THE MOST 21ST CENTURY HEADLINE EVER: The World’s Largest Hedge Fund Is Building an Algorithmic Model of its Founder’s Brain.

Deep inside Bridgewater Associates LP, the world’s largest hedge-fund firm, software engineers are at work on a secret project that founder Ray Dalio has sometimes called “The Book of the Future.”

The goal is technology that would automate most of the firm’s management. It would represent a culmination of Mr. Dalio’s life work to build Bridgewater into an altar to radical openness—and a place that can endure without him.

At Bridgewater, most meetings are recorded, employees are expected to criticize one another continually, people are subject to frequent probes of their weaknesses, and personal performance is assessed on a host of data points, all under Mr. Dalio’s gaze.

The only way this could be any more 21st Century is if Dalio’s last name was Kardashian or Jenner.