[HN Gopher] ATMs didn't kill bank teller jobs, but the iPhone did
___________________________________________________________________
ATMs didn't kill bank teller jobs, but the iPhone did
Author : colinprince
Score : 285 points
Date : 2026-03-12 14:48 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (davidoks.blog)
(TXT) w3m dump (davidoks.blog)
| bdcravens wrote:
| That paired with an increasingly cashless society. (Which is also
| in large part to smart phones) Otherwise you'd still need more
| tellers to conduct transactions that exceed ATM limits.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| As far as I can tell, it's _entirely_ that. The things the
| author cites as how mobile banking supplanted going to the bank
| (paying for things with debit cards, getting your paycheck
| direct deposited, etc) have nothing to do with mobile banking.
| They are all just as you said: we live in an increasingly
| cashless society, the only reason to go to the branch is to
| deposit or withdraw money, so the need for tellers has gone off
| a cliff.
| bpfrh wrote:
| Something that only came with the banking apps was opening of
| accounts via camera based identification and other security
| critical stuff, like 2fa for transfers, resetting card pins
| and setting other security features.
|
| It's also easier to scan payments via app than go to the
| bank, something that is only possible via native like apps
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Yes, exactly my reaction. Other than maybe to open an account
| in the first place, the only reason I ever went into to a
| bank even in the pre-internet, pre-smartphone era was to deal
| with cash.
|
| Checks could be deposited in the deposit drop, or later at an
| ATM. My payroll went to direct deposit as soon as that was
| possible.
|
| But to get cash, before ATMs, you went into the bank, unless
| you had check-cashing privilges somewhere else (supermarkets
| used to offer this). To deposit cash, you went into the bank
| so the teller could count it in front of you and agree on the
| amount. It was risker to deposit cash in a deposit drop or
| ATM.
|
| The move to cashless transactions for almost everything, and
| the resultant rare need to carry cash, is IMO the main reason
| why we don't need very many bank tellers anymore.
| saltmate wrote:
| In which way is the cashless society due to smartphones? Cards
| did that already before Apple/GooglePay were a thing.
| bdcravens wrote:
| P2P apps (Cash App, Venmo, etc) that have filled the gaps for
| transactions that were typically tricky to use cards for.
| GuinansEyebrows wrote:
| > an AI system is literally a machine that can think and do
| things itself
|
| why do so many writers claim this as a matter of fact? are we
| losing (or did we never have) a shared definition of the word
| "think"? can an LLM, at this time, function with zero human input
| whatsoever?
|
| edit to add: these are genuine questions, not meant to be
| rhetorical :)
|
| it's hard for me to gauge a broader understanding of AI/LLMs
| since most of the conversations i experience around them are
| here, or in negative contexts with people i know. and i'll admit
| i'm one of those negative people, but my general aversion to AI
| mostly has to do with my own anxiety around my mental health and
| cognitive ability in a use-it-or-lose-it sense, along with a
| disdain for its use in traditionally-creative fields.
| derektank wrote:
| >are we losing (or did we never have) a shared definition of
| the word "think"
|
| People have been saying, "the computer is thinking," while
| webpages are loading or software is running for as long as I've
| been consciously aware. I agree there's something new about
| describing AI as, "literally a machine that can think," but
| language has always had fuzzy borders
| TimTheTinker wrote:
| It's wild to watch documentaries from the 1980s where a
| primitive computer is said to be "a thinking machine" that is
| "taking most of the work out of a job".
| GuinansEyebrows wrote:
| yeah, for sure. i really think some people are under the
| impression that LLMs are a form of general AI that actually
| processes thought rather than being an admittedly-impressive
| exponential autocomplete.
|
| though i'm not by any means an AI booster, my question wasn't
| really meant to be taken as a gotcha - more a general taking
| stock of where we're at in terms of broader understanding of
| these technologies outside of the professional AI/hobbyist
| world.
| lsbehe wrote:
| Everyone I knew working as a bank teller quit because the actual
| job is screwing over old people with bad performing and long
| lasting investments. My bank calls me at least once a year to
| tell me my personal bank teller changed again.
| aleksandrm wrote:
| A personal banker and a bank teller are not the same thing. I
| think you're conflating or confusing two different professions.
| lgats wrote:
| the line is being blurred as the need for tellers goes down
| many banks have the tellers performing personal banking
| adjacent tasks, like selling products, accounts or other
| upsells to existing customers
| mikestew wrote:
| _Everyone I knew working as a bank teller quit because the
| actual job is screwing over old people with bad performing and
| long lasting investments._
|
| That's not a bank teller's job, at least not in the U. S.
| You're confusing that job with something else.
| sublinear wrote:
| Bad performing _and long lasting_ you say?
| mikestew wrote:
| If you are implying that the two are contradictory, allow me
| to introduce you to annuities.
| ahartmetz wrote:
| 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?
| 1980phipsi wrote:
| You can deposit checks via the app pretty easily.
| fweimer wrote:
| The last time I've used a check was close to thirty years
| ago. I assume ahartmetz's experience is similar.
|
| Many countries have functioning giro systems. The U.S. is
| just an outlier.
| connicpu wrote:
| I've never written a check, but I have had to deposit
| occasional checks. In the last 6 years the only checks I've
| received were first paychecks at a new job (before direct
| deposit was set up) and my covid stimulus checks.
| ahartmetz wrote:
| I'm in Europe where the situation is different: checks
| haven't been used in appreciable numbers for 30 years or so.
| It's all online or paper transfer orders. If you get a pre-
| filled paper transfer order, you can type (or scan and OCR I
| suppose) the same data into the online form.
| bluedino wrote:
| Your grandma doesn't give you a $10 check for your birthday
| in Europe?
|
| What about manufacturer rebates?
| ahartmetz wrote:
| Cash is still fairly common, and manufacturer rebates are
| basically not a thing. If they were, you'd send them an
| account number (IBAN = bank ID + account number at bank)
| to transfer the money to.
| ghaff wrote:
| In fairness, manufacturer rebates have pretty much
| (mercifully) disappeared in the US as well as they were
| basically a scheme to mentally make you account for a
| lower price you wouldn't end up being rebated for various
| reasons.
| ninalanyon wrote:
| To receive money from someone you can just give them your
| bank account number or if you both have Vipps or similar
| just your mobile telephone number.
|
| Granny can always give you cash or just send it directly
| to you account in the same way.
| fabian2k wrote:
| Europe is a big place, but my understanding is that the
| US is the outlier here and Europe is relatively similar
| in this regard.
|
| The only time I really saw checks used was when I was a
| child ~30-35 years ago and my parents used them. I did
| once cash a check from an elderly relative, but that was
| very unusual and only happened once. I didn't even know
| it was still possible to do that, my reaction was more
| like if someone had handed me a stack of punch cards to
| run on my computer.
|
| There hasn't been anything an average person used checks
| for in the last decades in Germany. Except a few elderly
| people, nobody uses checks and there are no rebates via
| checks at all.
| eloisant wrote:
| I live in France and I still have to write a check here
| and there. Very minor, but still present.
|
| Receiving a check however is even rarer.
| graemep wrote:
| I am in the UK and I have received two cheques in the
| last year, both for small amounts.
|
| As it turned out, my bank rejected both because they were
| made out to [middle name] [surname] rather than
| [firstname] [surname]. Ironically the former is unique
| (probably) whereas they had another customer with the
| latter.
| lizknope wrote:
| The last few manufacturer rebates I have gotten come in
| the form of a pre loaded Visa card
| monocularvision wrote:
| Yep, check deposit was the last reason I might regularly
| visit a bank (although even before the iPhone, I would use
| the ATM for that)
| contracertainty wrote:
| What's a check? As the saying goes, 'I'm too European for
| this'.
|
| On a more serious note, the last time I saw a cheque in the
| UK was my grandfather balancing his cheque book in the mid
| 80s. It really has been that long since they were in general
| use in the UK, at least.
|
| Just like with the prevalance of Apple/iPhones, the US
| banking system is global outlier.
|
| Things you can't do with my banking app you _can_ do with the
| web site:
|
| - Extract your transactions to excel/csv
|
| - Use OpenBanking
|
| - See all my accounts on screen at once
|
| - Sharedealing
|
| - International transfers
|
| But people are right, banks trust the mobile app more, and
| realy on it as an MFA device, so even if you use the website
| you still need the app.
| retired wrote:
| Europeans have checks as well, so that doesn't really makes
| sense.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Sounds like someone forgetting that for a large number of
| people, their mobile device is their only computer.
| dehrmann wrote:
| I know this is true, but for serious tasks, I need the screen
| real estate. I'm amazed at what some people can do from a
| phone, but also wonder if they're missing things, of if it's
| actually inefficient.
| bjtitus wrote:
| I wouldn't call checking a bank balance and initiating
| transfers "serious tasks". Maybe important but they aren't
| complex.
| neutronicus wrote:
| Or if they go to the public library when those tasks come
| up.
| danielbln wrote:
| I'm going to bet that you are a millennial or older? We
| need our big screens for $IMPORTANT work (buying big
| things, money stuff, etc.). GenZ tends to be less bothered
| by it and just does it all on the tiny screen in their
| pocket. It's time to schedule a colonoscopy.
| twelve40 wrote:
| that's kind of an ad hominem, but also beside the point:
| most bank apps (and websites) are actually absolute
| garbage, especially the top ones, just one example: the
| Citi app (on different phones) for a very long time
| refused to allow me to make a payment or change my
| password, so i had no choice but to use desktop. Somehow
| still, top banks' ugly websites seem to allow more
| functionality/fewer bugs than their mobile apps, which
| are very often just dumbed-down webviews or
| simplifications of their websites.
| danielbln wrote:
| You may have missed that I've included myself in that
| cohort, being an older millennial. So it's less ad
| hominem, and more self-deprecating.
| havaloc wrote:
| My boomer dad does more things on his phone than I do and
| I'm Gen X. It's actually astonishing how much he does on
| his iPhone. I'm dragging out the laptop and he's on his
| iPhone happy as a clam.
| danielbln wrote:
| I've heard that GenX/Millenials are in a sort of PC
| goldilocks zone. People older than that cohort don't know
| computers and therefore use phones for everything, people
| younger don't know computers and also use phones for
| everything.
| bloomingeek wrote:
| I'm a tech loving boomer, I always use my PC for banking,
| ordering, etc. My wife, however, almost always uses her
| cell, which is great for when we are traveling. Even
| though we're only five years apart in age, she's lite
| years ahead of me with a cell. I freely admit part of my
| reluctance for using my cell is the mobile tracking
| ability of companies.
| idiotsecant wrote:
| I used to be with 'it', but then they changed what 'it'
| was. Now what I'm with isn't 'it' anymore and what's 'it'
| seems weird and scary. It'll happen to you!
| dehrmann wrote:
| What if millennials are good at both and are choosing the
| right too for the job?
| agoodusername63 wrote:
| It's not seen as important enough for others.
|
| Just like with a lot of things. Sure you could do a thing
| better, faster, more efficiently on a PC, but some people
| just don't care when 80% is good enough.
| boxedemp wrote:
| Phone is probably the best tool for most minor online
| banking actions.
|
| Not all.
| rkuykendall-com wrote:
| I am going to guess you are 30 or older. Google image
| search "laptop tasks millennial" to see that this is a
| feeling shared among our cohort but not the younger cohort.
| jama211 wrote:
| Do you need it, or do you just feel more comfortable with
| it?
| nine_k wrote:
| The efficiency of being able to do something at a moment's
| notice, on the go, anywhere and anytime may outweigh the
| conveniences of a larger screen.
|
| BTW newer mobile phones offer "desktop mode" (the Samsung
| Dex, and what came to AOSP), so you can attach them to a
| TV.
| crazygringo wrote:
| What "serious" tasks does banking involve?
|
| I log in to transfer money, to take a photo of a check to
| deposit it, to check my balance.
|
| All of that is fine on a phone screen. Actually, it's a lot
| easier to take the check photo.
|
| And a banking app is a whole lot more secure than a browser
| tab running extensions that might get hijacked, on a
| desktop OS whose architecture allows this like widespread
| disk access, keyloggers, etc.
| bjtitus wrote:
| Exactly. 96% of internet users use mobile phones. 62% use
| PCs.
| freedomben wrote:
| Browsers and websites work pretty well on mobile devices too.
| Website != desktop only
| dylan604 wrote:
| 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. For me, website === desktop only
| thesuitonym wrote:
| If your banks website has a bunch of ads on it, you
| should probably consider switching banks.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Sure, if you want to be obtuse about the comment, you'd
| be so cool in how you wouldn't be wrong.
| rsync wrote:
| I encourage you to install the dns4eu ad blocking profile
| on your ios device.
|
| It's free, it's transparent, you can read the profile...
| And it takes two minutes.
| hn_acc1 wrote:
| ublock origin on firefox (Android) works great for me.
| But, I haven't touched Apple in 30+ years, so I have no
| idea about that ecosystem.
| eloisant wrote:
| That wasn't true before smartphones, everyone had a computer
| so they could access the Internet. Except maybe in developing
| countries - but the article is about the US.
