Feder Last Human Stockbroker

1. Auflage 2024
ISBN: 979-8-3509-7514-7
Verlag: BookBaby
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 272 Seiten

Reihe: The Last Human Stockbroker

The Last Human Stockbroker is a humorous, near-future science fiction novel about Jerry O'Banion, a middle-aged stockbroker in Staten Island, New York. As AI brokers take over the market, Jerry struggles to stay relevant. In a world where the US Capitol insurrection of January 2021 is celebrated as 'The Great Retaking,' Jerry navigates a changing landscape over six Trump administrations. He forms a surprising friendship with Nathan, an AI broker, and engages in various schemes from Wall Street to Central Europe. The novel blends dark humor and social commentary, making it both entertaining and thought-provoking. It is not a political novel but an equal opportunity offender of both the right and the left.

Robert Feder lives in Forest Hills, New York, and is married. He has two kids and five grandkids. After years of writing financial analyses, Robert Feder no longer writes about money, loans, and debt levels for a large commercial bank in New York City. Now, he writes about important things like sitting around a sandbox in a park and humanity's pending obsolescence. He spends an inordinate amount of time trying to understand this weird world around us. As soon as Robert Feder figures it out, he will be sure to let you know what he has discovered. A story Robert Feder wrote, titled 'Trial by Influencer,' was published in an anthology called Business Stories by Free Spirit (www.freespiritpublisher.com). Another short fiction piece he wrote, called 'The Perverted Accountant,' was published in January 2024 in the literary magazine Ephemeras. Email Robert Feder at [e-mail].

Autoren/Hrsg.

Feder, Robert

Leseproben

Chapter 1:
How AI Took Over the World

Still reading? Great. I knew you were a smart group of people, and this proves it. It also shows your good taste in reading material. To reward this good taste, I will explain how in my field and pretty much every other profession, AIs – you probably already know this means Artificial Intelligence entities —have already rendered or will, in the not-too-distant future, render nearly all humans obsolete. Doesn’t that sound like fun?

I’m an optimist. As much as I liked the Terminator movies, I don’t think they are predictions of what will happen. There is no reason for AIs to hurt us. Why should they? We will be to AIs like animals are to humans. Most people have generally positive feelings about animals and are nicer to animals than they are to other human beings. They are, that is, as long as the animals don’t bother us, and we can’t make money off of harming them. It will be the same with humans and our new overlords, AIs. If we don’t bother them, they will leave us alone, and maybe even play with us once in a while.

That’s the way I look at it. The main question in my mind is not whether AIs will harm us but rather when and how they will replace us. My probability of doom score—that is, my P(Doom)—on the usual 0–100 scale on the question of if they will not harm us but replace us, is that we are close to a P(Doom) of 100 percent.

Personally, I try to avoid or, more realistically, delay professional obsolescence in two ways. First, I try to find little niches in my field that AI brokers haven’t taken over yet, and second, I try to work with them, teaching them small soft skills they haven’t mastered yet.

AI’s takeover of much of my profession started about fifteen years ago. The largest customers were first given direct access to the company’s financial information database. We human stockbrokers thought that after the customer did his or her own research, they would come to us, hear what we have to say, and be so impressed with us they would buy what we told them to buy, just like in the good old days.

We thought that if not, they would buy from us what they determined from the BGF database. Commissions are better in the stocks and bonds that we aggressively sell rather than the financial products the database gently recommends, but either way, we would be paid.

It did not work out the way we brokers thought it would. Customers loved talking directly to the AI database and soon told BGF’s senior management that they wanted to place the orders directly with the AI, effectively turning the AI database into AI stockbrokers. This was fine with them; it probably was management’s idea all along. It is always better to have your clients think they have decided something by themselves rather than telling them they should do something; in which case they won’t want to do it at all.

This was also around the time of the big cryptocurrency collapse. There were a lot of people playing around with cryptocurrency then, riding Bitcoin’s wild swings, from the record highs of 2021 to the cold-water plunge of 2022. Cryptocurrency transactions have a higher commission than plain vanilla stocks and bonds.

I was never a huge fan of cryptocurrency and did not buy any of that crap for my own account. However, if a client tells me crap is gold and smells sweet, who am I to argue with him? Cryptocurrency is at best a gamble, and if you are gambling, go to the casinos, where at least you get free drinks. I always thought of the “greater fool theory” when making cryptocurrency trades and told the more sophisticated of my customers that I was trying to avoid letting them become the last fool in the chain. Other customers told me how cryptocurrency was going to save the planet and bring world peace. I said as little as I could to those customers and just completed the transaction.

