It's not a standard economics answer, even economists (normal ones anyway) aren't going to fly on planes entirely unregulated in a purely free market.

Gradient descent and reinforcement learning work eventually, but they take a lot of iteration and spectacular failures. Different exploration/exploitation tradeoffs are needed in different environments, the market signal isn't really strong enough to differentiate and the incentives don't actually line up perfectly.

The standard economics answer is more like, the market (i.e. regs) evolved to address coordination problems and align the market incentives better with the true long-term welfare function.