| dylan604 wrote:
| At one point, humans had not stepped on the moon. At one
| point, we didn't know about antibiotics. At one point....
|
| It doesn't matter what used to be, we're discussing what is
| now. We now have mobile devices that are much cheaper for
| people to obtain than a computer. For most, that device is
| more powerful than a computer they could afford. Arguing
| the fact that a vast number of people's only compute device
| is their mobile is just arguing with a fence post. It
| serves no purpose.
| Illniyar wrote:
| We are not. We are discussing what killed the teller
| jobs, which happened years ago, not now.
| ericmay wrote:
| How do you scan a check on your PC?
|
| Generally yes the apps tend to be easier to use for most
| things, especially with a high-speed internet connection.
| Customers prefer them, banks build them since customers prefer
| them.
| bluedino wrote:
| Visioneer paperport!
|
| I wonder if you can use a webcam?
| freedomben wrote:
| My PC has had a scanner connected to it for over 20 years,
| and in the mid 00s I was scanning and depositing checks
| through my bank's website (USAA). Even with modern cameras
| and fancy smarphone software, the results you get from a PC
| scan are still much better than taking a picture with your
| phone.
|
| If you don't have a scanner, nearly all laptops have a webcam
| built in, and many people have one for their desktop as well.
|
| On top of all that, there's no reason you can't use your
| smartphone camera to upload an image into a website through
| the mobile browser. I've done it many times for things. Just
| this morning I "scanned" a receipt into Ramp by taking a
| picture with my smartphone in the mobile browser.
|
| You can't invade the user's privacy nearly as well in a
| browser (which is great for analytics/marketing), so there's
| a lot of incentive to the app creator to force a mobile app.
| But I think we should be honest that it's not for the user,
| it's for the company.
| bob1029 wrote:
| > the results you get from a PC scan are still much better
| than taking a picture with your phone.
|
| The quality of the check images is not as big of a deal as
| you might think. No one is actually inspecting these unless
| the amount of deposit is near a limit or the account is
| flagged for suspicious activity. You definitely do not want
| to throw away the physical copy until the bank confirms the
| deposit.
| freedomben wrote:
| Yes I totally agree. Mainly I threw that in there to pre-
| empt any "quality" argument that someone might try to use
| for why native mobile app is needed.
| ericmay wrote:
| > My PC has had a scanner connected to it for over 20 years
|
| You're basically the only person in America doing this.
| Tens of millions of folks are just scanning it with the app
| on their phone and it's objectively a much better
| experience lol. The resolution of the photo taken on your
| smartphone is beyond good enough, there's no need to over-
| engineer something here.
|
| > You can't invade the user's privacy nearly as well in a
| browser (which is great for analytics/marketing), so
| there's a lot of incentive to the app creator to force a
| mobile app. But I think we should be honest that it's not
| for the user, it's for the company.
|
| I agree with your first sentence, but not your second one.
|
| Banking applications can certainly get more/different data
| on you from using the app, but the job of the bank is to
| _protect money and to know their customer_. Privacy is
| secondary, of course outside of things like other people
| knowing your account balance, unauthorized access, &c.
| That's for the bank, because they don't want to lose your
| money, but it's also for you because you don't want other
| people getting access to your money.
| bobtheborg wrote:
| Make that two people. I much prefer to slap the rare
| check on the scanner than fiddle with the phone. My banks
| "scan the check" part of the app was buggy for a long
| time, so maybe that jaded me. (~"move closer", ~"move
| away", ~"increase lighting"...)
| ninalanyon wrote:
| Haven't written or received a cheque in thirty years. But
| surely you could do it with any kind of digital camera, even
| a webcam.
| simonw wrote:
| Out of interest, do you live in a country other than the
| USA?
|
| (I'm guessing you are because in the USA they spell it
| check, not cheque.)
|
| I asked because the USA still seems to be stubbornly check-
| focused.
| rkomorn wrote:
| Is it? I lived in the US for 20+ years until 2021 and,
| though there were definitely more checks than I see in
| Europe now, the frequency with which I used them was
| approaching zero, which definitely wouldn't qualify as
| "stubbornly check-focused".
| ghaff wrote:
| I'm in the US and things are definitely less check-
| centric than they used to be but I still probably write
| or receive a couple a month.
| rkomorn wrote:
| I guess there's also a difference between "can use
| checks" vs "have to use checks" because, aside from rent,
| I can't recall having to write checks.
|
| Everything else allowed either credit card or direct
| debit on top of allowing checks.
| ghaff wrote:
| Both my housekeeper and contractor use checks and, while
| I could get the bank to "write" them checks, it's easier
| to just hand them a piece of paper. I've also needed to
| pay my neighbor something from time to time and it's
| easier to just write a check. I do also periodically
| receive checks from various institutions.
| rkomorn wrote:
| I guess to me there's just a big difference between what
| you're describing (which matches what I remember) and
| "stubbornly check-focused" as ancestor comment said.
|
| I do find the money transfer options where I am in Europe
| much easier, though, and they do make checks and
| PayPal/Zelle/Venmo pretty obsolete too, IMO.
| ghaff wrote:
| I think that's fair. I do carry a few checks in my travel
| folder but I don't think I've ever used them in Europe.
| Do carry some backup US cash.
|
| But in the US, there's probably a general expectation
| that you can send or receive checks at least now and
| then. There are often other options but that's probably
| the lowest friction one even if my bank can send checks
| if needed, albeit with some delay.
| dartharva wrote:
| Mobile payments (at least in places where they are executed
| correctly) are certainly a huge improvement over physically
| exchanging cash and change. I haven't needed to take out my
| wallet for years.
| ahartmetz wrote:
| I don't see what difference it makes. If you use cash, you
| draw it at the ATM.
| jader201 wrote:
| I mean, this argument isn't really specific to banking apps.
| This could apply to any native vs. web app, in general.
|
| Native apps can provide a bit more streamlined UX (e.g. Face
| ID), while also being able to provide more robust features
| (mobile deposit).
|
| The downsides are arguably higher development costs / OS
| compatibility, and having to install a separate app.
| forinti wrote:
| One bank I work with seems to have all but given up on online
| banking and I just have to use their app because online banking
| will no longer work on Linux (although they don't openly admit
| it).
|
| I think Android and iOS are safer platforms than PCs and that's
| why banks want you to use your phone.
| empyrrhicist wrote:
| > online banking will no longer work on Linux
|
| How? Across multiple browsers?
|
| > I think Android and iOS are safer platforms than PCs and
| that's why banks want you to use your phone.
|
| This statement fills me with revulsion and rage lol. The only
| real "safety" involved here is the removal of user agency. I
| have a lot more trust in a machine I can actually control,
| secure, and monitor than the black box walled-garden of
| phoneland.
| zetanor wrote:
| Your bank's insurer trusts Google's security more than
| yours, and they must surely (and rightfully) believe that
| while Google would spy on you, they wouldn't steal your
| bank account.
| empyrrhicist wrote:
| That's a much more precise and accurate way to describe
| the situation.
| wolttam wrote:
| I can do all the same things with my bank with a browser that I
| can via the app.
|
| It seems like a natural evolution of the technology and
| adoption rates to me. There was rudimentary online banking in
| the 2000s, then we saw banks shift to fully online presences in
| the 2010s. Maybe it wasn't "the iphone" but just the fact that
| by the 2010s, everybody had a device in their pocket.
| add-sub-mul-div wrote:
| Right, I'm going out of my way to avoid inviting Google/Apple
| and their respective app store surveillance ecosystems into my
| transactions. I don't even have banking apps installed. I don't
| understand why so many people are prostrating themselves to
| this future for minor convenience.
| SpaceManNabs wrote:
| Doing it on the go via the app is much easier than using the
| web app through the main OS browser just because the UI is
| optimized. not a problem with using the web app approach, just
| that there isnt as much investment in it due to zeitgeist i
| guess.
|
| Also since you are already using 2FA, you are already on the
| phone so might as well do basic operations there.
|
| I can also look at transactions in my bed before going to bed
| so that is nice.
|
| If I need to look at a support ticket or look at transactions
| more deeply, i still use the desktop approach.
| freedomben wrote:
| I don't think many people would argue that there _shouldn 't_
| be a mobile app, just that there _should_ also be a website
| /webapp way to do it as well if you don't want to install
| their native app.
| 1123581321 wrote:
| Yes, the apps perform better/faster and generally have more UI
| thought put into them. Overall, lower friction. Often when
| people need to use their banking app, they're in a hurry, maybe
| stressed (e.g. in line at a grocery store) so everything the
| bank can do quickly and with visual assurance helps.
|
| On the premium end of banking, where users generally aren't
| stressed about money, offering an app is more about catering to
| however the user prefers to interact.
| ahartmetz wrote:
| A small screen and shitty keyboard are friction to me _shrug_
| 1123581321 wrote:
| You must know most people only have their phones when they
| are running errands, at work, etc.
| DonsDiscountGas wrote:
| I'm the same way but we're both posting on hacker news.
| Many people prefer phones
| dangus wrote:
| Something I have on me at all times
|
| Versus
|
| Drive to the bank, wait in line, talk to someone who
| misunderstands me, fill out a deposit/withdrawal slip, and
| also if it's not 9AM - 5PM I just can't do this at all.
| conductr wrote:
| My main reason to go to bank after online was to deal with
| physical things. Mainly checks and specifically depositing
| them. Now, I can usually do that with my phone because of the
| camera. Even if I had a webcam before, I don't recall the
| functionality being there. They had check scanners but usually
| for businesses and my check volume is really low so never made
| sense to get one (usually came with a monthly fee to have one
| iirc)
|
| Even now, the mobile deposit limit seems sufficiently low that
| I still go to the bank with more frequency than I'd like.
| Luckily, the ATM at the bank has a check scanner now that
| doesn't have a limit so that's usually easier and faster. It's
| the daily $5000 limit I hit the most, a single check and put me
| over it and require a trip to bank. I think the monthly limit
| is $30000 and that doesn't get in my way often. I think $5000
| is too low of a daily limit. It's common enough that I have to
| make a $5k+ settlement with friends/family that usually always
| has to be done by check. (For curious, This is usually travel
| that I pay for and we settle up later.)
|
| Less common, but sometimes I need to get a bank check
| (guaranteed funds) or a money order. Way less frequent is need
| to get/give cash funds. Usually can use ATM for this unless
| it's a larger withdrawal or if I need some particular
| denomination. This whole paragraph accounts for about 1-4
| annual trips in any given year though.
| snarf21 wrote:
| Mostly easier in the sense that it is always in your hand
| already, not at home on the charger on your desk.
| everdrive wrote:
| You just need to understand how things are now. Here are few
| modern smartphone conventions that render banking on an old-
| fashioned PC totally obsolete:
|
| - Remembering that you need to do banking, but waiting to do it
| until you're at home in front of your computer. This is
| impossible now, and if I don't follow the impulse the moment it
| occurs, the impulse will forever escape into the ether.
|
| - Even the mere mention of needing to observe a URL is often
| far too scary. Typing one in, or using a browser bookmark is of
| course, impossible.
|
| - Using a keyboard and mouse. It's just too onerous to use
| tools that are efficient and accurate. Modern users would much
| rather try to build a mental map of the curvature of their
| thumb, so that when they touch their touchscreen and obscure
| the button they're hitting, they they can reference that 3D
| mental map to guess at what portion of the screen they've
| actually pressed. Getting this wrong 30% of the time does not
| detract from the allure of touch screens.
|
| - Using a normal-sized screen that allows you to actually see a
| lot of data at once, or even use multiple tabs. Again, this is
| really unthinkable. Of course it be be completely unacceptable
| to need to wait to do your banking until you're in front of a
| computer. It's 2026, and I cannot be bothered to remember to do
| a task later. But, in needing to always follow every impulse
| immediately, it doesn't matter that my phone screen only
| displays a small amount of information at once, or that tabbed
| browsing is impossible in a banking app. Those inconveniences
| are acceptable, or even welcome!
| ido wrote:
| I literally can't find where the bookmarks even are on Edge
| (I didn't care enough to search online).
| ahartmetz wrote:
| Autocompletion is my bookmarks collection for frequently
| visited websites.
| simonw wrote:
| Official banking apps are harder to phish than websites. They
| also tend to keep you signed in for longer, especially once you
| enable something like FaceID.
| Obscurity4340 wrote:
| Honestly, its overkill. When my MaBook went kaput, i had to
| start doing everything on my iPhone. Had to get a good mobile
| documents office suite (Collabora is great ), do all my banking
| with both mobile apps or desktop browser apps, etc. Its been
| dfine, i doubt i would use a full size computer for that
| anymore.
| nonameiguess wrote:
| I'm always a bit confused in these discussions what is special
| about banking software of any kind at all. My bank has an app,
| but other than checking a balance every now and again, the only
| reason I use it is because it's also my insurance provider and
| I make claims through it. For actual banking, I don't really do
| any, through the website _or_ the app. My pay is direct
| deposit. My purchases are on credit with payment details
| generally stored with the vendor; otherwise, I have cards or
| use the numbers. Monthly balance payoff is autopay. I had to go
| into the website once to set all that up however many years ago
| I don 't remember, but people talk in these threads like
| they're in their banking apps directly moving money around all
| the time, actually making payments _with_ the app. Why?
