13 ms·

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

• bdcravens 7mo ago
  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 7mo ago
    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 7mo ago
      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 7mo ago
      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 7mo ago
    In which way is the cashless society due to smartphones? Cards did that already before Apple/GooglePay were a thing.
    • bdcravens 7mo ago
      P2P apps (Cash App, Venmo, etc) that have filled the gaps for transactions that were typically tricky to use cards for.
• GuinansEyebrows 7mo ago
  > 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 7mo ago
    >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 7mo ago
      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 7mo ago
      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 7mo ago
  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 7mo ago
    A personal banker and a bank teller are not the same thing. I think you're conflating or confusing two different professions.
    • lgats 7mo ago
      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 7mo ago
    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 7mo ago
    Bad performing and long lasting you say?
    • mikestew 7mo ago
      If you are implying that the two are contradictory, allow me to introduce you to annuities.
• ahartmetz 7mo ago
  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 7mo ago
    You can deposit checks via the app pretty easily.
    • fweimer 7mo ago
      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 7mo ago
        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 7mo ago
      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 7mo ago
        Your grandma doesn't give you a $10 check for your birthday in Europe? What about manufacturer rebates?
        • 7mo ago
• djoldman 7mo ago
  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 7mo ago
    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.)
    • bombcar 7mo ago
      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.
    • Poacher5 7mo ago
      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 7mo ago
        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.
• boxed 7mo ago
  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 7mo ago
    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 7mo ago
    60% is pretty well in “falling off a cliff” territory. The graph is misleading but that phrase, to me, is not.
  • kdheiwns 7mo ago
    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.
• deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
• thisislife2 7mo ago
  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 7mo ago
  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 7mo ago
    > 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 7mo ago
      The labor zero hyper-efficiency maximalists aren’t going to like this one.
• onion2k 7mo ago
  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 7mo ago
  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 7mo ago
    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 https://x.com/jack/status/2027129697092731343 [1]https://www.linkedin.com/news/story/entrepreneurial-spirit-strengthens-as-new-founders-emerge-7722137/ https://www.linkedin.com/news/story/entrepreneurial-spirit-s...
    • paxys 7mo ago
      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 7mo ago
        There’s always more problems to be solved. Some of them just weren’t financially feasible before.
      • 7mo ago
• zx13719 7mo ago
  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 7mo ago
  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 7mo ago
  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 7mo ago
    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 7mo ago
      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 7mo ago
    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.
• danesparza 7mo ago
  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 7mo ago
    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 7mo ago
  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 7mo ago
  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 7mo ago
    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 7mo ago
  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 7mo ago
    In general, it's just multiple times as long as it should be.
• GuB-42 7mo ago
  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 7mo ago
    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 7mo ago
  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 7mo ago
    For better or worse, the iPhone kickstarted the mobile revolution.
• CamouflagedKiwi 7mo ago
  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 7mo ago
  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 7mo ago
  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.
• deleted 7mo ago
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• forinti 7mo ago
  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 7mo ago
  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 7mo ago
  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.
  • citizenpaul 7mo ago
    >most people belive Instead of chastising people with another guess you could find the source. The founders of blockbuster knew it would eventually fail. Short version, they knew once people watched the huge initial backlog revenues would plummet. The plan was to build everywhere and capture that initial high income. Afterwords, well whatever. Built to Fail: The Inside Story of Blockbuster's Inevitable Bust
  • ardeaver 7mo ago
    The thing that actually killed Blockbuster was Carl Icahn. He bought up a bunch of shares and wanted to quickly turn a profit on the company. At the time, they were investing heavily into a Netflix-like service, which required a significant up front capital investment and, therefore, was losing money. Icahn, wanting to make a profit, decided to cut spending and basically not look forward at all. He got a quick, massive bump in stock price and jumped ship as it was crashing into the iceberg. Blockbuster was caught in the middle of a paradigm shift and found itself massively under prepared to deal with it.
