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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

#381

Post by alex43578 »

ssl-3 wrote: post #378
alex43578 wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> cutting out menial decisions such as customer service. … Each person in the US hired to do that job would spend their entire paycheck This person can no longer get a customer service job, but why can’t they get another job? Customer service is hardly career with a huge sunk cost in training and with a non-fungible skill set. If they go get another job, compared to the base case of economy = customer service, we now…

It's easy for anyone to go get a different job as long as the supply of jobs is infinite. But it is not infinite; eventually, we reach a point where we no longer need additional ditch diggers.

“Demographic and labor market trends in the U.S. point to an ominous scenario. The nation potentially faces a shortfall of millions of workers in the decade to come — especially in the critical health care sector — due to a projected reduction in workforce participation.”

The supply of jobs exceeds the supply of workers, so yes, you should be able to go and get another job.

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

#382

Post by scubadude »

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…

> high quality medical advice

I'll replace my doctor with AI immediately after the tech bros do

lol

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

#383

Post by foxglacier »

array_key_first wrote: post #341
throwaway98797 wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 re…

People don't need to do much work to survive. They choose to because they want to play the rat-race. They want to compete with each other for status and wealth. And that's a good thing - it's what drives all the productivity that enables easy-goers to live off grid or in a tent or renting in a cheap neighborhood doing just a little part-time work.

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

#384

Post by matheusmoreira »

ssl-3 wrote: post #378
alex43578 wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> cutting out menial decisions such as customer service. … Each person in the US hired to do that job would spend their entire paycheck This person can no longer get a customer service job, but why can’t they get another job? Customer service is hardly career with a huge sunk cost in training and with a non-fungible skill set. If they go get another job, compared to the base case of economy = customer service, we now…

It's easy for anyone to go get a different job as long as the supply of jobs is infinite. But it is not infinite; eventually, we reach a point where we no longer need additional ditch diggers.

Job supply trends towards zero. The ultimate logical conclusion of this train of thought is there is no point in keeping the lower classes alive. Why do we need 15 billion humans if they do nothing but burden you with their maintenance costs? Let them die so that the quadrillionaires can enjoy the Earth with their perfect AI workforces catering to their every need.

The future is bleak. If this is the sort of dystopia I can look forward to, then I would rather have AI simply wipe out humanity as a whole.

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

#385

Post by matheusmoreira »

alex43578 wrote: post #381
ssl-3 wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's easy for anyone to go get a different job as long as the supply of jobs is infinite. But it is not infinite; eventually, we reach a point where we no longer need additional ditch diggers.

“Demographic and labor market trends in the U.S. point to an ominous scenario. The nation potentially faces a shortfall of millions of workers in the decade to come — especially in the critical health care sector — due to a projected reduction in workforce participation.” The supply of jobs exceeds the supply of workers, so yes, you should be able to go and get another job.

Give AI a medical license and all those critical health care jobs will literally disappear overnight.

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

#387

Post by nunez »

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?

Yes...because banks have made it much more difficult to do online banking through a web browser as a forcing function to route people to their apps.

I actually switched to a credit union last year from Chase partly for this reason. Chase used to have m.chase.com, which was PERFECT for most of the banking I did while being extremely fast, even back in the 2G days. They Web 2.0'ed it in 2017 and deprecated m.chase.com in 2018 or so.

The provider that maintains my bank's online banking platform made it fast and lightweight, much like m.chase.com of yesteryear, while also adding more modern authentication security (2FA vs SMS).

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

#388

Post by metalcrow »

jacquesm wrote: post #363

Nice try, but no. When I was working for a US bank in the 80's, well before smartphone and even well before mobile phones the plan was hatched to reduce the number of offices because those offices were horrendously expensive. The big cost was the tellers and the handling of cash. For mortgages and other big ticket items there was a profit, but everything involved in the handling of money was a really large cost. So t…

How do you explain the data contradicting this? I believe that your bank did this but the data seems to show otherwise.

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

#389

Post by nunez »

Poacher5 wrote: post #66
ahartmetz wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

They're basically bank receptionists for old people who will type details into the same system that the general public has access to. They also handle cash for small businesses (I worked in a cafe during university and we'd regularly have to do runs into town to deposit rolls of bills and get more change to float the till)

You also need to see tellers these days to do large withdrawals (think cashier's checks) and, ironically, resolving account lockouts due to fraud. The big banks also have relationship banking if you have enough money held by them, which I understand can be very useful in certain situations.

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

#390

Post by im3w1l »

whatisthiseven wrote: post #186
paxys wrote: 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…

> 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…

In my humble opinion, money is a distraction most of the time when trying to understand economic matters. Instead it's better to take opposite view: looking at the flow of goods and services.

AI will allow higher production of goods and services. If producing goods and services becomes cheap enough (and it's looking like it will become dirt cheap), then it will not take much redistribution for it to reach the masses.

I think the true crisis will be one of purpose. That we live meaningless lives of leisurely abundance.

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