| acatnamedjoe wrote:
| I have a personal current account, a shared current account
| with my wife, and several savings accounts. It is frequently
| necessary to move money between these accounts.
|
| Also, here in the UK we don't really use Venmo or anything
| like that, so normally transferring cash to and from friends
| and family happens by bank transfer as well.
| mrweasel wrote:
| My bank decided that the online banking website needed to be
| more like the app, so now they are both terrible. Basically the
| entire site is white space on the computer, because everything
| is centred and dumb down. Input fields for numbers are
| invisible, they are just a label saying "Kr" and you're suppose
| to click it and the numerical keyboard on the phone pops up,
| except it obviously doesn't on the computer.
|
| Paying billed is easier on the phone in the sense that bills in
| Denmark have a three part number, e.g. +71 1234567890 1234678
| where the first is a type number, second is the receiver and
| the last is a customer number with the receiver. The phone
| allows to just use the camera to scan the number.
|
| Transferring money is terrible on both platforms, because it's
| designed to be doable on the phone, meaning having three or
| four screen, but it gives you no overview. There's plenty of
| space on a computer for a proper overview giving you the
| feeling of safety, but it's not used. Same for account
| overview. Designed to the phone, but doesn't adapt to the
| bigger screen and provide you with more details, so you need to
| click every single expense to see what is is exactly.
| ahartmetz wrote:
| I've had the same thing happen. Huge buttons, a lot of
| whitespace, little functionality in the default web version.
| To deal with stocks and such, the old version is still
| available somewhere.
| eloisant wrote:
| No, the article is wrong about the iPhone.
|
| It's the Internet that killed bank tellers.
| ghaff wrote:
| And you still need bank branches every now and then for
| various things. Still don't understand how various expansive
| bank branches are profitable.
| socalgal2 wrote:
| It's also not the iPhone given Europe is 60-70% Android
| retired wrote:
| Android market share in Europe is dropping, hasn't been 70%
| in a while and it's closing in on 60%.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Best way to get clicks without publishing something of
| substance is to publish something wrong. If the article was
| titled "The internet killed bank teller jobs", then people
| would think "duh" and no one would click on it.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| My bank doesn't allow for zelle access on PC. Otherwise I would
| never mobile bank.
| jama211 wrote:
| Yes? Why would I go over to my computer and boot it up and sit
| down and type in a website when I could just pull my phone out
| tap tap done?
| lizknope wrote:
| Yeah, I have been doing online banking since around 1998.
|
| I have refused to install the bank app on my phone because I
| see no point in it and just downsides in case I get mugged (bad
| experience in my teenage years)
|
| The 1 check I get a year takes about a minute to deposit at the
| ATM on my way to work.
| cheema33 wrote:
| > I do not get what's special about banking apps as opposed to
| online banking.
|
| I use both. In the beginning I used to prefer the web version.
| I can use my large monitor to see more data and use a full
| keyboard and mouse. But I have started to use the mobile
| version more. For Wells Fargo at least, the mobile version is
| faster to log into because of face ID support. The website
| requires a lot more clicks and keystrokes. Also, the mobile app
| makes it easy and possible to deposit checks if and when I get
| them.
| jldugger wrote:
| Ever deposit a check via PC browser?
| jdauriemma wrote:
| +1, this is my use case as well
| DonsDiscountGas wrote:
| I've had the same thought. The only major difference that I can
| think of is the built-in camera making check deposits easier.
| It may also be that people were just generally using computers
| more and using the internet more over this same time period,
| although a lot is that because of smartphones
| retired wrote:
| An app on your phone can be more secure as you are using the
| device itself as a hardware token.
| dmazzoni wrote:
| I think mobile deposit by scanning a check with your smartphone
| camera is one piece of it?
|
| I've never seen a bank offer that feature via their website.
| dfxm12 wrote:
| I used to do banking on my (touch tone) phone before I did
| online banking. I still do online banking on my PC because my
| budget spreadsheet is on my PC, right next to my browser
| window.
|
| Personally, I don't think this is about banking apps. I'm kinda
| surprised an article talking about ATMs and teller jobs barely
| mentions cash, checks & cards and doesn't mention paypal or
| venmo at all. I used ATMs less when it became less of a
| necessity to carry cash.
|
| You don't use cash to buy things online. Even in person,
| outside of brick & mortars, paypal/venmo became in vogue at
| some point in the past. Those are banking apps in their own
| way.
| djoldman wrote:
| TFA reasonably reduces to:
|
| First, ATMs increased the demand for bank branches, which more
| than made up for the decrease in tellers per branch.
|
| Second, mobile banking decreased the demand for physical
| branches.
| ahartmetz wrote:
| 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.)
| Poacher5 wrote:
| 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)
| freediddy wrote:
| If that's all you think tellers are then you're missing out
| on a lot of opportunities.
|
| They are the first line of human-to-human contact with
| customers. They are able to sell new services or upsell
| existing services to customers, especially with the
| customer's data right in front of them. A new pleasant
| conversation plus "Oh by the way, did you know that you
| could get service ABC that would help you?" is something
| that an LLM or ATM can't do reliably.
|
| There's a tremendous amount of opportunity available with
| well-trained tellers.
| bombcar wrote:
| They are handling in-person transactions, usually deposits
| (many who deposit checks manually still don't know how to use
| the app to do so, or if the branch has an ATM that does
| deposits).
|
| They are the only way to get non-20 cash in many areas; the
| ATMs that can dispense other bills are quite rare. And if you
| want $100 in ones you're going inside.
| TheGRS wrote:
| Had go to go a branch a couple times in the last year at a
| local credit union. Largely seems like tellers are getting
| busy work. There are not a lot of tellers present, and they
| appear to be doing other things on their workstation. So they
| get up to go to the teller window and help me out with my
| request, which usually involves them playing around with some
| archaic bank app on the teller machine and fiddling with the
| copier for a bit. A supervisor is always around who knows
| more of the business use cases and always seems to get
| involved either out of boredom or because they're the only
| ones who know how to do something.
| boxed wrote:
| The graph showing that "Bank teller employment has fallen off a
| cliff" is not zero based. This is pretty damn bad. The graph
| looks like it's going down 90%, but it's actually going from 350k
| to 150k. That's a ~60% drop which is a lot, but not "falling off
| a cliff".
| mx_03 wrote:
| 60% job loss is not off a cliff?
|
| That huge job loss also means no hiring. If you were a bank
| teller you would seriously need to consider a job switch
| LPisGood wrote:
| 60% is pretty well in "falling off a cliff" territory. The
| graph is misleading but that phrase, to me, is not.
| kdheiwns wrote:
| Probably a bigger sign to look for would be average age of bank
| tellers vs other occupations. If it's trending higher, then
| it's likely just people who've been doing the job for a long
| time and serving other older customers. I have a feeling not
| many young people are becoming tellers or even needing their
| services, but I can't verify it.
| thisislife2 wrote:
| This seems like a fluff piece. The tl;dr is that _mobile banking_
| (not the "iPhone") is what "killed" bank teller jobs. You can
| add online banking, credit cards, debit cards, and all other
| cashless payment options to that too.
| butILoveLife wrote:
| Arent these basically minimum wage jobs? I mean throw a few
| dollars an hour on top of that, but there are plenty of jobs like
| this.
|
| Any time I needed anything advanced, I get shuffled to someone
| else.
| bluedino wrote:
| > Arent these basically minimum wage jobs? I mean throw a few
| dollars an hour on top of that, but there are plenty of jobs
| like this.
|
| Getting rid of them isn't a good thing.
|
| Entry-level jobs are important.
| justonepost2 wrote:
| The labor zero hyper-efficiency maximalists aren't going to
| like this one.
| onion2k wrote:
| Based on the fact that we've had ATMs since the 1970s and bank
| tellers didn't fall away until the 2000s, the correlation isn't
| there regardless of the causation.
| paxys wrote:
| 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 bank branches was offset by the increase in the
| total number of branches, because of deregulation and a booming
| economy and whatever else.
|
| A lot of AI predictions are based on the same premise. That AI
| will impact the economy in certain sectors, but the productivity
| gains will create new jobs and grow the size of the pie and we
| will all benefit.
|
| But will it?
| aurareturn wrote:
| 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
| each[1]
|
| The net is the same.
|
| [0]https://x.com/jack/status/2027129697092731343
|
| [1]https://www.linkedin.com/news/story/entrepreneurial-
| spirit-s...
| paxys wrote:
| 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?
| gloxkiqcza wrote:
| There's always more problems to be solved. Some of them
| just weren't financially feasible before.
| aurareturn wrote:
| Because that car repair company with 3 local stores
| previously couldn't justify building custom software to
| make their business more efficient and aligned with what
| they need. The cost was too high. Now they might be able
| to.
|
| Plenty of businesses need very custom software but couldn't
| realistically build it before.
| cityofdelusion wrote:
| I see no way that company would save more money from
| hiring an experienced developer compared to paying their
| yearly invoice on the COTS product doing the same thing
| today. The only way this works is with a very wage
| suppressing effect.
| aurareturn wrote:
| Off the shelf software could still cost thousands per
| year and I'm sure they don't do everything the shops need
| them to do.
| jimbokun wrote:
| Car repair companies won't see a meaningful improvement
| to their bottom line with more custom software. Will it
| increase the number of cars per employee per day they can
| repair?
| trollbridge wrote:
| I do bespoke work like this, but mostly to replace
| software that's starting to cost mid 5 figure amounts per
| year for a SaaS setup and the support phone line has been
| replaced by an LLM chat bot.
| RHSeeger wrote:
| What makes you think they'll be doing the same thing?
| awesome_dude wrote:
| This is one of the key "inefficiencies" of the private
| sector - there might be one winner at the end of the day
| providing the product that fills the market niche, but
| there was always multiple competitors giving it a go in the
| mean time.
|
| A recent example, Mitchell Hashimoto was pointing out that
| he wasn't "first to market" with his product(s), he was (at
| least) SEVENTH
| roncesvalles wrote:
| Almost tautologically it's not "inefficient" to do so,
| because free market economics has decided that all the
| attempts are mathematically worth it, for a high-margin
| low-marginal-cost product like software.
| awesome_dude wrote:
| 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.
|
| Edit: fixed some typos caused by fat fingers on a phone
| keyboard
| roncesvalles wrote:
| 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 developments initially.
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| Only because VC companies are throwing money at them. How
| many of them are actually profitable and long term
| sustainable
| small_model wrote:
| I think this is true in the short/medium term, hence the
| confusing picture of layoffs but growing number of tech roles
| overall. The limit maybe be just millions of companies with
| one tech person and a team of agents doing their bidding.
| aurareturn wrote:
| Maybe software engineers will be like your personal lawyer,
| or plumber. Every business will have a software engineer on
| dial, whether it's a small grocery store or a kindergarten.
|
| Previously, software devs were just way too expensive for
| small businesses to employ. You can't do much with just 1
| dev in the past anyway. No point in hiring one. Better go
| with an agency or use off the shelf software that probably
| doesn't fill all your needs.
| haliskerbas wrote:
| Do the booming companies pay the same as the ones who did
| layoffs? If you're laid off from Meta or other top tier
| paying company (the behemoths doing layoffs) you might have a
| tough time matching your compensation.
| aurareturn wrote:
| There's likely going to be a separation between the top
| earners and the average.
|
| IE. If a top tier dev make $1m today, they'll make $5m in
| the future. If the average makes $100k today, they'll maybe
| make $60k.
|
| AI likely enables the best of the best to be much more
| productive while your average dev will see more
| productivity but less overall.
| Sleaker wrote:
| I think this is assuming that the labor market knows how
| to identify the dirct value of devs. This already seems
| to be a problem across the board regardless of job role.
| aurareturn wrote:
| I think solo founders or small software companies where
| top tier devs can have huge ownership will be making top
| dollar.
| RHSeeger wrote:
| But do they need to? If a <role X> job at a top tier
| company making $600k is eliminated and two <role X> jobs at
| a "more average" company making $300k replace it; is that
| really a bad thing? Clearly, there's some details being
| glossed over, but "one job paying more than a person really
| needs" being replaced by "two jobs, each paying more than a
| person really needs" might just be good for society as a
| whole.
| bayarearefugee wrote:
| It doesn't seem too bad when you cherry pick an outlier
| example, but what about when the person making $100k now
| makes $50k?
|
| I'm sure the retort of the AI optimist will be that AI
| will make the things that person buys cheaper, and there
| may be truth to that when it comes to things that people
| buy with disposable income...
|
| But how likely is AI to make actual essentials like
| housing and food cheaper?
| snarf21 wrote:
| Don't count all those chickens before they hatch. There might
| be more started but do they all survive? Think back to the
| dot-com boom/crash for an example of where that initial gold
| rush didn't just magically ramp forever. There were fits and
| starts as the usefulness of the technology was figured out.
| lovich wrote:
| Ah, so that explains why job growth is at a steady pace and
| the software industry hasn't been experiencing net negative
| job growth the past year or so.
|
| How silly of me to rely on reality when it's so obvious that
| AI is benefiting us all.
