What is a Bank nowadays. It is nothing. It is a virtual construct and software that we are supposed to put our trust into, where banks have a history of betraying that trust.
ATMs didn’t kill bank teller jobs, but the iPhone did
331–340 of 607 posts
Re: ATMs didn’t kill bank teller jobs, but the iPhone did
#332I'm based in the rich Western world. Whenever I travel elsewhere, I'm amazed by the cheapness of labor. Humans would attend a gas station or fetch items in a store. Why? They're completely unneeded, I can do (and WANT to do) that myself. I always feel sad about these people, trapped in an economic system that forces them into useless labour when they could spend their time learning actually useful skills.
if the rich western world you mentioned is the US, I'd like to remind you that no economy needs that amount of fast food workers
Re: ATMs didn’t kill bank teller jobs, but the iPhone did
#333One 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…
> 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…
> It is a unique failure outcome I have yet to see anyone talk about
It seems likely to me that we will reach a violent, bloody revolt before we possibly reach this point. That may be why no one is taking about this failure mode
Re: ATMs didn’t kill bank teller jobs, but the iPhone did
#334One 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…
Depends. The only predictions I have seen here are the centaurs vs anti centaurs of Doctorow, and even his analysis I find pretty flimsy.
I dont think the race to shove an LLM into everything is going to grow the pie.
But I also dont think it is impossible that a use case will present itself that will create further jobs.
The issue is that its largely unpredictable.
Its a bit like, we are sitting around in the 1950s trying to predict how computers will affect the economy.
It is going to take more than 1 successful deductive leap to get us from 1950s computing -> miniaturisation -> computer in every home -> internet communications.
Every deductive leap we take is extremely prone to being wrong.
We simply cannot lie back and imagine every productive relationship in the economy and then extrapolate every centaur and anti centaur possible for it.
What we do know is that theres a bit of a gold rush to effectively brute force every possible AI variant into every productive relationship in the economy. The fastest way to get the answer to your question is to do it. Possibly the only way to get the answer is to do it.
For instance, someone might imagine LLMs simply eating a whole bunch of service industry jobs. At the same time, theres a mid state where it eats some, but the remaining staff are employed to monitor the LLMs to prevent them handing out free shit to smart shoppers. Its also easy enough to imagine that LLMs never quite get there and the risk is too large for foul play, so they just dont gain that kind of traction. Its also possible to imagine an end state where LLMs can get to 0% risk if they are constantly trained on human data coming from humans doing the same job, and that humans are gainfully employed in parallel with LLMs. Its possible that LLMs are great at business as usual, but the risk emerges when company policies change, and the cost of retraining LLMs makes it impractical for move fast and break things companies to do anything but hire humans. My favourite scenario is one where humans are largely AI assisted, trained on particular people, and theres a massive cybercrime industry built around exfiltrating LLM training weights trained on high functioning humans and deploying them without humans to the third world to help them get 80% of the quality of first world businesses, making them heavily competitive.
We dont know what we dont know.
Re: ATMs didn’t kill bank teller jobs, but the iPhone did
#335Earlier quoted context omitted.
It will never ever be as cheap as as cron job and a shell script. There is a certain limit to how efficient using an LLM to do a job vs using an LLM to create a job is. There is a large distinction in compute and power resources between the two. Don't mistake one for the other.
> It will never ever be as cheap as as cron job and a shell script. Yes. That's precisely why my company runs dBase 7 on a fleet of old 286DX machine from Compaq. /s Running obsolete software will be cheaper, but the value provided by the newer technology will make the difference insignificant.
I don't think so, because that carried efficiency scales.
Why do 50,000 tasks with an LLM when I can do 64,467,235 without an LLM that the LLM created for the same cost on probably far lower cost hardware?
Re: ATMs didn’t kill bank teller jobs, but the iPhone did
#336Earlier quoted context omitted.
Almost tautologically it's not "inefficient" to do so, because free market economics has decided that all the attempts are mathematically worth it, for a high-margin low-marginal-cost product like software.
I'm a little lost as to why seven teams duplicating effort is more "efficient" in any sense of the word than one or two teams working iteratively toward the same goal. If this were seven government funded teams solving the same problem, people would lose their minds over the 'waste' But when private companies do it, we call it efficient market competition. The duplication is the same - we just frame it differently. E…
The benefit from having a 5% better product that hundreds of millions of people will use is worth the duplicated effort in the beginning. The numbers just make sense.
>If this were seven government funded teams solving the same problem
The problem here is "government funded" - the trials are not rationalized by free-market economics. That is, a 5% better product in the end would not be worth seven competing developments initially.
Re: ATMs didn’t kill bank teller jobs, but the iPhone did
#337Earlier 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?
> They might still require a human in the loop, but for how long?
For as long as a human remains the customer.
Once humans become the proverbial horse supplanted by the automobile... I don't suppose glue really cares.
Re: ATMs didn’t kill bank teller jobs, but the iPhone did
#338Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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?
Interesting perspective; medical regulation as a business moat
Re: ATMs didn’t kill bank teller jobs, but the iPhone did
#339Earlier quoted context omitted.
1990? We were solid lower-middle class, and I got a computer for Christmas in 1983. I bought my own, from $$ saved by working in 1987.
Computers were roughly ~ $1000 in 1990. How did your lower-middle class family justify a $1000 expenditure inflation adjusted to $2565 today? Average minimum wage in the US is $11.30 so that's 29 days working at minimum wage. My family was on the border of upper-lower and lower-middle and we bought a computer once and used it for 10+ years. I dumpster dove later to scavenge parts for upgrading until the mid 2000s whe…
> How did your lower-middle class family justify a $1000 expenditure
What, like a yearly vacation? Maybe they stayed home for Christmas one year instead of flying to visit family
Re: ATMs didn’t kill bank teller jobs, but the iPhone did
#340One 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…
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