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

There's a simple solution. If a medical malpractice happens, law suit against the LLM company. If their license is revoked as part of that finding, unfortunately that applies to the "doctor" (e.g. ChatGPT).

Same for self-driving. Just hold each car like a normal driver, the owning AI company has liability. So after ~20 tickets and accidents in a week, a few ambulances being blocked, the only option is to revoke the driver's license (of which, all the cars share one, as they have the same brain).

This would make AI companies more cautious and only advertise capabilities they actually have and can verify. They would be held to the standard of a human. I think that's reasonable (why replace humans if the outcome is worse, and why reduce protections for individuals).

To make the analogy more clear: even if a telemedicine doc sees 10,000 patients a day all over the world, they would be held liable for any medical malpractice. Bad enough, and their license would be revoked, regardless of the fact that they see many patients all over the world. Same deal with AI / LLM -- if ChatGPT is making medical advice and it hurts someone, that's the same as a human doing so -- its malpractice and lawsuits can happen.

If they are somehow licensed, well then that license can be revoked. We would revoke a human's license for a single offense in some cases, the same should occur with AI.

Because in their ideal world, you won't have your own hardware beyond a secured thin client running only "approved" programs running on their servers.

I feel like even the phrasing of the original assumption that "we have more bank tellers now that we had before", which seems to imply that ATMs didn't affect or even boost the number of bank tellers is flawed.

If you look at the graph, the number of bank tellers from 1980 to 2010 went from roughly 500k to 550k (a 10% increase). However, the U.S. population grew from 220M to 305M in the same period (a 40% increase). To me, that seems to indicate that less and less people were becoming bank tellers after the invention of the ATM. Although from the graph again, you can see that the correlation is quite poor anyway.

This is a whole wall of post hoc ergo propter hoc.

You can’t state with any certainty that the ATM’s increased efficiency had anything to do with the expansion of bank branches. That could have simply been due to the strong population and economic growth. It’s quite possible (and I’d assume it to be true) that if the ATM had never been invented, there would have been far more bank tellers in 2005 than there were.

You also can’t assume the iPhone had that much to do with it. With the exception of depositing checks, there was nothing I couldn’t do on my computer in 2005 that I could on my phone in 2025. And you could always deposit a check at an ATM. It wasn’t like in 2006 we were all like “well I can only check my bank balance on my laptop so I’m going to drive there instead.”

It seems quite likely that other trends caused all of this.

Seven independent government agencies are still an arm of the same leadership.

When complete organizational separation is introduced, the concerns you speak of go away. In the USA, the ARPA (you might recognize that name from the thing you're using right now) program regularly enables "seven" independent leaders to tackle a problem and this is widely considered a resounding success.