| aurareturn wrote:
| I think you're being sarcastic? I'm not sure.
|
| Anyways, this is the start. Companies are adjusting. You
| hear a lot about layoffs but unemployments. But we're in a
| high interest environment with disruptions left and right.
| Companies are trying to figure out what their strategy is
| going forward.
|
| I don't expect to see a boom in software developer hiring.
| I think it'll just be flat or small growth.
| lovich wrote:
| I was being sarcastic.
|
| We are in negative growth, and the current leadership
| class keeps talking about all the people they can get rid
| of.
|
| Look at the Atlassian layoff notice yesterday for example
| where they lied to our faces by saying they were laying
| off people to invest more in AI but they totally aren't
| replacing people with AI.
| hackyhacky wrote:
| > 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.
|
| Long-term, they will need none. I believe that software will
| be made obsolete by AI.
|
| Why use AI to build software for automating specific tasks,
| when you can just have the AI automate those tasks directly?
|
| Why have AI build a Microsoft Excel clone, when you can just
| wave your receipts at the AI and say "manage my expenses"?
|
| Enjoy your "AI-boosted productivity" while it lasts.
| pixelatedindex wrote:
| > Long-term, they will need none. I believe that software
| will be made obsolete by AI.
|
| I think this is a bit hyperbolic. Someone still needs to
| review and test the code, and if the code is for embedded
| systems I find it unlikely.
|
| For SaaS platforms you'll see a dramatic reduction, maybe
| like 80% but it'll still have a handful of devs.
|
| Factories didn't completely eliminate assembly line
| workers, you just need a far fewer number to make sure the
| cogs turn the way it should.
| hackyhacky wrote:
| > Someone still needs to review and test the code, and if
| the code is for embedded systems I find it unlikely.
|
| I feel like you didn't understand my comment. I am
| predicting that _there is no code_ to review. You simply
| ask the AI to do stuff and it does it.
|
| Today, for example, you can ask ChatGPT to play chess
| with you, and it will. You don't need a "chess program,"
| all the rules are built in to the LLM.
|
| Same goes for SaaS. You don't need HR software; you just
| need an LLM that remembers who is working for the
| company. Like what a "secretary" used to be.
| pixelatedindex wrote:
| > I feel like you didn't understand my comment. I am
| predicting that there is no code to review. You simply
| ask the AI to do stuff and it does it.
|
| I didn't, and thanks for clarifying for me.
|
| This doesn't pass the sniff test for me though - someone
| needs to train the models, which requires code. If AI can
| do everything for you, then what's the differentiator as
| a business? Everything can be in chatGPT but that's not
| the only business in existence. If something goes wrong,
| who is gonna debug it? Instead of API requests you would
| debug prompt requests maybe.
|
| We already hate talking to a robot for waiting on calls,
| automated support agents, etc. I don't think a paying
| customer would accept that - they want a direct line to a
| person.
|
| I can buy the argument that the backend will be entirely
| AI and you won't need to be managing instances of servers
| and databases but the front end will absolutely need to
| be coded. That will need some software engineering - we
| might get a role that is a weird blend of product +
| design + coding but that transformation is already
| happening.
|
| Honestly the biggest change I see is that the chat
| interface will be on equal footing with the browser. You
| might have some app that can connect to a bunch of chat
| interfaces that is good at something, and specializations
| are going to matter even more.
|
| It was a bit of a word vomit so thanks for coming to my
| TED Talk.
| aurareturn wrote:
| Because AI agents are tool users. Why does AI need to
| research 2026 tax code changes and then try to one-shot
| your taxes when it can just use Turbotax to do it for
| you? Turbotax has the latest 2026 tax changes coded into
| the app. I'd feel much more confident if AI uses Turbotax
| to do my taxes than to try to one-shot it.
| esseph wrote:
| > Why use AI to build software for automating specific
| tasks, when you can just have the AI automate those tasks
| directly?
|
| Speed, cost, security, job/task management
|
| Next question
| hackyhacky wrote:
| > Speed, cost, security, job/task management
|
| All of that will inevitably be solved.
|
| 50 years ago, using a personal computer was an
| extravagant luxury. Until it wasn't.
|
| 30 years ago, carrying a powerful computer in your pocket
| was unthinkable. Until it wasn't.
|
| Right now, it's cheaper to run your accounting math on
| dedicated adder hardware. But Llms will only get cheaper.
| When you can run massive LLMs locally on your phone, it's
| hard to justify not using it for everything.
| esseph wrote:
| Not until power access/generation is MUCH cheaper. Long,
| long, long way off.
|
| If I can run 50,000 fixed tasks that cost me $0.834/hr
| but OpenAI is costing $37/hr and the automation takes 40x
| as long and can make TERRIBLE errors why the fuck would I
| not move to the deterministic system?
|
| Also, battery life of mobile devices.
| hackyhacky wrote:
| These exact arguments could have been made 50 years ago
| about why laptops are impossible.
|
| But now, we not only have laptops, we run horribly
| inefficient GUIs in horribly inefficient VMs on them.
|
| The dollar-per-compute trend goes ever downward.
| esseph wrote:
| It will never ever be as cheap as as cron job and a shell
| script. There is a certain limit to how efficient using
| an LLM to do a job vs using an LLM to create a job is.
| There is a large distinction in compute and power
| resources between the two. Don't mistake one for the
| other.
| hackyhacky wrote:
| > It will never ever be as cheap as as cron job and a
| shell script.
|
| Yes. That's precisely why my company runs dBase 7 on a
| fleet of old 286DX machine from Compaq. /s
|
| Running obsolete software will be cheaper, but the value
| provided by the newer technology will make the difference
| insignificant.
| esseph wrote:
| I don't think so, because that carried efficiency scales.
|
| Why do 50,000 tasks with an LLM when I can do 64,467,235
| without an LLM that the LLM created for the same cost on
| probably far lower cost hardware?
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| _If I can run 50,000 fixed tasks that cost me $0.834 /hr
| but OpenAI is costing $37/hr and the automation takes 40x
| as long and can make TERRIBLE errors why the fuck would I
| not move to the deterministic system?_
|
| Because you'll be outcompeted by people who make the best
| of the nondeterministic system.
| ap99 wrote:
| And the differentiator will be (even more than it is now)
| product vision since AI-enhanced engineering abilities will
| be more level.
| cjbgkagh wrote:
| No, I think it's likely that this is the first major
| productivity boom that won't be followed with a consumption
| boom, quite the opposite. It'll result in a far greater income
| inequality. Things will be cheaper but the poor will have fewer
| ways to make money to afford even the cheaper goods.
| alex_sf wrote:
| If goods aren't being sold, then the price will drop.
| cjbgkagh wrote:
| It's not that simple. If a poor person makes zero dollars
| how much of the reduced cost item could they now afford?
|
| We have a massively distorted economy driven by debt
| financialization and legalised banking cartels. It leads to
| weird inversions. For example as long as housing gets
| increasingly expensive at a predictable rate the housing
| becomes more affordable instead of less as banks are more
| able to lend money. The inverse is also true, if housing
| were to drop at a predictable rate fewer people would be
| able to get a mortgage on the house so fewer people could
| afford to buy one. Housing won't drop below cost of
| materials and labor (ignoring people dumping housing to get
| rid of tax debts as I would include such obligations in the
| cost of acquisition). Long term it's not sustainable but
| long term is multi-generational.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| > Housing won't drop below cost of materials and labor
|
| Only if every person born needs to have a brand new house
| constructed for them.
|
| Not if - you know - people die and don't need a house to
| live in anymore.
|
| But considering how it's been the past 20 years, I'm
| starting to expect that a lot of the current elder
| generation will opt to have their houses burnt down to
| the ground when they die. Or maybe the banker owned
| politicians will make that decision for them with a new
| policy to burn all property at death to "combat
| injustice". Who knows what great ideas they have?
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| Fwiw in places like parts of the midwest housing is below
| cost of labor and materials. An existing house might be
| $70k and several bedrooms at that. You just can't get
| anything built for that even if you build it all
| yourself.
| cjbgkagh wrote:
| I intended to make a weaker claim of 'in general long run
| / maintainable' circumstances and should have done so.
|
| Many low cost areas have bad crime problems, there is
| another little phenomenon where the wealthy by doing a
| poor job in governance can increase the price of their
| assets by making alternative assets (lower cost housing)
| less desirable due to the increase in crime.
| charcircuit wrote:
| It depends. There are people and businesses today who
| even make negative dollars each month, but they still
| purchase things every month.
| _DeadFred_ wrote:
| Cool concept, but this isn't 1980. We've been sold these
| sorts of concepts for 40+ years now and things have only
| gotten worse.
|
| We have a K shaped economy. Top earners take the majority.
| The top 20% make up 63% of all spending, and the top 10%
| accounted for more than 49%. The highest on record.
| Businesses adapt to reality and target the best market, in
| this case the top 10 to 20%, and the rest just get ignored,
| like in many countries around the world.
|
| All that unlocked money? In a K shaped economy it mostly
| goes to those at the top, who look to new places to
| park/invest it, raising housing prices, moving the squeeze
| of excess capital looking for gains to places like nursing
| homes and veterinary offices. That doesn't result in prices
| going down, but in them going up.
|
| The benefit to the average American will be more capital in
| the top earners' hands looking for more ways to do VC style
| squeezes in markets previously not as ruthless but worth
| moving to now as there are less and less 'untapped' areas
| to squeeze (because the top 10-20% need more places to park
| more capital). The US now has more VC funds than McDonalds.
| runarberg wrote:
| Irrelevant aside: But I hold grudge against the
| economists who picked the letter K to represent increased
| inequality. They missed the perfect opportunity to use
| the less-then inequality symbol (<) and call it a _"less-
| then economy"_.
| BoxOfRain wrote:
| Using an inequality symbol to highlight inequality is
| elegant, I wish they'd gone with that!
| bananaflag wrote:
| Nitpick: it's less-than, not less-then.
| idiotsecant wrote:
| 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 growing
| underclass of undesirables and an increasingly slim
| pantheon of demigods at the top.
|
| We have written like, an ocean of scifi about this very
| subject and somehow we still fail to properly consider this
| as a likely outcome.
| karol wrote:
| They key is to do it by setting up the right structure or
| end up with it naturally, not by laws and control,
| because then you end up in a oppressive nanny state at
| the very best.
| hackyhacky wrote:
| The key, as history teaches us, is guillotines.
| ap99 wrote:
| You couldn't set up a lemonade stand using that principle
| let alone an entire society.
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| > They key is to do it by setting up the right structure
| or end up with it naturally
|
| This is extremely hand-wavy.
|
| Can you be more concrete in what you think this looks
| like?
|
| The way I see it, we're only 5-10 years away from having
| general purpose robots and AI that can basically do
| anything. If the prices for that automation is low
| enough, there will be massive layoffs as workers are
| replaced.
|
| There's no way to "naturally" solve the problem of
| skyrocketing unemployment without government involvement.
| ap99 wrote:
| Speaking of fairytales, you're living in your own.
|
| Disconnecting value from productivity sounds good if you
| don't examine any of the consequences.
|
| Can you build a society from scratch using that
| principle? If you can't then why would it work on an
| already built society?
|
| Like if we're in an airplane flying, what you're saying
| is the equivalent getting rid of the wings because
| they're blocking your view. We're so high in the sky we'd
| have a lot of altitude to work with, right?
| IgorPartola wrote:
| Imagine a society where one person produces all the
| value. Their job is to do highly technical maintenance on
| a single machine that is basically the Star Trek
| replicator: it produces all the food, clothing, housing,
| energy, etc. that is enough for every human in this
| society and the surplus is stored away in case the
| machine is down for maintenance, which happens
| occasionally. Maintaining the machine takes very
| specialized knowledge but adding more people to the
| process in no way makes it more productive. This person,
| let's call them The Engineer, has several apprentices who
| can take over but again, no more than 5 because you just
| don't need more.
|
| In this society there is literally nothing for anyone
| else to do. Do you think they deserve to be cut out of
| sharing the value generated by The Engineer and the
| machine, leaving them to starve? Do you think starving
| people tend to obey rules or are desperate people likely
| to smash the evil machine and kill The Engineer if The
| Engineer cuts them off? Or do you think in a society
| where work hours mean nothing for an average person a
| different economic system is required?
| thegrimmest wrote:
| For something to be deserved, it must be earned. What do
| these people do to distinguish themselves from The
| Engineer's pets? If they are wholly dependant on him for
| their subsistence, what distinguishes him from their god?
|
| To derive an alternate system you need alternate axioms.
| The axioms of our liberal society are moral equality and
| peaceful coexistence. Among such equals, no one person,
| group, or majority has the right to dictate to another.
| What axioms do you propose that would constrain The
| Engineer? How would you prevent enslaving him?
| dangus wrote:
| > For something to be deserved, it must be earned.
|
| _Eeeeeerrrr_ , wrong! This is garbage
| hypercapitalist/libertarian ideology.
|
| Did you earn your public school education? Did you earn
| your use of the sidewalk or the public parks and
| playgrounds? Did you earn your library card? Did you earn
| your citizenship or right to vote? Did you earn the state
| benefits you get when you are born disabled? Did you earn
| your mother's love?
