ATMs didn’t kill bank teller jobs, but the iPhone did • Hacker News Board

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

#501

Post by ori_b » Fri, Mar 13, 2026, 2:00 PM UTC

gpderetta wrote: post #488

ori_b wrote: post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's interesting that you assume there's value in being educated in this hypothetical world of complete passive consumption. The world you're describing is one where the entire economic value of humanity is in reminding the AI to put out the food bowl and refill the water dish at the appropriate time.

For many, the Culture is an utopia to aspire to, for some is something to run away as fast as possible. Banks himself described the dichotomy.

The interesting thing here is less about what people aspire to, and more about the lack of imagination and thought when considering the world they want to create.

It would be funny if the sleepwalkers weren't trying so hard to drag humanity along.

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

#502

Post by raisedbyninjas » Fri, Mar 13, 2026, 2:16 PM UTC

eloisant wrote: post #139

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?

No, the article is wrong about the iPhone. It's the Internet that killed bank tellers.

Yeah cash and checks haven't been replaced by mobile banking or mobile payments. Credit and debit card use took over the payment market with digital wallet exploding in the last few years. Electronic transfers took over paying bills with paper checks. None of those need a smartphone or other personal computing.

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

#503

Post by rgblambda » Fri, Mar 13, 2026, 2:20 PM UTC

bloomingeek wrote: post #470

rgblambda wrote: post #461

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure I'm following, unless you're saying you don't carry your phone around with you? Your bank and Amazon/ebay already know your address.

Sorry, I should have noted. I haven't installed any apps from banks, FB, Amazon, ebay, credit card companies, reward programs or anything like that on my cell. Sure, there are apps in my cell that I basically can't uninstall that track. Just not one's I've installed myself.

I can understand FB and rewards programmes, but can I ask what level of privacy you believe you're achieving by logging into your bank on your laptop instead of your phone? Same for Amazon, eBay, credit cards.

You can choose to not allow location tracking on those apps if that's your concern.

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

#504

Post by wwweston » Fri, Mar 13, 2026, 2:21 PM UTC

alex43578 wrote: post #360

hn_acc1 wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right there with you. Sure, I have gained a lot as a software engineer in the valley (I guess I'm upper-middle class now), but I'd give it up and go right back to lower-middle class (1980s) status I was raised in if it meant my kids could also aspire to a similar lower-middle class life. This suicide-pact of "either AI goes crazy and 100 people rule the world with 99% of the world's wealth" or "AI fails badly and eve…

You can easily live a “lower middle class 1980s life” on minimum wage today. Find a 1980s apartment, an early 2000s used car, and don’t bother paying for TV, Starbucks, a cellphone, etc.

The rent on a literal 1980s apartment (let alone SFH mortgage) in every area that I’ve lived in has scaled up faster than average income. This is the trend for essentials.

Consumer electronics are cheaper; this is the trend for substitutable goods.

Love me the right 20-30 year old car, but the dramatic cost rise around covid times means the savings is only relative to new. A 3x increase in old car prices hasn’t been matched by 3 fold wage increases for most.

And of course we’re discussing this in a larger conversation about automating away 1980s jobs.

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

#505

Post by freedomben » Fri, Mar 13, 2026, 2:22 PM UTC

dylan604 wrote: post #97

freedomben wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Browsers and websites work pretty well on mobile devices too. Website != desktop only

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 an institution will fill their website with ads, why wouldn't they do the same with their mobile app?

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

#506

Post by gwd » Fri, Mar 13, 2026, 2:32 PM UTC

paxys wrote: post #67

aurareturn wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Why will we need 1000 companies tomorrow to do the same thing that 100 companies are doing today? If they are really so efficient because of AI then won't 10 companies be able to solve the same problems?

For the same reason there were more bank branches after the cost-per-branch was reduced.

Right now, software is really expensive; so 1) economics tends to favor large pieces of software which solve many different kinds of problems, and 2) loads of things that should be automatable simply aren't being automated with software.

With the cost of software dropping, it makes more sense to have software targeted towards specific niches. Companies will do more in-house development, more things will be automated than were being automated before.

Of course nobody knows what will happen; but it's entirely possible that the demand for people capable of driving Claude Code to produce useful software will explode.

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

#507

Post by wwweston » Fri, Mar 13, 2026, 2:40 PM UTC

WalterBright wrote: post #401

ssl-3 wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And the executives do this in a golden shower of trickle-on economics. ...which didn't work so well during the Reagan administration, but I guess we're on course to try it again.

No country has ever raised up poor people by eviscerating the wealthy.

The Nordic model does a great job of providing a poor-raising floor (which also launches entrepreneurs at a higher success rate than in the US). And Norway in particular seems to have figured out how to take commons resources and turn them into common wealth while industry retains profit incentives.

No one is “eviscerated.”

And it’s disingenuous to use that term for any proposal that has even the slightest public traction in the US. The most extreme proposals require single digit taxes on hyperwealth which might not have impact beyond stabilizing it and certainly wouldn’t make anyone not-wealthy.

No one is talking about eviscerating the wealthy. Yet. But if we pretend the only options are (a) unencumbered hyperwealth with attendant hyper income inequality and (b) eviscerating the wealthy for long enough, it’s more likely some people will eventually embrace the latter.

And this is particularly relevant for the age of LLMs. None of them approach intelligence with reliance on a huge data commons (and likely even data that isn’t intended for the commons) they’re an enterprise with a natural arrow from the commons to the common wealth, if we can remember a culture that sustains it.

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

#508

Post by idiotsecant » Fri, Mar 13, 2026, 2:46 PM UTC

thegrimmest wrote: post #284

idiotsecant wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This and other fairytales. The only solution here is to stop tying people's value to their productivity. That makes a lot of sense in the 1900s but it makes a lot less sense when the primary faucet of productivity is automation. If you insist on tying a person's fundamental right to a decent and secure life to their productivity and then take away their ability to be productive you're left with a permenant and growin…

Who ever said you have the right to a decent a secure life? People don’t universally agree about this. Some of us posit that we will never escape a state of competition for fundamentally scarce resources. And that the organizing principle of a free society should be peaceful coexistence, not mandatory cooperation. You figure out your own economic security, I’ll manage mine.

There are already enough resources that nobody should live in abject insecurity and poverty. Your position is fundamentally morally abhorrent to me. You're saying that your ability to take a little bit more for yourself is more important than a child not having polio, a mother feeding her child, a village having clean water.

You are, in short, a tiny little microcosm of why humanity is doomed as a species.

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

#509

Post by NoSalt » Fri, Mar 13, 2026, 2:55 PM UTC

I remember a few years back when I went into my banking branch to deposit a check my insurance company had sent me. When it was my turn at the teller, and I presented my check to her for deposit, and she said, rather rudely: "You can do this with your phone, you know?" On my way out of the bank, I remember thinking to myself that she was, essentially, putting herself out of a job by encouraging people to use their phones and not her. Turns out I was correct.

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

#510

Post by lchengify » Fri, Mar 13, 2026, 2:57 PM UTC

bogtog wrote: post #467

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…

> Not listed here is how banks themselves have changed to be almost entirely online Sorry what? Was this not the central theme of the article? (albeit with a title that used the word "iPhone" to be catchier)

Yea that could have been worded better. My point was more that the banks didn't turn into software (an app) with just developers working on it, just that the labor force that was doing teller operations moved.