or otherwise noted, this publication is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/
Language	en-GB
page start	201
page end	215
Source	Breaking and Making Models, ed. by Christoph F. E. Holzhey, Marietta Kesting, and Claudia Peppel, Cultural Inquiry, 33 (Berlin: ICI Berlin Press, 2025), pp. 201–15

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Cite as: Orit Halpern, ‘Models, Markets, and Artificial Intelligence: A Brief History of our Speculative Present’, in Breaking and Making Models, ed. by Christoph F. E. Holzhey, Marietta Kesting, and Claudia Peppel, Cultural Inquiry, 33 (Berlin: ICI Berlin Press, 2025), pp. 201-15 <https://doi.org/10.37050/ci-33_08>