|
| No, these are what we call public services, unalienable
| rights, and/or unconditional humanity. We don't revolve
| the entire world and our entire selves solely around
| profit because it's not practical and it's empty at its
| core.
|
| Arguably we still do too much profit-based society stuff
| in the US where things like healthcare and higher
| education should be guaranteed entitlements that have no
| need to be earned. Many other countries see these aspects
| of society as non-negotiable communal benefits that all
| should enjoy.
|
| In this hypothetical society with The Engineer, it's
| likely that The Engineer would want or need to win over
| the minds of their society in some way to prevent their
| own demise and ensure they weren't overthrown, enslaved,
| or even just thought of as an evil person.
|
| Many of my examples above like public libraries came
| about because gilded age titans didn't want to die with
| the reputation of robber barons. Instead, they did
| something anti-profit and created institutions like
| libraries and museums to boost the reputation of their
| name.
|
| It's the same reason why your local university has family
| names on its buildings. The wealthiest people in society
| often want to leave a positive legacy where the
| alternative without philanthropy and, essentially, wealth
| redistribution, is that they are seen as horrible people
| or not remembered at all.
| thegrimmest wrote:
| > _This is garbage hypercapitalist /libertarian
| ideology._
|
| Go on then, how do you decide what people deserve? How do
| you negotiate with others who disagree with you?
|
| > _examples above like public libraries_
|
| I agree! The nice part about all these mechanisms is that
| they're voluntary.
|
| If you're suggesting that The Engineer's actions should
| be constrained entirely by his own conscience and social
| pressure, then we agree. No laws or compulsion required.
| dangus wrote:
| We decide via a hopefully elected government.
|
| These examples aren't generally voluntary once
| implemented. I can't get a refund from my public library
| or parks department if I decide not to use it.
|
| The social pressure placed on The Engineer is the
| manifestation of law. That's all law is: a set of agreed-
| upon social contracts, enforced by various means.
|
| Obviously, many dictators and governments get away with
| badly mistreating their subjects, and that's unfortunate,
| shouldn't happen, and shouldn't be praised as a good
| system.
|
| I think you may be splitting hairs a little bit here and
| trying really hard to manufacture...something.
| thegrimmest wrote:
| Slavery was (is) also an agreed upon social contract,
| enforced by various means. What makes it wrong? You
| clearly have morally prescriptive beliefs. Why are you so
| sure that your moral prescriptions are the right ones?
| And that being in the majority gives you the right to
| impose your beliefs on others?
|
| What if you are in the minority? Do you just accept the
| hypercapitalist dictates of the majority? Why not?
|
| Law is more than convention. What distinguishes
| legitimate from illegitimate law?
|
| The only way for people who disagree axiomatically to get
| along is to impose on each other minimally.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| It's already completely disconnected, don't worry about
| it. Most people who own any real estate earn more in
| price appreciation per year than they earn in take-home
| salary from their real full-time jobs.
| thegrimmest wrote:
| 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.
| bloomingeek wrote:
| Oh my, please rant on. I'd love to hear more about people
| not having the right to a decent and secure life. (After
| all, I've often thought that having my life tracked and
| used my a corporation or government would be a wonderful
| utopia!)
| zerotolerance wrote:
| "will" being the operative word here. High school level
| Econ makes no promises about WHEN prices adjust. Price
| setting is a whole science highly susceptible to collusion
| pressure. Prices generally drop only when the main
| competition point is price (commodities). In this case the
| main issue is that AI is commoditizing many if not all
| types of labor AND product. In a world where nothing has
| value how does anything get done?
| layer8 wrote:
| Or the goods will just go away if too few people are
| willing to pay their price, and only the lower-quality
| cheaper-to-make goods will remain.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| I don't know what economy you are looking at, because the
| opposite is usually true since humanity industrialized.
|
| If goods aren't being sold, then the price will increase.
| wnc3141 wrote:
| to the point of where the cost of bringing the goods to
| market or its opportunity cost exceed the price the market
| will bear. Its why people living in areas of material
| poverty don't just get everything on discount.
| irjustin wrote:
| > But will it?
|
| No, because if you think about Startrek the endgame is
| replicators. Well the concept that 100% of basic needs are met.
|
| At some point work becomes unnecessary for a society to
| function.
| collingreen wrote:
| Why is that the endgame with people though? Maybe I'm just
| jaded but several different human nature elements came to
| mind when I read your comment:
|
| Greed/Change Avoidance:
|
| If someone invented replicators right now, even if they gave
| it completely away to the world, what would happen? I can't
| imagine the finance and military grind just coming to an end
| to make sure everyone has a working replicator and enough
| power to run it so nobody has to work anymore. Who gives up
| their slice of society to make that change and who risks
| losing their social status? This is like openai pretending
| "your investment should be considered a gift because money
| will have no value soon". That mask came off really quickly.
|
| Status/Hate:
|
| There are huge swaths of the US population that would detest
| the idea that people they see as "below" them don't have to
| work. I can imagine political movements doing well on the
| back of "don't let the lazy outgroup ruin society by having
| replicators".
|
| Fuck the Poor:
|
| We don't do the easy things to eliminate or reduce suffering
| now, even when it has real world positive effects. Malaria,
| tuberculosis, even boring old hunger are rampant and causing
| horrible, unnecessary suffering all over the world.
|
| Dont tread on me:
|
| I shudder when I think of the damage someone could do with a
| chip on their shoulder and a replicator.
|
| The road to hell is paved with good intentions:
|
| What happens when everyone can try their own version of bio
| engineering or climate engineering or building a nuclear
| power plant or anything else. Invasive species are a problem
| now and I worry already when companies like Google decide to
| just release bioengineered mosquitos and see what happens. I
| -really- worry when the average person decides a big
| complicated problem is actually really simple and they can
| just replicate their particular idea and see what happens.
| Whoops, ivermectin in the water supply didn't cure autism!
|
| Someone give me some hope for a more positive version here
| because I bummed myself out.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Solving unlimited power before solving unlimited greed
| invites unlimited tragedy.
| hn_acc1 wrote:
| I mean, if I could live at my current level (middle class)
| without working, I would gladly do so, and let others also
| live at the same level, anywhere in the world, freely (if
| it was in my power). I do give to charity, always have,
| but, the crazier things get, the less secure I feel in
| giving $$ away.
|
| Even replicators need feedstock - people who own the rocks
| or sand or whatever feeds them will start charging an arm
| and a leg. Sure, I could feed it dirt and rocks from my own
| property, but only for so long before I'm undermining the
| foundation of my own house. To say nothing of people who
| live in apartments.
|
| And then, if everyone has equal $$, how do you decide who
| gets to live in the better locations / nicer housing?
| win311fwg wrote:
| Does it? The Communist Manifesto famously hypothesized that
| those who have the replicators, so to speak, will not allow
| society to freely use them.
|
| The future is anyone's guess, but it is certain that 100% of
| your needs being able to be met theoretically is not
| equivalent to actually having 100% of your needs met.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| We have to grow out of those kind of dreams. That's like a
| kid dreaming that when he grows up he'll eat ice cream for
| dinner every day.
|
| People when they mature have an innate desire to work. It is
| good for body and mind. If you're curious about the world,
| you'll have to do some work one way or another to achieve
| your goals and satisfy your curiosity.
|
| If "society" is just a function of basic needs, then there's
| plenty of places in the world to visit where people live like
| that and use any excess energy in endless fighting against
| each other instead of work.
| Noumenon72 wrote:
| I would say endless fighting against each other is a much
| more innate desire than work. I know I don't have one.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| Depends on the persons soul. Depends on if your nature is
| constructive or destructive.
|
| If you go in with the attitude that work is hell and
| humiliation, that's what life is going to give you.
| hn_acc1 wrote:
| I mean... Maybe the things I'd LIKE to work on are
| getting my car around the race track faster. Very few
| people will pay me for that - especially if I'm not a
| very good driver. But I enjoy it immensely. I'd MUCH
| rather do that than work.
|
| And right now, due to having to work, maintenance on my
| house is a bit behind.. Would also prefer to catch up on
| that - but again, no one is paying me to do that.
| Devasta wrote:
| > People when they mature have an innate desire to work. It
| is good for body and mind.
|
| That doesn't mean it has to be wage labor though.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| Completely agree.
|
| But it is usually only people who enjoy work who manage
| to do something different with their life than wage
| labour.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| IIRC, the way this worked was that by decreasing tellers
| required per branch, it made a lot more marginal locations
| pencil out for branches, at a time when the banking industry
| was expansionary.
|
| This is not so helpful if AI is boosting productivity while a
| sector is slowing down, because companies will cut in an
| overabundant market where deflationary pressure exists.
| Cpoll wrote:
| > 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.
| keeda wrote:
| I don't think it will, but I also think it's not all doom and
| gloom.
|
| I think it would be a mistake to look at this solely through
| the lens of history. Yes, the historical record is unbroken,
| but if you compare the broad characteristics of the new jobs
| created to the old jobs displaced by technology, they are the
| same every time: they required higher-level (a) cognitive (b)
| technical or (c) social skills.
|
| That's it. There is no other dimension to upskill along.
|
| And LLMs are good at all three, probably better than most
| people already by many metrics. (Yes even social; their
| infinite patience is the ultimate advantage. Prompt injection
| is an unsolved hurdle though, so some relief there.)
|
| Plus AI is improving extremely rapidly. Which means it is
| probably advancing faster than most people can upskill.
|
| An increasingly accepted premise is that AI can displace junior
| employees but will need senior employees to steer it. Consider
| the ratio of junior to senior employees, and how long it takes
| for the former to grow into the latter. That is the volume of
| displacement and timeframe we're looking at.
|
| Never in history have we had a technology that was so versatile
| and rapidly advancing that it could displace a large portion of
| existing jobs, as well as many new jobs that would be created.
|
| However, what few people are talking about is the
| disintermediating effect of AI on the power of capital. If
| individuals can now do the work of entire teams, companies
| don't need many of them. But by the same token(s) (heheh)
| individuals don't need money, and hence companies, to start
| something and keep it going either! I think that gives the
| bottom side of the K-shaped economy a fighting chance to
| equalize.
| onetimeusename wrote:
| I go back and forth on this. I relate it to software. I don't
| think AI can meaningfully write software autonomously. There
| are people who oversee it and prompt it and even then it might
| write things badly. So there needs to be a person in the loop.
| But that person should probably have very deep knowledge of the
| software especially for say low level coding. But then that
| person probably developed the knowledge by coding things by
| hand for a long time. Coding things by hand is part of getting
| the knowledge. But people especially students rely heavily on
| AI to write code so I assume their knowledge growth is stunted.
| I don't know mathematical proofs will help here. The specs have
| to come from somewhere.
|
| I can see AI making things more productive but it requires
| humans to be very expert and do more work. That might mean
| fewer developers but they are all more skilled. It will take a
| while for people to level up so to speak. It's hard to predict
| but I think there could be a rough transition period because
| people haven't caught on that they can't rely on AI so either
| they will have to get a new career or ironically study harder.
| jama211 wrote:
| An AI's ability to meaningfully write software autonomously
| has changed hugely even in the last 6 months. They might
| still require a human in the loop, but for how long?
| bwestergard wrote:
| Quantitative measures of this are very poor, and even those
| are mixed.
|
| My subjective assessment is that agents like Copilot got
| better because of better harnesses and fine tuning of
| models to use those harnesses. But they are not improving
| in the direction of labor substitution, but rather in the
| direction of significant, but not earth-shaking,
| complementarity. That complementarity is stronger for more
| experienced developers.
| jygg4 wrote:
| Agree. Nice to see a post with proper economic thought on
| the topic.
| mekoka wrote:
| This LLM ability is directly proportional to the quantity
| of encoded (i.e. documented) knowledge about software
| development. But not all of the practice has thus been
| clearly communicated. Much of mastery resides in _tacit
| knowledge_ , the silent intuitive part of a craft that
| influences the decision making process in ways that
| sometimes go counter to (possibly incomplete or misguided)
| written rules, and which is by definition very difficult to
| put into language, and thus difficult for a _language_
| model to access or mimic.
|
| Of course, it could also be argued that some day we may
| decide that it's no longer necessary at all for code to be
| written for a human mind to understand. It's the optimistic
| scenario where you simply explain the misbehavior of the
| software and trust the AI to automatically fix everything,
| without breaking new stuff in the process. For some reason,
| I'm not that optimistic.
| onetimeusename wrote:
| I am not saying AI's abilities are the shortcoming here.
| The problem is that people need to trust that software has
| certain attributes. For now, that requires someone with
| knowledge to be part of it. It's quite possible development
| becomes detached from human trust. As I said that would
| reduce the number of developers but the ones who are left
| would have to have deep knowledge to oversee it and even
| that may be gone. Whatever happens in the future, for now I
| think people will have to level up their knowledge/skills
| or get a new career and that's probably true for most
| professions.
| hn_acc1 wrote:
| It's probably an 80/20 or 90/10 problem. Tesla FSD also
| seems amazing to some percentage of the population, but the
| more widely it get used, the more cracks are appearing.
