The problem is that folks keep thinking of and referring to AI as if it is some free-willed conscious entity capable of doing anything it wants to on its own.

It is NOT. It is a PROGRAM that does only what it has been programmed to do. Period. End of story.

If AN AI program has been setup to monitor global economic conditions and make trading decisions based on the inputs, so what> that has been done for well over a decade by many financial houses such as J.P. Morgan et al. It used to be referred as Big Data mining until 'AI' became the popular buzzword for it. Thing is, it still only generates projections that actual humans base their buy/sells on. When millions/billions of dollars are on the line no company is about to let a machine handle things on full-auto.