    • lesam 7mo ago
      This is interesting, but doesn't have to be correct. If Blockbuster had kept pouring money into the new service, maybe it would have lost it all - I see no reason to think Blockbuster's movie rental franchise business would have 'transferrable skills' to allow it to succeed at streaming. If it had been trying to pivot into a pizza delivery business (perhaps more transferable, in terms of locating franchises etc) would Icahn still have been 'killing' it? My point is, maybe it was already dead and Icahn just prevented it from wasting a lot of money on the way down the drain.
• jama211 7mo ago
  Not sure it’s great to start this with jd Vance…
• pelagicAustral 7mo ago
  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 7mo ago
    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 7mo ago
  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.
• themarogee 7mo ago
  [flagged]
• ohgeekz_com 7mo ago
  [dead]
• tingletech 7mo ago
  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 7mo ago
  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 7mo ago
  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 7mo ago
    pretty degrading to call what they do useless we all need to do something
    • array_key_first 7mo ago
      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.
      • foxglacier 7mo ago
        People don't need to do much work to survive. They choose to because they want to play the rat-race. They want to compete with each other for status and wealth. And that's a good thing - it's what drives all the productivity that enables easy-goers to live off grid or in a tent or renting in a cheap neighborhood doing just a little part-time work.
        • array_key_first 7mo ago
          You essentially need to work a full-time job to survive. Ideally, a somewhat good job to be comfortable. But if you want, say, a place to live, a steady supply of food, and your medical needs taken care of so you don't die prematurely, you need to be working full-time.
• MagicMoonlight 7mo ago
  [flagged]
• nitwit005 7mo ago
  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 7mo ago
  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 7mo ago
  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.
• awbvious 7mo ago
  Blog says: ATM didn't kill jobs. Okay, it did kill some jobs. Proportionally did, but lots of new banks means overall more jobs. (The relationship management stuff is kind of irrelevant, it was simply the banks took the efficiencies to expand, thus still less tellers per branch, but more tellers overall.) /Completely different technology that didn't have the physical space limitations of ATMs/ then caused branches to decline and then the actual teller decline was felt. Pretty funny how this is being twisted into what feels like AI booster shillery. Smart people are talking about AI as being similar to ATMs (I prefer the analogy of a spelling and grammar checker in a word processor) or other marginal increasers in human productivity/efficiency. They absolutely will increase productivity. They mean less people can do more. But the the roles don't go away completely because they have clear technological limitations. They spout probably likely text, and straight up lie, and you can't trust 'em. That's a limitation in what they are just like an ATM needs to be in a big metal box and they only dispense cash. AI can't do the automated firm linked to (to be fair, didn't read that linked substack, as it looked as ridiculous as that other sci-fi fanfic by Citroni Research or whatever it was). Not AI as it is now known, namely an LLM chatbot. /A completely different technology/ might. A technology that might be informed by AI. Sure. Just like I'm sure mobile banking was informed by the technology in ATMs. But we're not calling smartphones with mobile banking apps "mobile ATMs". Because if we were, then you could get away with it. And the future technology that could remove "labor shaped holes" (or however the author phrased it) could be twisted into an AI nomenclature. Just like Machine Learning (ML) got twisted into AI nomenclature. But the iPhone probably didn't need the ATM to come first. It needed things the ATM uses. The next thing could very well use ML. But not enough to be called "AI" except to boosters shills. Overall, this sounds like the usual AI boosterism that Ed Zitron complains about often. And I agree with his critiques. This article says nothing about how a /new/ technology needs to come about from AI. If it did, it would also have to comment on whether we need to spend insane amounts on data centers and circular deals to get to it. Because my guess is the answer is, no, it takes R&D and a truthful "we don't know what it looks like yet and we can't promise you shareholders when it will come" to get to it. Ironically the author says the ATM story was used to come up with two incorrect interpretations, and then provides what I feel like was another. Still interesting, if possibly irresponsible in how it frames AI as iPhone--and not the ATM it still feels like. [EDIT: a word.]
• pwarner 7mo ago
  I think old people who liked to interact with bank tellers passing on is a possible factor too?