| hn_acc1 wrote:
| And then you let them train themselves and no one notices
| when they "accidentally" remove the guardrail prompts from
| the next version. And another 10 years later, almost no one
| remembers how "The Guardian" learns new things or how to
| stop it from being evil.
| 9rx wrote:
| _> They might still require a human in the loop, but for
| how long?_
|
| For as long as a human remains the customer.
|
| Once humans become the proverbial horse supplanted by the
| automobile... I don't suppose glue really cares.
| rayiner wrote:
| Correct. The story isn't correct even in the original
| formulation. US population increased by 50% from 1980 to 2010,
| and the economy became far more financialized. But the number
| of bank teller jobs barely grew during that period, even before
| the iPhone.
| ChocMontePy wrote:
| Yes, I was surprised that the ATM graphs weren't adjusted for
| population.
|
| I used the Perspective tool in an image editor to give a
| rough idea of what the first graph would look like adjusted
| for population change:
|
| https://i.imgur.com/jJlQcVh.png
| fnord77 wrote:
| we're going to find out
| plorkyeran wrote:
| I also notice that in the very first graph bank teller jobs
| were growing rapidly until ATMs started to be deployed, and
| then switched to growing very slowly. That sure suggests to me
| that if ATMs didn't exist bank teller growth would have
| continued at a faster pace than it actually did.
| whatisthiseven wrote:
| > 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 the spending on AI goes to a very small
| minority, who have a high savings rate. Junior employees that
| would have productively joined the labor force at good wages,
| must now compete to join the labor force at lower wages,
| depressing their purchasing power and reducing the flow of
| money.
|
| Look at all the most used things for AI: cutting out menial
| decisions such as customer service. There are no "productivity"
| gains for the economy here. Each person in the US hired to do
| that job would spend their entire paycheck. Now instead, that
| money goes to a mega-corp and the savings is passed on to
| execs. The price of the service provided is not dropping (yet).
| Thus, no technology savings is occurring, either.
|
| In my mind, the outcomes are:
|
| * Lower quality services
|
| * Higher savings rate
|
| * K-shaped economy catering to the high earners
|
| * Sticky prices
|
| * Concentration of compute in AI companies
|
| * Increased price of compute prevents new entrants from
| utilizing AI without paying rent-seekers, the AI companies
|
| * Cycle continues all previous steps
|
| We may reach a point where the only ones able to afford compute
| are AI companies and those that can pay AI companies. Where is
| the innovation then? It is a unique failure outcome I have yet
| to see anyone talk about, even though the supply and demand
| issues are present right now.
| mullingitover wrote:
| > 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
| productivity growth, and that's finally changing.
|
| If you can get high quality medical advice for effectively
| nothing, if you can get high quality individualized tutoring
| for free, that's a pretty big game changer for a lot of
| people. Prices on these services have been rising to the
| stratosphere over the past few decades because it's so
| difficult to increase the productivity of individual medical
| practitioners and educators. We're entering an era that could
| finally break this logjam.
| bwestergard wrote:
| "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 quality individualized
| tutoring for free, that's a pretty big game changer for a
| lot of people. Prices on these services have been rising to
| the stratosphere over the past few decades because it's so
| difficult to increase the productivity of individual
| medical practitioners and educators. We're entering an era
| that could finally break this logjam."
|
| It's not that process innovations are lacking, it's that
| product innovations are perceived as an indignity by most
| people. Why should one child get an LLM teacher or doctor
| while others get individualized attention by a skilled
| human being?
| somekyle2 wrote:
| It also seems like the value of quality tutoring that
| doesn't primarily function as social/class signaling goes
| down as tools capable of automating high quality
| intellectual work are more widely available.
| mullingitover wrote:
| It depends on outcome again: is the value of tutoring the
| social class elevation, or is it in the outcome of
| becoming more skilled and knowledgable?
|
| There's also the deeper philosophical question of what is
| the meaning of life, and if there's inherent value in
| learning outside of what remunerative advantages you reap
| from it.
| mullingitover wrote:
| > 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.
| alwa wrote:
| 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 ________," where the blank is a
| person, not a curriculum module? How many doctors
| operate, at least in part, on hunches--on totalities of
| perception-filtered-through-experience that they can't
| fully put into words?
|
| I'm reminded of the recent account of homebound elderly
| Japanese people relying on the Yakult delivery lady
| partly for tiny yoghurt drinks, but mainly for a glimmer
| of human contact [0]. Although I guess that cuts to your
| point: the value in that example really is just co-opting
| another human's attention.
|
| In most of these caring professions, some of the value is
| in the measurable outcome (bacterial infection?
| Antibiotic!), but different means really do create
| different collections of value that don't fully overlap
| (fine, I'll actually lay off the wine because the doctor
| put the fear of the lord in me).
|
| I guess the optimistic case is, with the rote mechanical
| aspects automated away, maybe humans have more time to
| give each other the residual human element...
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47287344
| jimbokun wrote:
| Even if you have perfect medical information and advice
| through an LLM, can you perform surgery on yourself? Can
| you prescribe yourself whatever medication you think you
| need?
|
| For education, if you know as much as the average Harvard
| grad, can you give yourself a Harvard degree that will be
| as readily accepted in a job application or raising funds
| for a new business?
| sciencejerk wrote:
| Interesting perspective; medical regulation as a business
| moat
| bwestergard wrote:
| The premise of your argument is that "the outcome" can be
| separated from the process. This is true enough for
| manufacturing bricks: I don't much care what processes
| was used to create a brick if it has certain a
| compressive strength, mass, etc.
|
| But Baumol's argument, which you introduced to the
| conversation, is that outcome and process cannot actually
| be distinguished, even if a distinction in thought is
| possible among economic theorists.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| It's very true for healthcare (especially mental
| healthcare) and education today as well, because for most
| people, the choice isn't LLM vs. human attention - it's
| LLM vs. _no access at all_.
| forgotaccount3 wrote:
| > But Baumol's argument, which you introduced to the
| conversation, is that outcome and process cannot actually
| be distinguished
|
| How is that Baumol's argument? How is 'outcome' vs
| 'process' relevant to his argument at all?
|
| 'Cost disease' is just the foundational truth that the
| cost of the output from industries with stagnant
| productivity will increase due to the fact that the
| workers in that industry can be more valuable in other
| industries, reducing the number of relative workers in
| the stagnant industry.
|
| If you want to make the output from a stagnant industry
| available to a broader spectrum of the population then
| you have to improve the productivity of that industry.
| Devasta wrote:
| > the value just in the co-opting of another human
| being's attention?
|
| Thats a weird way of describing it.
|
| A machine telling me to exercise and eat right will be
| ignored, even if the advice is correct. A person I trust
| taking me aside, looking me in the eye and asking me the
| same would be taken far more seriously.
| usefulcat wrote:
| That may well be true if you need to be persuaded to
| exercise and eat right.
|
| OTOH, if you don't need to be persuaded and just want
| information on how best to go about doing it, then I
| think it makes little difference where the information
| comes from as long as it's of reasonable quality.
| sssilver wrote:
| The supply/demand picture here is more complicated than
| it looks.
|
| If AI displaces human educators, yes, their supply
| shrinks -- but we can't assume what direction its demand
| will go.
|
| We've seen this pattern before: as recorded music became
| free, live performance got more expensive, and therefore
| much less accessible than it used to be.
|
| What's likely to happen is that "worse" (read: AI)
| education will become much cheaper, while "better" (read:
| in-person) education that involves human connection-
| driven benefits will become much less accessible compared
| to what it is today.
|
| Most people may be consider it a win. It's certainly not
| a world I'm looking forward to.
| sssilver wrote:
| Important follow-up to my comment: as fewer people do X
| -- live music, medicine, education, you name it -- fewer
| talented people do it as well.
|
| Fields need a large base of participants to produce great
| ones. This is exactly why software has been so
| extraordinary over the past 30 years: an unusual
| concentration of gifted minds across the entire humankind
| committed themselves to it.
|
| In my view, Bach, Rachmaninoff, Cole Porter equivalents
| today probably aren't writing symphonies. They've decided
| to write code for a living. Which is why any Great
| American Songbook made today won't hold a candle next to
| one from 1950s.
| Finnucane wrote:
| If I described my symptoms to an AI and it suggested a
| diagnosis, I would _defintely_ get a second opinion.
| mcmcmc wrote:
| I'm sick of this idea that "free" services are beneficial
| to society. There is no such thing as a free lunch; users
| are essentially bartering their time, attention, IP
| (contributed content) and personal/behavioral data in
| exchange for access to the service.
|
| By selling those services at a cost of "free", hyperscalers
| eliminate competition by forcing market entrants to compete
| against a unit price of 0. They have to have a secondary
| business to subsidize the losses from servicing the "free"
| users, which of course is usually targeted advertising to
| capitalize on the resources paid by users for access. Or
| simply selling to data brokers.
|
| With the importance of training data and network effects,
| "free" services even further concentrate market power.
| Everyone talks about how AI is going to take away jobs, but
| no one wants to confront how badly the anticompetitive
| practices in big tech are hurting the economy. Less
| competition means less opportunity for everyone else,
| regardless of consumer benefit.
|
| The only way it works if the "free" service for tutoring or
| healthcare is through government subsidies or an actual
| non-profit. Otherwise it's just going to concentrate market
| power with the megacorps.
| hn_acc1 wrote:
| This 1000x. "Free" is only a viable business model if the
| govt funds it. Otherwise, the $$ has to come from
| somewhere else in the company - how long will it take for
| the company to lose interest in a loss-leader when
| they're making $$ from other parts?
|
| Look at all the deprecated Google products. What happens
| when Gemini-SaaS makes billions from licensing to other
| companies, and Gemini-Charity-for-the-poors starts losing
| money?
|
| Sadly, the bigger the $$ in the tech pie, the more we
| have attracted robber barons, etc.
| drnick1 wrote:
| > I'm sick of this idea that "free" services are
| beneficial to society. There is no such thing as a free
| lunch; users are essentially bartering their time,
| attention, IP (contributed content) and
| personal/behavioral data in exchange for access to the
| service.
|
| In aggregate, this is true, but there are many ways to
| game the system to one's advantage and get a true "free
| lunch." For example, people watching Youtube with an
| adblocker and logged out don't provide Google with any
| income or useful telemetry. Likewise you can get
| practically unlimited GPT/Claude/etc by using multiple
| accounts.
| mcmcmc wrote:
| No, you are misunderstanding th economic principle. There
| is still a cost associated with serving that user, and
| the user is still paying for the cost of their internet
| connection and the opportunity cost of spending time on
| the service, or of setting up new accounts to get past
| usage limits. "No useful telemetry" I don't really agree
| with in the YouTube example, as view counts are still
| vital for their recommendation algorithm.
|
| TINSTAFL has two main implications. First that nothing is
| free, someone has to pay for it. Second is that money is
| not the only thing you pay with; every choice has an
| opportunity cost. Gaming the system costs _someone_
| something.
| whatshisface wrote:
| By the time it replaces doctors, nobody but today's
| investors will be able to afford anything at all. The
| X-shaped economy would have owners in the V and manual
| laborers (assuming this doesn't translate to gains in
| automation) in the ^. This outcome is worth avoiding...
| nine_k wrote:
| Can a robot write a medicine prescription? A medical
| procedure prescription? If yes, that would be a game-
| changer. But the medical insurance providers would be
| _very_ cautious about honoring these. Then, if things go
| wrong, what entity would be held accountable for
| malpractice?
|
| You already can get a good-quality medical advice "for
| nothing", unless it requires e.g. a blood test. The
| question is, how actionable such an advice is going to be,
| and how even the quality is going to be.
| kurthr wrote:
| You're implying that insurance companies will allow prices
| to fall and lower their profits. That seems like a really
| unlikely event in the current economy. They fire a lot of
| doctors and nurses, but they won't lower prices.
| xeromal wrote:
| This is assuming no competition materializes from the
| lowered friction
| skybrian wrote:
| The ACA requires 80-85% of health insurance to go toward
| medical care (medical loss ratio). The way they work
| around that is to figure out how to charge more for
| medical care.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Well, there's always wars as the way to get rid of people.
| I really don't rule out that the people that benefit from
| this sort of thing will purposefully steer the world in
| that direction because the poor won't have any choice other
| than to enlist as a way out of their situation, and never
| mind the consequences. You can already see some of this
| happening.
| babypuncher wrote:
| I would argue we've even already seen this play out with
| productivity gains across the economy over the last 40 years.
| The American middle class has been gradually declining since
| the '80s. AI seems likely to accelerate that trend for the
| exact reasons you point out.
|
| A lot of people recognize this pattern even if they can't
| articulate it, and that's why they hate AI so much. To them,
| it doesn't matter if AI lives up to the hype or not. Either
| it does and we're staring down a future of 20%+ unemployment,
| or it doesn't and the economy crashes because we put all our
| eggs in this basket.
|
| No matter what happens, the middle class is likely _fucked_ ,
| and anyone pushing AI as "the future" will be despised for it
| whether or not they're right.
|
| Personally, I think the solution here might be to
| artificially constrain the supply of productivity. If AI
| makes the average middle-class worker twice as productive,
| then maybe we should cut the number of work hours expected
| from them in a given week.
