It's not a dumb question. It's a difficult one. Not so easy to answer. Psychology and emotions play a major role in discretionary trading (particularly among inexperienced or ineffective traders). How will this be affected by robotic trading? I don't know. I'm thinking much robotic trading, at least in the recent past, assumes that patterns that resulted from emotional trading will continue in the future. But I'm not sure that would apply to HFT, which it seems is something altogether different.