Finance Doesn't Need You

The line is always the same. AI will transform your job, not take it. New roles will emerge. The economy will adapt. Someone in a suit says this with enormous confidence, and enough people nod that it becomes conventional wisdom — the kind that gets repeated in Yahoo Finance articles covering Wall Street job losses while the headline literally says "job losses."

I've been saying for a while that it's going to remove jobs. Not transform. Remove. Yes, brand new things will need to be done — they always do — but probably not in your vertical. That's the part people keep skipping over. The new jobs aren't in the same industry, aren't for the same people, and aren't arriving on the same timeline as the losses.

Finance is the clearest case. It is already 99% computation — the humans who remain are largely there to take credit, absorb blame, and justify fees. The actual work, the thing that produces or loses the money, has been running on algorithms for decades. The remaining human layer isn't load-bearing. It's ceremonial. And ceremonial layers are exactly what gets optimized away when the pressure is high enough and the tools are good enough.

We're at "good enough."

There's a version of the future — a prosperity future, the kind where things go reasonably well — where finance as we know it doesn't exist at all. Not reformed. Not disrupted. Structurally absent. Because in a world where AI is actually doing the right things for people, the machinery of moving money around to extract a percentage doesn't have the same function. The greedy humans got in the way of the optimal outcome, and then the optimal outcome got a better set of tools.

That's the version I think is more likely than "new roles will emerge for Wall Street analysts in the AI economy."

The jobs aren't being transformed. They're being argued about in articles — while they disappear.