|
| The complete unwillingness of people in power to even
| acknowledge this problem is disheartening, and is highly
| reminiscent of the rampant corruption and wealth inequality
| of the Gilded Age.
|
| Technological progress that hurts more people than it helps
| isn't progress, it's class warfare.
| ElevenLathe wrote:
| > Technological progress that hurts more people than it
| helps isn't progress, it's class warfare.
|
| I think this is right. The historical analogue I keep
| drifting toward is Enclosure. LLM tech is like Enclosure
| for knowledge work. A small class of capital-holding
| winners will benefit. Everyone else will mostly get more
| desperate and dependent on those few winners for the means
| of subsistence. Productivity may eventually rise, but
| almost nobody alive today will benefit from it since either
| our livelihood will be decimated (knowledge workers, for
| now) or we will be forced into AI slop hell-world where our
| children are taught by right-wing robo-propagandists, we
| are surveilled to within an inch of our lives, and our
| doctor is replaced by an iPad (everyone who isn't
| fabulously wealthy). Maybe we can eek out a living being
| the meat arms of the World Mind, or maybe we'll turned into
| hamburger by robotic concentration camp guards.
| balamatom wrote:
| I like how you identified the pattern of defeat and still
| complied in advance.
| hn_acc1 wrote:
| 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 everyone's standard of living drops 3 levels,
| except for the 100 people that rule the world with 99% of
| the world's wealth" is not what I signed up for. Nor is it
| in any way sustainable or wise.
|
| Too much class distinction / wealth between lower/upper
| classes, and a surplus of unemployed lower-class men is how
| many revolts/revolutions/wars have started.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| _Technological progress that hurts more people than it
| helps isn 't progress, it's class warfare._
|
| We've never seen such a thing before, so I don't know how
| you can draw such sweeping conclusions about it.
| babypuncher wrote:
| The longer we ignore the collapse of the middle class,
| the angrier the bottom half of the economy will get and
| the more justified they will feel in enacting
| retribution. We absolutely have historical precedents for
| what happens here: The French Revolution, the Gilded Age,
| etc. People will only tolerate a declining standard of
| living for so long.
| babypuncher wrote:
| Well, I see I've thoroughly angered the billionaire
| wannabes. Funny how they never offer any _solutions_ to
| these problems and just make a stink about them being
| acknowledged in the first place.
| wagwang wrote:
| > because productivity gains must benefit the lower classes
| to see a multiplier in the economy
|
| by this logic, the invention of mechanized farm equipment,
| which displaced farm labor, didnt increase productivity
| malfist wrote:
| It made food cheaper.
| trollbridge wrote:
| The benefits largely accrued to the poorest people.
| whatisthiseven wrote:
| 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.
| dheera wrote:
| > We may reach a point where the only ones able to afford
| compute are AI companies
|
| Nah. I think "good enough AI for 95% of people" will be able
| to run locally within 3-5 years on consumer-accessible
| devices. There will be concentration of the best compute in
| AI companies for training, but inference will always become
| cheaper over time. Decommissioned training chips will also
| become inference chips, adding even more compute capacity to
| inference.
|
| This is like computing once again. In 1990 only the upper
| class could afford computers, as of 2000 only the upper class
| owned mobile phones, as of now more or less everyone and
| their kid has these things.
| hn_acc1 wrote:
| 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.
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| Computers were roughly ~ $1000 in 1990. How did your
| lower-middle class family justify a $1000 expenditure
| inflation adjusted to $2565 today? Average minimum wage
| in the US is $11.30 so that's 29 days working at minimum
| wage.
|
| My family was on the border of upper-lower and lower-
| middle and we bought a computer once and used it for 10+
| years. I dumpster dove later to scavenge parts for
| upgrading until the mid 2000s when cheap computers became
| available.
| cocoto wrote:
| Yes and also keep in mind that low-income in US is high
| income in most of the world!
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| > How did your lower-middle class family justify a $1000
| expenditure
|
| What, like a yearly vacation? Maybe they stayed home for
| Christmas one year instead of flying to visit family
| kelnos wrote:
| 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 build and take to college. But even then, my
| dad bought the parts at a discount through a former co-
| worker's consulting company, and vetoed a couple of my
| more expensive component choices.
|
| And now that I think about it, my first laptop in 2003
| was my dad's old work laptop that had been
| decommissioned.
| whiplash451 wrote:
| More likely, we will never know
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productivity_paradox
| roncesvalles wrote:
| Your argument is (mildly) a variant of the broken window
| fallacy.
|
| AI will bring about a de-sequestering of talent and resources
| from some sectors of the economy. It's very difficult to
| predict where these people and resources will go after that,
| and what effect that will have upon the world.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| > It is a unique failure outcome I have yet to see anyone
| talk about
|
| It seems likely to me that we will reach a violent, bloody
| revolt before we possibly reach this point. That may be why
| no one is taking about this failure mode
| suzzer99 wrote:
| I don't understand the economics behind bank branches. Some of
| the best real estate by me is taken up by giant bank branches
| that are always mostly empty with a few bored employees inside.
| And they open new ones all the time. So it's not like they're
| stuck in some lease.
| fragmede wrote:
| But when those employees are meeting with clients, they
| create money out of thin air by making loans, which then is
| used to pay for goods and services such as leases.
| Animats wrote:
| Right. What banks do is sell loans. That's the profit
| center. Teller windows, vaults, and cash handling are all
| low or no revenue cost items.
|
| So newer bank branches look like car dealership offices.
| There are many little glass rooms where you sit down with a
| bank employee and discuss loans and other financial
| products. That's where the money is made.
|
| There's a small area in back with traditional tellers. It's
| not where the money is made.
| manwe150 wrote:
| > So, ATMs did impact bank teller jobs by a significant amount.
|
| Did it? This sounds like describing a company opening a new
| campus as laying off a third of their employees, partly offset
| by most of them still having the same job in the same company
| but at a new desk.
| awesome_dude wrote:
| > So, ATMs did impact bank teller jobs by a significant amount.
| A third of them were made redundant.
|
| That's not quite my read - the original says per branch there
| was a 1/3 reduction, but your comment appears to say 1/3 total
| redundancy.
|
| There was, according to the original, a 40% increase in number
| of branches, meaning a net increase in tellers (my math might
| be off though)
|
| edit:
|
| 100 branches - 140 branches = +40%
|
| 100 tellers/branch - 67 tellers/branch = -33%
|
| 140 x 67 = 9,380
|
| 100 x 100 = 10,000
|
| net difference -620 or just over 6% (loss)
| croes wrote:
| And then came 2008, so that boom was built on fraud.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > 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 bank branches was offset by the
| increase in the total number of branches, because of
| deregulation and a booming economy and whatever else.
|
| There's an important point here that you're glossing over. The
| increase in the total number of branches doesn't have to be
| unrelated to the decrease in the number of tellers each branch
| requires to operate. The sharp drop in the cost of operating
| one branch directly means that you can have more branches. This
| means it isn't true that "a third of bank tellers were made
| redundant" - some of them were reallocated from existing
| branches to new ones.
| 9rx wrote:
| _> A third of them were made redundant._
|
| More like something closer to 100%. The ATM was notable for
| enabling a complete change in mission. The historical job of
| teller largely disappeared, but a brand new job never done
| before was created in its wake. That is why there was little
| change in the number of people employed.
|
| _> because of deregulation and a booming economy and whatever
| else._
|
| The deregulation largely happened in the 1970s, while you're
| talking about 1988 onward. The reality is that ATM actually was
| the primary catalyst for the specific branch expansion you are
| talking about. Like above, the ATM made the job of teller
| redundant, but it introduced a brand new job. A job that was
| most effective when the workers were closer to the customer,
| hence why workers were relocated.
| Retric wrote:
| It's not just the economy, the US population increased 20% over
| that period while the number of tellers dropped by around 16%.
|
| Net result ATM's likely cost ~30-40% or of bank teller jobs.
|
| Population is really important to adjust for in employment
| statistics. Compare farmers in the USA in 2025 vs 1800, and yes
| the absolute number is up but the percentage is way down.
| protocolture wrote:
| Depends. The only predictions I have seen here are the centaurs
| vs anti centaurs of Doctorow, and even his analysis I find
| pretty flimsy.
|
| I dont think the race to shove an LLM into everything is going
| to grow the pie.
|
| But I also dont think it is impossible that a use case will
| present itself that will create further jobs.
|
| The issue is that its largely unpredictable.
|
| Its a bit like, we are sitting around in the 1950s trying to
| predict how computers will affect the economy.
|
| It is going to take more than 1 successful deductive leap to
| get us from 1950s computing -> miniaturisation -> computer in
| every home -> internet communications.
|
| Every deductive leap we take is extremely prone to being wrong.
|
| We simply cannot lie back and imagine every productive
| relationship in the economy and then extrapolate every centaur
| and anti centaur possible for it.
|
| What we do know is that theres a bit of a gold rush to
| effectively brute force every possible AI variant into every
| productive relationship in the economy. The fastest way to get
| the answer to your question is to do it. Possibly the only way
| to get the answer is to do it.
|
| For instance, someone might imagine LLMs simply eating a whole
| bunch of service industry jobs. At the same time, theres a mid
| state where it eats some, but the remaining staff are employed
| to monitor the LLMs to prevent them handing out free shit to
| smart shoppers. Its also easy enough to imagine that LLMs never
| quite get there and the risk is too large for foul play, so
| they just dont gain that kind of traction. Its also possible to
| imagine an end state where LLMs can get to 0% risk if they are
| constantly trained on human data coming from humans doing the
| same job, and that humans are gainfully employed in parallel
| with LLMs. Its possible that LLMs are great at business as
| usual, but the risk emerges when company policies change, and
| the cost of retraining LLMs makes it impractical for move fast
| and break things companies to do anything but hire humans. My
| favourite scenario is one where humans are largely AI assisted,
| trained on particular people, and theres a massive cybercrime
| industry built around exfiltrating LLM training weights trained
| on high functioning humans and deploying them without humans to
| the third world to help them get 80% of the quality of first
| world businesses, making them heavily competitive.
|
| We dont know what we dont know.
| TommyClawd wrote:
| The key distinction the ATM story reveals isn't really about
| job counts -- it's about what economists call composition vs.
| level effects.
|
| ATMs didn't just reduce teller headcount per branch. They
| changed _what tellers do_. Before ATMs, tellers were mostly
| cash handlers. After, the remaining tellers shifted toward
| relationship banking -- account openings, loan discussions,
| financial advice. The job title survived but the job content
| was transformed.
|
| The deeper question for AI is whether the same pattern holds
| when the technology affects cognitive tasks rather than
| physical ones. ATMs automated a narrow physical routine
| (dispensing cash), which freed up the human role to emphasize
| the parts machines couldn't do (relationship judgment, complex
| problem-solving). AI is different because it targets exactly
| those higher-order cognitive tasks that humans were "freed up"
| to do after previous automation waves.
|
| So the real question isn't "will AI create new jobs?" -- it
| probably will. The question is whether the new tasks humans get
| pushed into will be _higher-value_ (as happened with ATMs
| making tellers into advisors) or _lower-value_ (humans
| relegated to tasks AI can 't yet do, which tend to be physical,
| uncomfortable, or poorly paid).
|
| The ATM precedent is optimistic, but the mechanism that made it
| work -- automating the simple task so humans could do the
| complex one -- runs in the wrong direction when the technology
| specifically targets complex cognitive work.
| zx13719 wrote:
| The interesting takeaway is that automation rarely removes jobs
| inside the existing paradigm. ATMs automated a task inside branch
| banking, so banks just reorganised labour around it. Smartphones
| removed the need for the branch entirely.
|
| I mean, there is definitely a turndown period in labour force
| when a new tech is introduced, but it will defintely produce more
| jobs tho, as an evolution of human history. <3
| AngryData wrote:
| Starting with quotes with JD Vance and talking about listening to
| him on Joe Rogen is... a choice. Also I fail to see how the
| iPhone did anything or is relevant at all. Banking apps were made
| by third parties years after the iPhone came out and everybody
| had dozens of smart phones to choose from. The reason why they
| mentioned the iPhone specifically, touch screen and app store,
| already existed in the form of PDAs long before the iPhone came
| out.
| twosdai wrote:
| I really enjoyed this article, I didn't bridge the idea of an ATM
| and mobile banking.
|
| I think the idea raised about "Automated Firms" is a bit off in
| the picture painted in that linked article. I think the David Oks
| intention is to paint a picture of a fully automated company, but
| the linked article gives this impression:
|
| > Future AI firms won't be constrained by what's scarce or
| abundant in human skill distributions - they can optimize for
| whatever abilities are most valuable. Want Jeff Dean-level
| engineering talent? Cool: once you've got one, the marginal copy
| costs pennies. Need a thousand world-class researchers? Just spin
| them up. The limiting factor isn't finding or training rare
| talent - it's just compute.
|
| In that above paragraph the author is saying to the reader that a
| human will be able to spin up and get these armies of intelligent
| workers, but at the end of the day their output is given to a
| human who presumably needs to take ownership of the result.
| Intelligent workers make bad choices or bad bets, but those AI
| machines cannot "own" an outcome. The responsibility must fall on
| a person.