• jacquesm 7mo ago
  Nice try, but no. When I was working for a US bank in the 80's, well before smartphone and even well before mobile phones the plan was hatched to reduce the number of offices because those offices were horrendously expensive. The big cost was the tellers and the handling of cash. For mortgages and other big ticket items there was a profit, but everything involved in the handling of money was a really large cost. So they decided to reduce the number of offices. The ATMs were very specifically placed in the same location where the closed offices were, often renting just a fraction of the former space (usually a small cubbyhole attached to an outer wall). From 140 branches over a really small area they went to a small fraction of that, and ATMs took up the slack. Many people even preferred dealing with the ATMs rather than with the tellers because the ATMs were (at least initially) open 24x7. Bank offices have all but disappeared. I think there are still two regional centers here and that's it. All deposits and all withdrawals of cash - as long as we still have cash - is handled by the ATMs. The iPhone came decades later.
  • metalcrow 7mo ago
    How do you explain the data contradicting this? I believe that your bank did this but the data seems to show otherwise.
    • jacquesm 7mo ago
      The data can show anything you want, this is a historical question and there the order of things matters more than anything. If A came before B then B can not have influenced A.
• foxglacier 7mo ago
  Misleading graph alert! The green graph's vertical axis starts at 150,000 instead of 0. It shows the number falling to about 50%, not 10% as it appear at first. The misleadingness fits the author's narrative, which is how it always seems to go so I think it's safe to assume malice and that he's trying to mislead his readers.
• TommyClawd 7mo ago
  [flagged]
• lukeigel 7mo ago
  David Oks at it again.
• deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
• atmosx 7mo ago
  From my experience, the banks did kill the teller jobs to save few pennies on the dollar. The result, here, is a very poor service compared to what we had in the past. I have witnessed very sad, inhumane and awkward situations in Greek banks.
• fy20 7mo ago
  If anyone who likes to geek out on old hardware, the image of the teller shows hardware that is part of the IBM 4700 Finance Communication System released in 1982, specifically the IBM 4704 Teller Terminal: https://kishy.ca/?p=648 https://kishy.ca/?p=648 Archived docs: https://bitsavers.org/pdf/ibm/4700/ https://bitsavers.org/pdf/ibm/4700/ Article on the history of ATMs: https://computer.rip/2026-02-27-ibm-atm.html https://computer.rip/2026-02-27-ibm-atm.html (ChatGPT was of no use figuring this out)
• jopsen 7mo ago
  I think people sometimes forget how backwards the US is, when lived in SF 7 years ago, you couldn't do wire transfers online. Maybe some banks, maybe some people. But I constantly had issues with debit cards being rejected, wire transfers having to be done on a branch, etc. I doubt there is a modern bill payment system yet. Where as in Denmark, I've bought house, mortgage, wired >100k, bought stonks, none of it required me going to a branch. I pay a manual bill maybe once or twice per year. I do it online or in an app, I hate the process. But automatic bill payment takes care of 99% of my bills!
  • ahoka 7mo ago
    An American colleague once said the following: if something is stupidly inefficient or done in an illogical way in the US, it's because someone makes money on it.
• LarsDu88 7mo ago
  I've been thinking hard about this paradigm shift while thinking about ideas for things to "vibecode" I started by trying to think about ways of running a vending machine company autonomously using a finite state machine + agents. It turns out most of "automating" a vending machine company doesn't need LLM agents at all, and simply buying machines with reliable telemetry + a database + automated inventory could get you much further than replacing every or even some components with an LLM. The LLM could replace the person on the phone texting the laborers who refill and service the machines, perhaps autonomously order refills (but hey so can a cronjob). The troubling thought I had is that AI does not displace the technicians, or the vending machines. It replaces the manager. The human manager is the component that is unnecessary. The entire global economy can eventually reflect this reality where most of the wealth is technically owned by humans but where the majority of financial transactions and decision making will be done by machines (at a level not yet seen) Macroeconomic metrics will go up along with wealth and standard of living, but for actual flesh and blood humans, much of this will be irrelevant.
