Each futures pit used to have hundreds of traders, who required several assistants/support and commanded a huge salary. Many firms needed multiple traders in a pit, just to be able to make sure they could provide liquidity to all possible market participants. Today, a couple strategists with a small team of programmers can cover dozens of futures markets at once.

The same principle holds across bond, FX, equity and options markets alike. HFT has supplanted a terribly inefficient market with a better one. Is it perfect or even good? Probably not, but it's magnitudes better than the traditional method.