CHICAGO — The pits where generations of sweating traders in colorful jackets once bellowed out orders for wheat, corn and cattle contracts, using hand signals and sheer force of personality, are almost empty. The smattering of traders who hung around them on a recent day appeared listless, some glancing at tablet screens, others staring blankly into space.

Open-outcry futures trading, a profession that took root here in the mid-19th century, becoming part of the city’s identity and influencing trading systems around the world, is going extinct. Most of the futures pits inside the Chicago Board of Trade building, an Art Deco tower that looms over downtown’s LaSalle Street, are scheduled to close by July after being choked by a decade of technological advancement that has made face-to-face trading largely obsolete.

“It’s a computer product now,” said Anthony Crudele, a 37-year-old trader who started as a clerk in Chicago in the 1990s and was an early adopter of new trading technology. He said the planned closing was inevitable. “As far as we’re concerned,” he said, “it’s been closed for many years.”

But the official end of the commodity futures pits this summer — including those in New York, where metals and energy contracts are traded — will nevertheless amount to a loss. Gone will be the trading-floor culture that was captured in the 1983 film “Trading Places” and provided the backdrop for a memorable scene in “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.” Gone will be the feverish habitat where a lexicon of hand gestures survived through the decades and only occasionally devolved into fisticuffs.