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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

#441

Post by jopsen »

I think people sometimes forget how backwards the US is, when lived in SF 7 years ago, you couldn't do wire transfers online. Maybe some banks, maybe some people.

But I constantly had issues with debit cards being rejected, wire transfers having to be done on a branch, etc. I doubt there is a modern bill payment system yet.

Where as in Denmark, I've bought house, mortgage, wired >100k, bought stonks, none of it required me going to a branch.

I pay a manual bill maybe once or twice per year. I do it online or in an app, I hate the process. But automatic bill payment takes care of 99% of my bills!

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

#442

Post by LarsDu88 »

I've been thinking hard about this paradigm shift while thinking about ideas for things to "vibecode"

I started by trying to think about ways of running a vending machine company autonomously using a finite state machine + agents. It turns out most of "automating" a vending machine company doesn't need LLM agents at all, and simply buying machines with reliable telemetry + a database + automated inventory could get you much further than replacing every or even some components with an LLM. The LLM could replace the person on the phone texting the laborers who refill and service the machines, perhaps autonomously order refills (but hey so can a cronjob).

The troubling thought I had is that AI does not displace the technicians, or the vending machines. It replaces the manager. The human manager is the component that is unnecessary. The entire global economy can eventually reflect this reality where most of the wealth is technically owned by humans but where the majority of financial transactions and decision making will be done by machines (at a level not yet seen)

Macroeconomic metrics will go up along with wealth and standard of living, but for actual flesh and blood humans, much of this will be irrelevant.

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

#443

Post by Dylan16807 »

Cpoll wrote: post #148
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…

> A third of them were made redundant If I'm reading this correctly, the interpretation should be that a third of them were transferred to new branches. 0.66 (two thirds retention) * 1.4 (40% more branches) = 0.84, so we only expect ~16% were made redundant.

.66 * 1.4 = .92, so it's even less.

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

#444

Post by nlitsme »

ATMs came in the 90s, online banking in the 2000s, banks closed most of their branch offices in the 2010s i think. Gradually cash disappeared, so now you don't have ATMs either anymore. Than after covid they discovered that even the final bit of financial consultancy could be done via zoom, online.

Banking apps came later, long after banks had moved most interaction online.

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

#445

Post by heavyset_go »

mullingitover wrote: post #211
bwestergard wrote: post #199

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.

Wisdom comes from application of knowledge and experience in the real world, as does skill.

The value comes from applying an expert's wisdom and skill to the problem at hand.

You get neither from LLMs.

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

#446

Post by awesome_dude »

roncesvalles wrote: post #336
awesome_dude wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 developme…

> 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.

This assumes that the duplicated effort arrives at a solution that is better than if it were done by a single team.

> >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.

I think you're saying that 5% is worth it when the free market does it, but 5% gain isn't when the government does it?

I'm hoping you're not because that's impossible - the end result is precisely the same

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

#447

Post by awesome_dude »

9rx wrote: post #423
awesome_dude wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 duplication is the same It is not. Seven teams all working under one leadership is quite different to seven leaderships each working with one team. When different governments (e.g. USA and USSR), and thus different leaderships, are both trying to solve the same problem (e.g. travel to the moon), that too is considered efficient competition.

Oh, so seven /leaderships/ is what's made the difference?

If a government did this (e.g., seven independent agencies competing for a moon landing), people would call it "fragmented," "uncoordinated," and "bureaucratic infighting."

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

#448

Post by tossandthrow »

LarsDu88 wrote: post #442

I've been thinking hard about this paradigm shift while thinking about ideas for things to "vibecode" I started by trying to think about ways of running a vending machine company autonomously using a finite state machine + agents. It turns out most of "automating" a vending machine company doesn't need LLM agents at all, and simply buying machines with reliable telemetry + a database + automated inventory could get y…

> The troubling thought I had is that AI does not displace the technicians, or the vending machines. It replaces the manager.

This is really why ai will have a more profound impact on the society: it is fundamentally changing the hierarchy of conpetence we have gotten so accustomed to.

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

#449

Post by laughing_man »

aurareturn wrote: post #51
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…

We're already seeing large software companies figure out that they don't need 5,000 developers. They probably only need 1,000 or maybe even fewer. However, the number of software companies being started is booming which should result in net neutral or net positive in software developer employment. Today: 100 software companies employ 1,000 developers each[0] Tomorrow: 10,000 software companies employ 10 developers ea…

The number of software companies being started is probably at least partially the result of people not being able to find a job and starting a company as a last resort.

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

#450

Post by hdgvhicv »

kelnos wrote: post #344
hn_acc1 wrote: post #256

Earlier 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.

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 b…

You couldn’t afford a Commodore 64 or spectrum? Yet were middle class?

US median household wage was $24k in 1985 and a c64 $150

More likely your parents decided to spend the money on something else. Like a $400 19” tv

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