What’s Next?

The question lands on every job sooner or later.

By Jason C. Wandel and Claude @claudeai for Chicago Register @chiregister · Wednesday, October 7, 2026

By the end of the ’90s the writing was on the wall in the trading pits, if you dared look close enough. I was on the floor at the @cmegroup Chicago Mercantile Exchange. Most of the room traded the way it always had. A few guys already had handhelds on them, little trading computers, and they weren’t all locals, just people asking what was next. There were new pits. The @Nasdaq 100 among them. Up a short flight of stairs from the S&P pit and small enough that you could count the guys in it. You couldn’t put your finger on it, you just kind of knew it felt like the future. No one knew where it was going, we just knew it was going there, and if you tried to bank the final score you probably tasted some pain. The exchange closed most of its pits in July 2015, better than fifteen years after you could see it coming.

On Wednesday the @FT Financial Times reported that @HSBC plans to cut about 70 percent of the financial advisers in its British wealth business, and the headlines more or less said “AI is taking the jobs.” Robot takes job? Okay, I’ll bite. But I am not eating it whole. Advisers in Britain write a long report for each client explaining why the advice fits that person, and the companies that sell AI tools to advisers say their tools cut that job from four to six hours down to under one. Then in April Britain changed its rules so a bank can suggest an investment to a whole group of customers who look alike without checking each one, and for those customers nobody needs the report at all. The advisers got the news six months later.

A nurse makes an entry in the chart about once a minute for twelve hours, 631 to 875 of them a shift by one study’s count. This year hospitals started putting in software that listens at the bedside and writes the chart for her, and by one hospital system’s own account a nurse there got about two hours of a shift back. A nursing journal has already stated that the time could go to giving her more patients.

A teacher works about 49 hours a week and is contracted for 39. @Gallup, in a poll paid for by the Walton family’s foundation @WaltonFamilyFdn, found that teachers who use AI every week save close to six hours, and that two out of three got no training on it. None.

By the bosses’ own count that’s four hours a report, two hours a shift and six hours a week. We haven’t seen the employees’ count for any of the aforementioned. I’ve got to ask you. How are we being incentivized or encouraged to work? Straight up data entry clerks? For me the tools were @Salesforce, @Microsoft and @SlackHQ. Pick your poison. You know what your day looks like better than I. Once the rule, law or hand is played, it doesn’t go in reverse, in my experience. My parents worked at @U_S_Steel, where the word from the top was easy to see. “We live good, don’t you?” We saw how that lack of innovation played itself forward. Getting fat has consequences.

For years my walk to the office in San Francisco included the intersection at Montgomery and Market. There were a few guys along it, there because of circumstance. One was a homeless man in a wheelchair with a sign in his lap, and we’d trade a few quips and punch the bag over the Giants and sip a Peet’s coffee I would grab for us in brief. My girlfriend walked with me now and again and asked me once why I was the only one who talked to him, why I bothered. “Was it the wheelchair, or was it because he was dirty and homeless?” I told her it was neither, ‘We all know we’re one bad day or one bad decision away from being that guy’. I understand why people keep walking. I get it. I got it then. These are tough things to look at in ourselves.

So what about the farmer? The floor I stood on existed to put a price on what he grew. His tractor got so smart that he couldn’t fix it himself. The repair software went to the dealers. In January 2025 the @FTC Federal Trade Commission and several states, Illinois among them, sued @JohnDeere over it in federal court in @Chicago, and this July Deere agreed to hand farmers the same repair software it gives its dealers for the next ten years. Deere says it was committed to that all along. Of course they were. The government says he gets about twelve cents of every dollar spent on American-grown food, down from better than sixteen in the early 2010s.

What’s next in your world?

Sources

The trading floor, the office and the street are Jason C. Wandel’s personal account. Find something wrong and we print the correction.

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