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ATMs didn’t kill bank teller jobs, but the iPhone did

davidoks.blog

231–240 of 607 posts

Re: ATMs didn’t kill bank teller jobs, but the iPhone did

#231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But will it? My prediction is no, because productivity gains must benefit the lower classes to see a multiplier in the economy. For example, ATMs being automated did cause a negative drop in teller jobs, but fast money any time does increase the velocity of money in the economy. It decreases savings rate and encourages spending among the class of people whose money imparts the highest multiplier. AI does not. All t…

> because productivity gains must benefit the lower classes to see a multiplier in the economy by this logic, the invention of mechanized farm equipment, which displaced farm labor, didnt increase productivity

It made food cheaper.

Re: ATMs didn’t kill bank teller jobs, but the iPhone did

#232

TFA reasonably reduces to: First, ATMs increased the demand for bank branches, which more than made up for the decrease in tellers per branch. Second, mobile banking decreased the demand for physical branches.

There are ATMs not attached to bank branches. They could have replaced the branches with ATMs before. (I do wonder what bank tellers are doing these days. I mean actual tellers, not investment advisors and jobs like that.)

Had go to go a branch a couple times in the last year at a local credit union. Largely seems like tellers are getting busy work. There are not a lot of tellers present, and they appear to be doing other things on their workstation. So they get up to go to the teller window and help me out with my request, which usually involves them playing around with some archaic bank app on the teller machine and fiddling with the copier for a bit. A supervisor is always around who knows more of the business use cases and always seems to get involved either out of boredom or because they're the only ones who know how to do something.

Re: ATMs didn’t kill bank teller jobs, but the iPhone did

#233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Browsers and websites work pretty well on mobile devices too. Website != desktop only

If you consider a website fully laden with ads as working. I have yet to find an ad blocker that works on my iOS/iPad OS that works as well as on my computer. I also hate apps with all of their invasive data hoarding that is much more controllable on my computer. So to me, websites on mobile are broken as they are full of malware vectors that are not present when looking at the same website on my non-mobile device. F…

I encourage you to install the dns4eu ad blocking profile on your ios device.

It’s free, it’s transparent, you can read the profile… And it takes two minutes.

Re: ATMs didn’t kill bank teller jobs, but the iPhone did

#234
post #35

One key line about ATMs is buried deep in the article: > the number of tellers per branch fell by more than a third between 1988 and 2004, but the number of urban bank branches (also encouraged by a wave of bank deregulation allowing more branches) rose by more than 40 percent So, ATMs did impact bank teller jobs by a significant amount. A third of them were made redundant. It's just that the decrease at individual b…

> So, ATMs did impact bank teller jobs by a significant amount.

Did it? This sounds like describing a company opening a new campus as laying off a third of their employees, partly offset by most of them still having the same job in the same company but at a new desk.

Re: ATMs didn’t kill bank teller jobs, but the iPhone did

#235
post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why will we need 1000 companies tomorrow to do the same thing that 100 companies are doing today? If they are really so efficient because of AI then won't 10 companies be able to solve the same problems?

Because that car repair company with 3 local stores previously couldn't justify building custom software to make their business more efficient and aligned with what they need. The cost was too high. Now they might be able to. Plenty of businesses need very custom software but couldn't realistically build it before.

I see no way that company would save more money from hiring an experienced developer compared to paying their yearly invoice on the COTS product doing the same thing today. The only way this works is with a very wage suppressing effect.

Re: ATMs didn’t kill bank teller jobs, but the iPhone did

#236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I go back and forth on this. I relate it to software. I don't think AI can meaningfully write software autonomously. There are people who oversee it and prompt it and even then it might write things badly. So there needs to be a person in the loop. But that person should probably have very deep knowledge of the software especially for say low level coding. But then that person probably developed the knowledge by codi…

An AI’s ability to meaningfully write software autonomously has changed hugely even in the last 6 months. They might still require a human in the loop, but for how long?

I am not saying AI's abilities are the shortcoming here. The problem is that people need to trust that software has certain attributes. For now, that requires someone with knowledge to be part of it. It's quite possible development becomes detached from human trust. As I said that would reduce the number of developers but the ones who are left would have to have deep knowledge to oversee it and even that may be gone. Whatever happens in the future, for now I think people will have to level up their knowledge/skills or get a new career and that's probably true for most professions.

Re: ATMs didn’t kill bank teller jobs, but the iPhone did

#238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do the booming companies pay the same as the ones who did layoffs? If you're laid off from Meta or other top tier paying company (the behemoths doing layoffs) you might have a tough time matching your compensation.

There's likely going to be a separation between the top earners and the average. IE. If a top tier dev make $1m today, they'll make $5m in the future. If the average makes $100k today, they'll maybe make $60k. AI likely enables the best of the best to be much more productive while your average dev will see more productivity but less overall.

I think this is assuming that the labor market knows how to identify the dirct value of devs. This already seems to be a problem across the board regardless of job role.

Re: ATMs didn’t kill bank teller jobs, but the iPhone did

#239
post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Speed, cost, security, job/task management All of that will inevitably be solved. 50 years ago, using a personal computer was an extravagant luxury. Until it wasn't. 30 years ago, carrying a powerful computer in your pocket was unthinkable. Until it wasn't. Right now, it's cheaper to run your accounting math on dedicated adder hardware. But Llms will only get cheaper. When you can run massive LLMs locally on your p…

Not until power access/generation is MUCH cheaper. Long, long, long way off. If I can run 50,000 fixed tasks that cost me $0.834/hr but OpenAI is costing $37/hr and the automation takes 40x as long and can make TERRIBLE errors why the fuck would I not move to the deterministic system? Also, battery life of mobile devices.

These exact arguments could have been made 50 years ago about why laptops are impossible.

But now, we not only have laptops, we run horribly inefficient GUIs in horribly inefficient VMs on them.

The dollar-per-compute trend goes ever downward.

Re: ATMs didn’t kill bank teller jobs, but the iPhone did

#240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Baumol's cost disease hurts the lower classes by restricting their access to services like health care and education, and LLMs/agents make it possible to increase productivity in these areas in ways which were once unimaginable." You've expressed very clearly what LLMs would have to do in order to be economically transformative. "If you can get high quality medical advice for effectively nothing, if you can get high…

> Why should one child get an LLM teacher or doctor while others get individualized attention by a skilled human being? Is the value in the outcome of receiving medical advice and care, and becoming educated, or is the value just in the co-opting of another human being's attention? If the value is in the outcome, the means to achieving that aren't of much consequence.

Even if you have perfect medical information and advice through an LLM, can you perform surgery on yourself? Can you prescribe yourself whatever medication you think you need?

For education, if you know as much as the average Harvard grad, can you give yourself a Harvard degree that will be as readily accepted in a job application or raising funds for a new business?

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