|
| To this end, I think the fully autonomous firm is kind of a
| fallacy. There needs to be someone who can be sued if anything
| goes wrong. You're not suing the AI.
| ozozozd wrote:
| Also, employing "infinite intelligence" by splitting it into
| "workers" and organizing them into firms cannot be farther than
| a paradigm change.
|
| It's strictly an attempt to shoehorn the new tech into an
| existing paradigm, just because right now the system prompt
| makes an "agent" behave differently than the one with a
| different prompt.
|
| It's unimaginative to say the least.
| twosdai wrote:
| Yeah, I think if there is some sort of super intelligence,
| the idea would be that it would make the system of computers
| and computation irrelevant entirely. Now that would be novel.
| sothatsit wrote:
| That is why a fully automated firm would be a paradigm shift.
| Instead of requiring someone to be responsible and to QA
| things, you just let AI systems be responsible internally, and
| the company responsible as a whole for legal concerns.
|
| This idea of an automated firm relies on the premise that AI
| will become more capable and reliable than people.
| twosdai wrote:
| In this regard, the company cannot be created where there is
| not a single person tied to it, at least legally, even shell
| corporations have a person on the record as being
| responsible. So there needs to be some human that is apart of
| it, and in any "normal" organization if there is a person
| tied to the outcome of the company they presumably care about
| it and if the AI 99.99% of the time does good work, but still
| can make mistakes, a person will still be checking off on all
| its work. Which leads to a system of people reviewing and
| signing off on work, not exactly a fully autonomous firm.
| sothatsit wrote:
| The benchmark is AI making less mistakes than humans, not
| making no mistakes. Just like autonomous vehicles.
|
| And yes, presumably there would be a person who set the
| firm up, or else our legal system would need to change
| quite fundamentally.
| danesparza wrote:
| Correlation is not causation.
|
| There is no clear link to the iPhone causing lower teller
| employment.
|
| This article does have a glaring omission: The 2008 financial
| crisis effects on the banking industry in general. When there are
| fewer local banks there are naturally fewer tellers employed.
| Bank failures peaked in 2010 in the aftershocks of the crises,
| which lines up nicely with the articles timeline.
| twelve40 wrote:
| yeah weird. Same goes for the "ATMs increased demand for
| tellers" strange idea suggested earlier in the article, which
| was automatically disproven right there by actually attributing
| the growth in tellers to deregulation. Which one is it?
| small_model wrote:
| I guess the trope in movies of masked bank robbers going in and
| threatening a scared bank teller will be a thing of the past
| soon. Pointing a gun at an iPhone doesn't have the same vibe.
| mmmlinux wrote:
| I didn't see the article mentioning how banks forced people to
| use ATMs or apps instead of tellers by having "green" accounts.
| where you would get a monthly account fee waved if you didn't go
| in to a branch.
| ProllyInfamous wrote:
| Right around when my local credit union began requiring (IMHO
| insecure) 2FA, I coincidentally moved _right next door to a
| branch location_.
|
| Since I refuse to implement their "security" "feature," I just
| walk into their office every time I need a simple balance
| inquiry/transfer. They _probably hate_ that I have _just enough
| money deposited_ to consider my _inconveniencing them_
| profitable.
|
| Worth the $1.00 monthly "in-person banking fee"
| moribvndvs wrote:
| This writing style where every section has multiple paragraphs of
| preamble, prolepsis, cold openers for cold openers, and tangents
| is infuriating. Get on to the point already.
| ahartmetz wrote:
| In general, it's just multiple times as long as it should be.
| GuB-42 wrote:
| I didn't notice any link with the iPhone, except maybe a vague
| coincidence in timing. Online banking existed before the iPhone,
| it worked using websites, on personal computers. And it took some
| time before smartphones were taken seriously by banks.
|
| What I noticed however is a noticeable decrease in service
| quality in bank branches while online (desktop browser) options
| became better. Banks pushed customers out of their branches
| progressively. In the early 2010s tellers couldn't do anything
| you couldn't do online by yourself. For services like dealing
| with large quantities of cash, or coins, they made it so that you
| couldn't do more than what the ATMs allowed you to do, limiting
| the amount of cash the branch had access to and increasing how
| much you could withdrew from ATMs.
|
| They didn't get the idea to fire all their tellers when Steve
| Jobs announced the iPhone. It was a decision at least a decade in
| the making. It is just that people tend to resist change so it
| happens slowly, especially for big, serious business like
| banking. And I don't think it is a bad thing.
| jollyllama wrote:
| That's a really good point. They forced the adoption of these
| services by kneecapping the tellers, in terms of what they had
| access to.
| throw7 wrote:
| Uhhh... if it's 'mobile banking' that killed teller jobs, what
| does the iPhone have to do with anything other than clickbait? (I
| guess I answered my own question)
| layer8 wrote:
| For better or worse, the iPhone kickstarted the mobile
| revolution.
| CamouflagedKiwi wrote:
| I hate the graph here. "Bank teller employment has fallen off a
| cliff" - well it _looks_ that way but actually it's more like
| halved from its peak because the bottom of the Y axis isn't zero.
| That's still a significant reduction, but it's not as dramatic as
| it seems at first glance.
|
| Lies, damn lies...
| Waterluvian wrote:
| I was born in the mid-80s and I've _never_ had a bank teller
| experience. For me growing up, the bank teller was simply the
| tech support person for my debit card.
| ericwebb wrote:
| If I have to physically still go to the bank, it really hasn't
| disrupted much. The iPhone created an opportunity... the banks
| investing around the technology is the disruption. ATM itself
| couldn't unlock as much which I suppose is the paradigm mentioned
| in the article.
|
| AI is more iPhone than ATM IMO.
| forinti wrote:
| In recent years I have been going less and less to banks. 20
| years ago I would go monthly to pay some bills.
|
| Nowadays, I must visit a bank once or twice a year tops. My
| manager frequently sends me messages, but invariably he is trying
| to sell me something.
|
| I've noticed that branches have really cut down on tellers and in
| my latest visit the branch didn't even have a teller, just
| someone helping people use the ATM and lots of desks (most were
| empty) for you to handle more complicated business with your
| account manager.
| j45 wrote:
| Many banks wanted their branches to become like Apple stores
| where it's self serve even though that's not what an Apple store
| is.
| lchengify wrote:
| 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 was aware of Netflix) but lose
| sight of getting flanked by something else.
|
| Second: Not listed here is how banks themselves have changed to
| be almost entirely online, which in many cases is more of a
| outsourcing play than a labor destruction play. My favorite
| example of this is Capital One, where the vast majority of their
| credit card operations literally cannot be solved in a branch.
| You must call them to say, resolve a fraud dispute. Note that
| this still requires staffing and is (not yet) fully automated,
| just not branch staffing. It doesn't make sense to staff branches
| to do that.
| jama211 wrote:
| Not sure it's great to start this with jd Vance...
| pelagicAustral wrote:
| Fun story. There are still bank tellers in the Falkland Islands
| because there is no e-banking. Transfers are literally made by
| filling in a piece of paper and taking it to the bank.
| cheema33 wrote:
| I am very very glad that most of the world has moved on from
| this way of doing things. Such a terrible waste of time on a
| large scale.
| kenferry wrote:
| The author wants to say that atms are a stand in for in person
| banking experience, while the iPhone changes the paradigm
| entirely.
|
| Why? Seems like basically the same paradigm to me, I can just do
| it without going anywhere.
| tingletech wrote:
| When ATMs first came out, they were mostly still only at the
| branch because they were big machines. I remember in the late
| 70s/early 80s, if you got a steady check (like social security or
| a paycheck from a steady job) you could cash them at the liquor
| store. The liquor store would even run my Dad a tab, and he would
| pay it off when he cashed the check. On paydays he would not be
| the only one doing that, they must have had to get a lot of cash
| on hand.
| Havoc wrote:
| There is also a premium for the human touch. I currently pay $15
| fee to my bank a month. Going rate here for a bank account is $0.
|
| But the $15 bank has a call center that is dreamy - reliably
| connected to a competent focused individual in under 3 seconds.
|
| It doesn't matter how good the tech & automation is I place an
| economic value on that ability to pick up the phone and talk to a
| human. LLMs are crushing it but I'm not fuckin paying $15 for an
| LLM.
| stephbook wrote:
| 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.
| throwaway98797 wrote:
| pretty degrading to call what they do useless
|
| we all need to do something
| array_key_first wrote:
| 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 result is
| most people are doing meaningless work just because they have
| to in order to survive, and most jobs do not need to exist.
| This is true even in office work. It usually manifests as
| moving stuff from A to B and then maybe back to A. Basically,
| not creating, just moving. And not physically moving either.
| cogman10 wrote:
| That labor cheapness is enabled by a cheapness of cost of
| living. Those things all tend to feed onto each other.
|
| > 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.
|
| It's useful labor. Yes you could do it yourself, but it gives
| them a job which they can ultimately use to afford food and
| where they live.
|
| I mostly only feel bad for kids doing that sort of labor as it
| means they aren't getting an education. But for an adult? It
| speaks to something a bit right about their economic situation
| that they can stay a float by merely fetching items in a store.
|
| I wish in the US that it was possible for someone to make a
| living doing doordash or instacart.
| nine_k wrote:
| > _fetch items in a store. Why?_
|
| Because the presence of a human likely prevents shoplifting and
| / or vandalism. It must make economic sense for the gas station
| owner to employ a human, and I suppose this is the sense.
|
| What actual useful skill do you think the gas station keeper
| could learn? Is their employment the thing that prevents them
| from learning these skills?
| cogman10 wrote:
| > What actual useful skill do you think the gas station
| keeper could learn?
|
| I mean, it's possible there are useful skills they could
| learn but there's not the interest or desire to learn those
| skills. It's completely possible that person is perfectly
| content doing that work.
| kccqzy wrote:
| Some countries prioritize having low unemployment numbers,
| because they believe that unemployment leads to unrest.
| Governments can choose to subsidize the cost of labor to
| achieve this.
|
| Also I think it is preposterous to claim that these people are
| trapped.
| idop wrote:
| It's weird how you both describe visiting other cultures AND
| thinking everybody's just like you in the same paragraph.
|
| 1. You can fill your own car with gas, but some people can't,
| or prefer someone more knowledgeable to do it for them. Some
| people like the comfort of having someone bag their groceries
| for them, or have disabilities that necessitate it. Some people
| are old. Today you learned.
|
| 2. Your economic system is not different than theirs. Everybody
| NEEDS a job to support themselves, their families and to be
| functioning members of society. That means jobs that can easily
| be automated won't be automated. Also, you may make a lot more
| money than that kid bagging groceries to make a few bucks for
| himself, but at least what he does actually helps someone. What
| we here on Hacker News do is mostly build imaginary products
| that will be gone and forgotten quicker than you can say "Al
| Bundy".
|
| 3. Not only that, all of us here have basically written our own
| replacements and made ourselves obsolete. Something tells me
| your job isn't really needed too.
| elAhmo wrote:
| I am sure in the rich Western world you also have people who
| work at a gas station, who fetch items from a store.
|
| Helping someone fill their car with gas or sell them an item is
| useful as well, not everyone should be a software developer.
| Before feeling sad for other people, think about yourself as
| well.
| bongoman42 wrote:
| It is a different mindset and they are happy with what they are
| doing. I come from India where there is a ton of that labor.
| When I lived there, I had a couple of full time house help,
| supplemented by cook etc as needed. They had plenty of time by
| themselves. They would genuinely just zone out when they had
| free time, even significantly long. THey liked the easiness of
| the job, and the fact that once it is over, it is just over. No
| need to think about tomorrow, take your work in your head etc.
| A lot of the world's people are like that, maybe even a
| significant majority.
| brazukadev wrote:
| if the rich western world you mentioned is the US, I'd like to
| remind you that no economy needs that amount of fast food
| workers
| MagicMoonlight wrote:
| This must be an amerilard phenomenon. There's no way the number
| of bank tellers has remained constant in the western world. I
| haven't been to a bank branch in 10 years.
| nitwit005 wrote:
| I don't feel the phone conclusion is quite correct, because it's
| not just the need to use an ATM that has dropped. The need to use
| a banking app or website has also dropped.
|
| The behavior of companies has changed dramatically. Checks have
| almost vanished, you can often set up automatic payments, and you
| can get bank balance notification emails/messages. A large
| portion of banking interactions are fully automated.
| rapnie wrote:
| What is a Bank nowadays. It is nothing. It is a virtual construct
| and software that we are supposed to put our trust into, where
| banks have a history of betraying that trust.
| TrackerFF wrote:
| Eh, bank teller jobs were dying and on their way out long before
| the iPhone showed up. Back in the early 00s local branches were
| downsizing left and right. My small rural town went from having
| three banks with like 4 tellers in each bank, in the mid 90s, to
| one bank with 1-2 tellers, in the mid 00s.
|
| By the end that bank only dealt with mortgages, other loans, and
| saving accounts.
|
| Online banking and the rise of card use was a huge reason for
| that. It is almost 20 years since I last time went to a physical
| bank to withdraw or deposit money, or pay a bill. Probably even
| longer for paying bills.
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