It won't, because although computers have a lot of control over the market, people also look at it pretty regularly. The reason why nobody noticed a $23,000,000 book on Amazon is because out-of-print biology books are not very liquid. If that were Microsoft stock, someone would have manually made a bet on it, and then the price would have corrected after a while.
No. If someone were asking $23m for a share of MSFT it would just be way outside the market and would just sit there. Plenty of people leave way outside the market bids and asks just in case someone else makes an accidental huge market order.
True, but at the same time, we're talking about billions of dollars of real money. In clear self interest, all those institutions will have built obvious checks in their system. Losing several billions of dollars in seconds is something they want to avoid.
Indeed, the fact that the flash crash was the definition of something with a vast number of transactions, huge price moves, and happened in the blink of an eye but still was relatively minor and almost inconsequential shows the reliance of the stock market.
