8 Robots That Will Put You Out Of A Job

By Stevie Shephard /

8. Trading Bots

Richard Drew/AP

That stereotypical mental image we have of trading floors, with wonky-tied, haggard men in their shirtsleeves, shouting into phones is way out of date.

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These days, most of the transactions are made to the quiet hum of computer servers, buying and selling at 10 times the speed of their human counterparts. In a world in which fortunes are made and lost on literal split-second decisions, it pays to trade in your slow, leaky, error-prone humans for the very latest software.

The business is so cut throat and to-the-wire, that businesses can pay a premium to have their servers physically located next to the exchange, connected by the shortest, straightest cables possible in order to shave milliseconds off the time it takes to transmit orders.

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How can a human possibly compete with that?