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

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

#341

Post by array_key_first »

throwaway98797 wrote: post #276
stephbook wrote: post #267

I'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.

pretty degrading to call what they do useless we all need to do something

If it makes you feel better, most labor is useless. In the sense that a computer program and/or machine could easily do it, or the customer could trivially do it themselves. But the labor is cheap enough that having a warm body around is worth it.

We've pretty much locked ourselves into an economic system that requires everyone to work, even though our productivity has skyrocketed many orders of magnitude. The end result is most people are doing meaningless work just because they have to in order to survive, and most jobs do not need to exist. This is true even in office work. It usually manifests as moving stuff from A to B and then maybe back to A. Basically, not creating, just moving. And not physically moving either.

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

#342

Post by TrackerFF »

Eh, bank teller jobs were dying and on their way out long before the iPhone showed up. Back in the early 00s local branches were downsizing left and right. My small rural town went from having three banks with like 4 tellers in each bank, in the mid 90s, to one bank with 1-2 tellers, in the mid 00s.

By the end that bank only dealt with mortgages, other loans, and saving accounts.

Online banking and the rise of card use was a huge reason for that. It is almost 20 years since I last time went to a physical bank to withdraw or deposit money, or pay a bill. Probably even longer for paying bills.

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

#343

Post by sssilver »

sssilver wrote: post #312
mullingitover wrote: post #211

Earlier 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.

The supply/demand picture here is more complicated than it looks. If AI displaces human educators, yes, their supply shrinks -- but we can't assume what direction its demand will go. We've seen this pattern before: as recorded music became free, live performance got more expensive, and therefore much less accessible than it used to be. What's likely to happen is that "worse" (read: AI) education will become much chea…

Important follow-up to my comment: as fewer people do X -- live music, medicine, education, you name it -- fewer talented people do it as well.

Fields need a large base of participants to produce great ones. This is exactly why software has been so extraordinary over the past 30 years: an unusual concentration of gifted minds across the entire humankind committed themselves to it.

In my view, Bach, Rachmaninoff, Cole Porter equivalents today probably aren't writing symphonies. They've decided to write code for a living. Which is why any Great American Songbook made today won't hold a candle next to one from 1950s.

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

#344

Post by kelnos »

hn_acc1 wrote: post #256
dheera wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We may reach a point where the only ones able to afford compute are AI companies Nah. I think "good enough AI for 95% of people" will be able to run locally within 3-5 years on consumer-accessible devices. There will be concentration of the best compute in AI companies for training, but inference will always become cheaper over time. Decommissioned training chips will also become inference chips, adding even more c…

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.

We were solid middle-middle class and didn't have a computer until 1989, and it was a "free", 2- or 3-year-old computer from my dad's work that they were going to throw away. We absolutely could not have afforded a computer during the 80s.

Even in the 90s, we kept relying on cast-offs from my dad's employer, and when I was preparing to go to college in '99, my parents scrounged to buy me the parts for a computer to build and take to college. But even then, my dad bought the parts at a discount through a former co-worker's consulting company, and vetoed a couple of my more expensive component choices.

And now that I think about it, my first laptop in 2003 was my dad's old work laptop that had been decommissioned.

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

#345

Post by dylan604 »

thesuitonym wrote: post #226
dylan604 wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If your banks website has a bunch of ads on it, you should probably consider switching banks.

Sure, if you want to be obtuse about the comment, you'd be so cool in how you wouldn't be wrong.

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

#346

Post by jacquesm »

mullingitover wrote: post #193
whatisthiseven wrote: post #186

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…

> My prediction is no, because productivity gains must benefit the lower classes to see a multiplier in the economy. 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. The problem with services is that they're typically resistant to productiv…

Well, there's always wars as the way to get rid of people. I really don't rule out that the people that benefit from this sort of thing will purposefully steer the world in that direction because the poor won't have any choice other than to enlist as a way out of their situation, and never mind the consequences. You can already see some of this happening.

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

#347

Post by bananaflag »

runarberg wrote: post #111
_DeadFred_ wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cool concept, but this isn't 1980. We've been sold these sorts of concepts for 40+ years now and things have only gotten worse. We have a K shaped economy. Top earners take the majority. The top 20% make up 63% of all spending, and the top 10% accounted for more than 49%. The highest on record. Businesses adapt to reality and target the best market, in this case the top 10 to 20%, and the rest just get ignored, like…

Irrelevant aside: But I hold grudge against the economists who picked the letter K to represent increased inequality. They missed the perfect opportunity to use the less-then inequality symbol ( “less-then economy” .

Nitpick: it's less-than, not less-then.

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

#348

Post by sothatsit »

twosdai wrote: post #180
sothatsit wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is why a fully automated firm would be a paradigm shift. Instead of requiring someone to be responsible and to QA things, you just let AI systems be responsible internally, and the company responsible as a whole for legal concerns. This idea of an automated firm relies on the premise that AI will become more capable and reliable than people.

In this regard, the company cannot be created where there is not a single person tied to it, at least legally, even shell corporations have a person on the record as being responsible. So there needs to be some human that is apart of it, and in any "normal" organization if there is a person tied to the outcome of the company they presumably care about it and if the AI 99.99% of the time does good work, but still can…

The benchmark is AI making less mistakes than humans, not making no mistakes. Just like autonomous vehicles.

And yes, presumably there would be a person who set the firm up, or else our legal system would need to change quite fundamentally.

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

#349

Post by dylan604 »

simonw wrote: post #69
ahartmetz wrote: post #7

I do not get what's special about banking apps as opposed to online banking. I've been doing online banking in the browser on a PC since before apps and I'm still doing it because dealing with data on a phone is painful compared to a PC. Is an app really that much easier to use?

Official banking apps are harder to phish than websites. They also tend to keep you signed in for longer, especially once you enable something like FaceID.

Obviously, I've never used every. single. banking app, yet the ones I've used have signed me out of the app just as the web page does. Using FaceID makes it less noticeable, but it is signing me in each time I use it unless I've returned to it within the active session. Otherwise, it's logged out as expected.

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

#350

Post by kelnos »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #339
Karrot_Kream wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Flying? We were solid middle class in the 80s and my first plane flight wasn't until 2001 (and then only because I was away at college and my mother had died suddenly). My parents hadn't flown since the 70s (before my sister and I were born), and even then, that was a rare thing for them.

Our childhood vacations were single-day (so we didn't have to pay for a hotel) road trips to a nearby state to go to an amusement park, or multi-day trips (also within driving distance) where my dad had to go somewhere for work and the hotel was paid for by his employer. It was a huge huge deal for us when, in the late 90s, we drove down to Disney World (a 13-hour drive) for a several-day trip.

And we never traveled around Christmas; that was one of the most expensive times of the year to travel!

Not sure when or where you grew up, but most middle-class folks in the US in the 80s didn't have a lot of discretionary income, and flights were (inflation adjusted) quite a bit more expensive than they are today.

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