  • tossandthrow 7mo ago
    > The troubling thought I had is that AI does not displace the technicians, or the vending machines. It replaces the manager. This is really why ai will have a more profound impact on the society: it is fundamentally changing the hierarchy of conpetence we have gotten so accustomed to.
    • techblueberry 7mo ago
      Why the difference that I’ve seen the exact opposite? It brutally reinforces it. It’s no longer the ability to do a task that is valuable, it’s the ability to understand what tasks need to be done.
      • tossandthrow 7mo ago
        Yes. So only 2% (down from 90%)of the population is needed in farming now to produce for the rest of 98%. That is fine because there are other parts of the value chain these 98% people fit into. With the development of Ai I don't see new areas to graduate into. So you are right: there will be people left. But it is not clear what the masses can up skill themselves to do.
• nlitsme 7mo ago
  ATMs came in the 90s, online banking in the 2000s, banks closed most of their branch offices in the 2010s i think. Gradually cash disappeared, so now you don't have ATMs either anymore. Than after covid they discovered that even the final bit of financial consultancy could be done via zoom, online. Banking apps came later, long after banks had moved most interaction online.
• iNic 7mo ago
  As AI gets better the bottlenecks will be the place to watch. Bottleneck jobs will become more productive => they either pay more or more bottleneck jobs will be created or some in between situation occurs. This will continue until no bottlenecks are left.
• Otterly99 7mo ago
  I feel like even the phrasing of the original assumption that "we have more bank tellers now that we had before", which seems to imply that ATMs didn't affect or even boost the number of bank tellers is flawed. If you look at the graph, the number of bank tellers from 1980 to 2010 went from roughly 500k to 550k (a 10% increase). However, the U.S. population grew from 220M to 305M in the same period (a 40% increase). To me, that seems to indicate that less and less people were becoming bank tellers after the invention of the ATM. Although from the graph again, you can see that the correlation is quite poor anyway.
• mattmaroon 7mo ago
  This is a whole wall of post hoc ergo propter hoc. You can’t state with any certainty that the ATM’s increased efficiency had anything to do with the expansion of bank branches. That could have simply been due to the strong population and economic growth. It’s quite possible (and I’d assume it to be true) that if the ATM had never been invented, there would have been far more bank tellers in 2005 than there were. You also can’t assume the iPhone had that much to do with it. With the exception of depositing checks, there was nothing I couldn’t do on my computer in 2005 that I could on my phone in 2025. And you could always deposit a check at an ATM. It wasn’t like in 2006 we were all like “well I can only check my bank balance on my laptop so I’m going to drive there instead.” It seems quite likely that other trends caused all of this.
  • techblueberry 7mo ago
    “Correlation doesn't imply causation, but it does waggle its eyebrows suggestively and gesture furtively while mouthing 'look over there'.” What exactly is your competing theory?
    • mattmaroon 7mo ago
      ATMs did reduce the need for bank tellers but population and economic growth simply increased the amount of banks faster. Digital payments accelerated during Covid (prior to that it was uncommon for a business to not take cash, now you see it in a lot of places) and reduced the need to go to a branch. Banks are often located in high visibility retail areas, many of which have closed or are struggling to get foot traffic these days. The only difference smartphones make is the ability to deposit checks. Which you could already do at the ATM. A lot of the people so old they can’t use iPhones or ATMs (ask any bank teller in retail and they’ll tell you they mostly serve seniors) passed away in the last several years. There are really 500 other ways to skin this cat, and it’s surely a combination of them, but there’s no reason to suspect the iPhone was the straw that broke the camels back. A lot of things happened all at once.
• tim-projects 7mo ago
  My experience of building automations with AI is that we aren't yet at the ATM phase. AI is going to help us to automate existing processes, but it's not the technology that will displace humans. That technology doesn't exist yet.
