The number of jobs that these banks will support in the future will be influenced by much more than just software. Banks are currently cutting back in response to slower-than-expected economic growth and new regulations since the financial crisis. But these factors are also encouraging all the banks to look for any place where they can find a cheaper and more transparent way to do jobs that are currently being done by expensive and unreliable humans.

When I asked Chavez whether the job losses were likely to continue to outpace the gains, he reacted with what seemed like genuine uncertainty. ‘‘That is one of the most interesting questions of our time,’’ he said.

Carl Benedikt Frey, the lead author of the 2013 study on automation, has done more recent research indicating that innovations are no longer providing as big a boost to the economy and the labor force as they did in the past. In a paper he published last year with Thor Berger, a Swedish academic, he found that in the 1980s, a large portion of the American work force was going into job categories that did not exist a decade before; IBM, in other words, was hiring. That movement, though, slowed down in the ’90s and went practically to zero between 2000 and 2010. To the degree that there are new jobs, Frey’s data suggests that they are often lower-paying ones that serve the wealthy elite, in roles like personal trainer or barista.

‘‘Technology is becoming more labor-saving and less job-creating,’’ Frey said.

One theory for why this might be happening is that many of the recent technological advances have been in software rather than hardware. While a company like IBM or Dell needed employees to build each new computer for every new customer, software like Facebook and Kensho can be replicated endlessly, at near-zero marginal cost. When Chou came up with the software that automatically logged onto dozens of trading systems, it could essentially have been rolled out across all of Goldman’s trading desks around the world the next day. This is very different from the 1970s, when Detroit would need to retrofit its car-manufacturing plants one at a time, after the robots themselves were actually built. The difference is what convinced Chou, after his time at Goldman Sachs and in Silicon Valley, that this phase of automation would play out differently from past ones.

‘‘We are not coming up with new jobs as fast as we are replacing them,’’ Chou told me.

This observation appears to be borne out by Kensho. In less than three years, Nadler’s company has expanded to serve three of the world’s largest banks and has needed only around 50 employees to do so, just enough to fill two relatively small offices. Recently, Nadler’s New York staff moved to a bigger office in 1 World Trade Center. It has more room for desks so that Kensho can expand. But most of the additional space is taken up by a kitchen, a pool table and a putting green.

The growth has made Kensho worth hundreds of millions of dollars and turned Nadler into a millionaire many times over, at least when his stake in the company is taken into account. But it’s not clear how beneficial his company will be to the American labor market as a whole. Back when I first met Nadler, for a lunch last summer, he wasn’t too proud to admit this. ‘‘The cynical answer that another tech entrepreneur would give you is that we’re creating new jobs, we’re creating technology jobs,’’ he told me. ‘‘We’ve created, on paper at least, more than a dozen millionaires.

‘‘That might help people sleep better at night,’’ he continued, ‘‘but we are creating a very small number of high-paying jobs in return for destroying a very large number of fairly high-paying jobs, and the net-net to society, absent some sort of policy intervention or new industry that no one’s thought of yet to employ all those people, is a net loss.’’