I hope "amazed" is just poor wording.
What's wrong with the word amazed?
If I said I worked at Google and I continue to be amazed at the tech behind how they served up ads would I still get the same remark from you?
Maybe I could be doing more with my skill? I don't know but I really love the learning curve I'm on working with cutting edge technology and pushing the performance envelope.
edit: I guess, I did though.
I can't help to reply to the adwords question - although you can argue that advertising/marketing is soulless, at least it creates real world value. Someone makes a product, someone else buys it. Exchange of goods happens.
Derivatives are uncontrallable in the my humble opinion. Especially if regulated by uber greedy people. And it makes me sad sad when I see the highest skilled people go and put their talent in something that is pretty much useless, apart from making a few, selected people even richer than they are. But I guess, whatever pays the bills.
But that's not why I made my comment. I made my comment, because what I find even more sad, is people going numb to injustice and admiring this situation and the people who are making it possible.
If HFT produces nothing else (and I generally agree with your economic view of it), at least it'll have financed the next generation of low-latency networking gear.
Or maybe you are worried they would buy less? In that case, would the world really be a worse place? People only buying what they need...
Amazement (dopamine rushes) confuses us.
Biologically, we respond to amazement as part of the learning process. But all too often, we receive these dopamine rushes simply as a consequence of the amount of resources and effort someone (or a group) puts into something.
e.g. You can go to Las Vegas, see thousands of people running around topless in gorgeous outfits and be amazed, yet what's the actual value to you?
I see this ALL too often in art. People get "amazed" by things that require a great deal of effort/resources (look how many transistors in this CPU!), but this temporary narcosis blinds us to evaluating /whether it's a good idea/. So many art projects are simply the result of an ordinary person commanding extraordinary resources from a corporate entity to construct a large number of instances of a single, mundane object or a single, large-scale version of the object. In these cases, the art is not in the sculpture, but in the conning to get the resources. I see budding artists respond to this amazement and trying to get huge funding.
Internet bloggers (Cory Doctorow comes to mind) abuse the word "amaze" all the time. I just checked boingboing.net right now and saw amazing used to describe wallpaper (no dude, this is /natural history/ wallpaper).
If this was any other industry it would be lauded. I don't understand the moralizing about this industry while we applaud start ups for building ever more complex twitter aggregators.
High frequency trading had nothing to do with any of this. HFT deals in fungible instruments traded in public markets.