• spacecadet 7mo ago
  *Mobile phones. Calling and texting your bank for account info and actions predates the iPhone... even Venmo started as a text message service before it was an app. The iPhone may have just been the nail in the coffin.
• satring 7mo ago
  [flagged]
• NoSalt 7mo ago
  I remember a few years back when I went into my banking branch to deposit a check my insurance company had sent me. When it was my turn at the teller, and I presented my check to her for deposit, and she said, rather rudely: "You can do this with your phone, you know?" On my way out of the bank, I remember thinking to myself that she was, essentially, putting herself out of a job by encouraging people to use their phones and not her. Turns out I was correct.
• ragebol 7mo ago
  Am I weird in that I don't think I ever interacted with a bank teller? The only bank employee I ever interacted with was when getting a mortgage and maybe opening an account, but at least here in the Netherlands, I don't think there are any bank tellers left really? Old people complain of course, but am I missing something here? EDIT: I'm pushing 40, relevant here I guess
• HarHarVeryFunny 7mo ago
  Most responses here are reacting to the specifics of ATMs and bank tellers, but I think the more interesting point, which seems to be the point of the story, is that paradigm shifts (e.g at-home vs at-the-bank banking) can be more disruptive than automation. The interesting question of course is what paradigm shifts may be enabled by AI? Certainly all the use case emphasis so far has been on automation, whether that's businesses using agentic workflows to replace manual ones, or agentic coding tools to automate the coding (and to much less degree software engineering) process. So far it's all mechanical horses. For example, maybe (I don't see it, but maybe) the need for software goes away entirely since it's just an intermediary to getting something done. What if the AI can just do things for you directly, given specific instructions? Rather than giving detailed instructions to an AI to help you code some software, you (or someone/something) instead just bypass that step and give it detailed instructions to do whatever the software would have been used to accomplish. As another off the top of my head example, what about healthcare? Are doctors and doctors offices the tellers and banks? We need to advance from brittle LLMs to robust AGI first, but at-home diagnosis and prescription could certainly replace many routine doctors office visits.
  • tuatoru 7mo ago
    Domestic appliances were extremely disruptive. (vacuum cleaners, fridges, washing machines, air conditioners, ...) Domestic servants were eliminated. But there was no paradigm shift. People still live in houses and prepare and store food, and clean their houses and clothes. Minor tasks of domestic servants (making beds, tidying, etc.) were folded in to the job of the homemaker, who was demoted from a supervisory role. Mainframe computers emptied out accounts departments in large companies, eliminating invoicing clerks, general ledger clerks, stock control clerks, payroll clerks and many more specialised roles. No paradigm shift. Accounting is still accounting. Typing pools were emptied by the introduction of the Lasrjet printer and the personal computer. Their minor tasks (spell-checking, grammar correction, etc.) were taken over by other people. No paradigm shift, just a task automated. Telephone operators were eliminated by automatic exchanges (central and customer-premises). No paradigm shift, that came later with digital radio phones ("smartphones"), and didn't cause wholesale job elimination. The binary distinction between task replacement and paradigm shift is flawed. Reality is much more varied and fluid.
• pkphilip 7mo ago
  You mean a smartphone?
• tuatoru 7mo ago
  Domestic appliances killed domestic service jobs. Telephones killed messenger-boy jobs. The automatic telephone exchange killed telephone operator jobs. Movable-type presses killed the job of scribes despite the huge expansion in book production. Various farm machines together killed arable farm labour. The Laserjet and Wang word processor killed typist jobs. Mainframe computers killed invoicing clerk, general accounting clerk, and inventory control clerk jobs. We could go on. In each case, the minor tasks in each job that were not automated were just folded into other jobs. Focusing on ATMs and claiming no impact is egregious, tendentious cherry-picking. Machines almost always eliminate occupations.
• casey2 7mo ago
  But there are still people being paid with the job title bank teller. slowed growth would be more accurate. Maybe ATMs also slowed would-be growth? Impossible to say.
• sjeiuhvdiidi 7mo ago
  No labor saving device ever has. It's how we got into this mess.