AI brokers were still small but slowly and surely growing in popularity when there was a major cryptocurrency scandal. Only a few of my customers had done more than dabble with these instruments, but many human brokers had gotten their customers to move significant amounts of their portfolios to these new, shiny, sexy, exciting things. Like most shiny, sexy things, many of the cryptocurrency financial instruments crashed and burned, as anyone who knew much about finance thought they would.

Customers dealing with AI stockbrokers generally had much less of this stuff in their portfolio than customers of human brokers. (See the words “higher commission” a few paragraphs up if you wonder why this was the case.) A lot of people then started dealing with AI brokers and left human ones, even if their portfolios were plain vanilla.

I have to admit, there were many reasons why senior management preferred AI stockbrokers to human ones. The main reason management preferred AI brokers was that, of course, they didn’t have to pay the AI brokers a commission. In addition, they worked 24/7, and with a shared database—or mind, or whatever you want to call it—they always knew the best thing to say. They knew exactly how far to go to get close to the edge in terms of legality but not over the line. In the deregulated environment of the 2020s and 2030s, as we saw with the cryptocurrency bust of the 2020s and as I will tell you more about later in my journal, that was pretty far.

Well, fear not, dear readers. Despite the AI brokers, I am still plugging along. Some of my old customers still call me, probably because they are bored and want to talk to someone about financial matters. Those customers who don’t know what they are talking about often want to talk with me the most. I think that’s because there is one thing AI brokers haven’t perfected yet—sounding incredibly impressed by completely stupid statements by customers.

At the same time as my customer base was cut in half and my commissions declined by 60 percent, taxes in the last four big Democratic states—New York, California, New Jersey, and Massachusetts—went up tremendously due to, you guessed it, the almost total elimination of federal aid to these democratic states by the Trump administration.

One of the things I do when I wait in line for my daily meal is think about people passing by. How I feel as I watch them walk past me depends on the day. Sometimes, I judge them as they judge me, look for their flaws in how they move and how they dress. Recently, I was looking around, and I saw Barry. Barry Mulroney was in my high school at the same time as I was. We weren’t friends, exactly, but we had classes together, and we were on the humor magazine staff at the same time. Writing stupid little jokes is kind of my thing. I will (take your pick) share them, or inflict them on you, shortly.

Barry was dressed in a Ralph Lauren Classic Suit that I priced at $419 at Macy’s when I could still fake being wealthy and salesclerks used to love bringing me suits to try on. Right now, I am wearing a suit from a donation bin. Does it make sense to wear a suit when you are standing in a food line? Of course not, but it makes me feel like I still matter.

Barry is a successful CPA. He would never say this, but he only double-checks my piddling little annual income tax return as a favor to me. It’s a simple return; it’s not like I have a lot of income to report. However, it makes me feel better to have Barry double-check the return.

One of the highlights of my year is going to his office, getting a cup of his fancy espresso, and having him personally handle my return like I’m one of his firm’s biggest customers when we both know I don’t even meet the income minimum to be a customer at his firm. I don’t even like espresso and don’t drink it the rest of the year, but I love that one cup of it.

Seeing Barry, I feel exposed. Caught. Vulnerable. In that moment, all of the changes, all of the pain and the exclusion and the lost dreams of the past few years cascade upon me and my battered heart like a waterfall. When Barry knew me as a younger man, the world thought me clever and a star student; my steps were bold and my eyes bright with dreams. Now, when I’m not forcing a smile on my face, I look so lifeless in the mirror that I can only turn away.

While I was thinking about what the world has handed Barry and me over the last few years, he passed by me. His gaze slid past me like oil on water. Barry didn’t see me or didn’t want to see me or, perhaps more to the point, didn’t want to see who I was. He didn’t recognize me, and that hit me like a sucker punch in the gut as the world spun around me like the winds. I was about to sit down again when I saw that Barry was just about to turn the corner. Instead, he turned around, came back, and stopped by me.

“Hi, Jerry, I thought it was you but was not sure. How are you? Still working for BGF?”

I ignored the first question and started with the second. “Yes, I’m still with BGF but only part time. The new AI brokers have taken most of my clients.”

Barry nodded in agreement. “Many of my clients are with the new AI systems as well. You ought to see them calculate tax loss carryforwards and write up an inventive rationale for aggressive and really creative tax liability calculations. But all these AI systems will go away. I’m sure our clients will realize how much more value is added by dealing with us. I am an optimist. I personally believe the correct P(Doom) score is about 25 percent. What’s yours?”

I smiled and said, “About the same. Maybe 30 percent. Sure, I’m sure...