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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

#451

Post by heavyset_go »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #379
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…

At some point we're gonna have to abolish the economy itself. We need to transition to a post-scarcity society where everything is abundant and there's no need to economize.

That is the future for significant shareholders, everyone else can starve.

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

#452

Post by generic92034 »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #385
alex43578 wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“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.

It would require several breakthroughs in robotics and AI to automate a nurse's job. And then it would still be unlikely that this kind of automation is saving costs.

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

#453

Post by concats »

jopsen wrote: post #438
whatisthiseven wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the contrary, humanity spent nearly its entire existence calorically deficit, and until mechanized farming did we finally see health outcomes improve, height increase, IQ increase, and populations explode. Productivity gains in the case of mechanized labor got everyone out of subsistence farming and into factories. AI gets everyone out of every job and into nothing.

> AI gets everyone out of every job and into nothing. Why is mechanized thinking going to do that? When mechanized labor didn't?

> Why is mechanized thinking going to do that? When mechanized labor didn't?

You're right. There is technically a category of work that relies on neither our ability to do physical labor nor excessive thinking. It just relies on being a human.

The conclusion is thus obvious: AI is going to push us all into careers as photo models, OF-creators, and social media influencers! /s

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

#454

Post by Karrot_Kream »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #356
kelnos wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I suspect your family was not as middle class as you think it was. You're describing a very similar childhood to what I had in the late 80s, but we were lower class for sure I'm not saying that middle class families flew all the time in the 80s, but they absolutely could afford to if they wanted to make it a priority A cursory google search seems to bear this out. Cheap flights in north america started in 1978 with s…

GP claims their family was lower middle class not properly middle class. My family mostly traveled like kelnos family did at the time. Also gas prices in the 80s-90s were so cheap that it rarely made sense to fly over driving. We flew as a family twice as a kid because we were an immigrant family and we saved up to visit the country of origin but it was ridiculously expensive to take the whole family, so dad stayed home one vacation, and we always stayed there with family.

We did have a computer but it was really a one time expense. At the time computers were improving quickly so I scavenged parts which wealthy areas that threw last Gen hardware away but were better than what we had (and I was a kid with a lot of time on my hands.) Giving a computer to a kid for Christmas in '83 is a very different value proposition than even a family vacation because a vacation is something the whole family does.

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

#455

Post by ardeaver »

lchengify wrote: post #196

Two anecdotes I'll share: First: Most people believe it was Netflix that killed Blockbuster, but that's not strictly correct. It was the combination of Netflix and Redbox that really sealed the deal for Blockbuster (and video rental generally). It normally takes not one, but at least two things to really fill the full functionality of a old paradigm. Also it's human nature to focus heavily on one thing (Blockbuster w…

The thing that actually killed Blockbuster was Carl Icahn. He bought up a bunch of shares and wanted to quickly turn a profit on the company. At the time, they were investing heavily into a Netflix-like service, which required a significant up front capital investment and, therefore, was losing money. Icahn, wanting to make a profit, decided to cut spending and basically not look forward at all. He got a quick, massive bump in stock price and jumped ship as it was crashing into the iceberg. Blockbuster was caught in the middle of a paradigm shift and found itself massively under prepared to deal with it.

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

#456

Post by nottorp »

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.

> Why? They're completely unneeded, I can do (and WANT to do) that myself.

Do you WANT to do that?

I've tried to run my own items at the corner store via the automatic checkout. Whenever I buy lightweight items or items that lose weight during the day (fresh bread) the anti fraud weighing system lights up. And I like my fresh bread.

So I've gone back to the one manned checkout. Judging by the lines I get sometimes, so have most other customers.

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

#457

Post by Tklaaaalo »

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…

It costs a lot of money to train one person to learn stuff.

We are already now in the time were training one LLM seems to be more cost effective to train for everything than training a million people the same thing over and over (after all, people loose knowledge when they get replaced).

LLM don't even need to become AGI to continue this trend. They just need to be good enough 'executors' of these tasks we expected people to do.

Which also means that every new job, which needs any form of training, will not be created because we will train ONE llm (or three, doesn't matter) to do it right and again you optimized the new people away.

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

#458

Post by sayamqazi »

alwa wrote: post #216
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.

More subtly, what is an education? What is care? As you point out, the LLMs are (or probably will become) perfectly good at the measurable parts of those services; but I think the residual edge of “good” education/care is more than just the other human’s co-opted attention. How many of us have a reminiscence that starts “looking back, the most life-changing part of my primary or secondary education was ________,” whe…

> How many of us have a reminiscence that starts “looking back, the most life-changing part of my primary or secondary education was ________,”

For me it was a website with turotirals on how to make flash games. It literally launched my career and improved the quality of life for my whole family by an order of magnitude.

I am primarily the naysayer of AI but I admit that current LLMs could have easily replicated the whole website.

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

#460

Post by foxglacier »

array_key_first wrote: post #399
foxglacier wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You essentially need to work a full-time job to survive. Ideally, a somewhat good job to be comfortable. But if you want, say, a place to live, a steady supply of food, and your medical needs taken care of so you don't die prematurely, you need to be working full-time.

Yea standard of living has increased. Can't you want olden-days level of healthcare, accomodation, food, etc. but less work?
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