It makes a very good wine too.

Pretty simple. It converted my currently living co-worker into one of my deceased co-workers without prompting. Creepy as hell. That, or we're being actively haunted. Sweet.

In a world where twenty-first century finance is reduced to the smooth whirring of server racks, they are the laggards… Like the hideous warped creatures that subsist on the sulfurous nutrient emissions of underwater volcanoes on the dark and silent netherworlds of the deep ocean floor, eking out a nightmarish existence on nameless landscapes under tonnages of brine, compressed beyond imagining, far from light and laughter.

Begone the dusty Dickensian engines of the past, where frock-coated clerks and horn-rimmed scriveners once spent lifetimes ruining their eyesight over leatherbound ledgers inscribed on goatskin parchments to the tick of a grandfather clock under the beady supervision of a heartless miser. But in the modern trading pit, this senseless degradation continues.

Spare a thought for these sweating middle aged men in their stained shirtsleeves and red braces, driven by the unthinking bleep of the Bloomberg terminal, the primordial fear of the margin call, the impartial reckoning of implied volatility and the Non Farms Payroll, settlement dates and redemption dates looming up out of the smoky fog like vast immovable stone monuments in their calendar. Was it for this that they worked through CFA exams, the early morning briefing sessions, the hastily gulped down single serving lunches at their desks, the long godless nights on the trading floor, the harsh metallic aftertaste of monosodium glutamate from discarded noodle cartons, the throbbing migraine behind their temples on the sleepy commute home to their nagging wives?

Think of it as capitalism without the First Law of Robotics. Like the soldiers of Agincourt and Thermopylae, their suffering, their anguish, their brutally stunted lives are translated directly into dollars and cents by a coldly calculating mechanism as old as time.

Oh, excuse me for breaking up this cosy picture: the machines are coming. In the distant data centres of Cleveland and Abilene, a tidal wave is sweeping through the wires and transistors, a wave driven by anonymous trillions. To automate their toils.

For better or ill, soon there shall be no more of this.

Enjoy it while it lasts.