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

https://davidoks.blog/p/why-the-atm-didnt-kill-bank-teller

by colinprince • 4 months ago

530 582 4 months ago

bdcravens2• 4 months 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• 4 months 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• 4 months 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• 4 months 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• 4 months ago

In which way is the cashless society due to smartphones? Cards did that already before Apple/GooglePay were a thing.

bdcravens2• 4 months ago

P2P apps (Cash App, Venmo, etc) that have filled the gaps for transactions that were typically tricky to use cards for.

GuinansEyebrows2• 4 months 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• 4 months 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• 4 months 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".

GuinansEyebrows2• 4 months 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• 4 months 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• 4 months ago

A personal banker and a bank teller are not the same thing. I think you're conflating or confusing two different professions.

lgats• 4 months 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

mikestew2• 4 months 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• 4 months ago

Bad performing and long lasting you say?

mikestew2• 4 months ago

If you are implying that the two are contradictory, allow me to introduce you to annuities.

ahartmetz9• 4 months 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• 4 months ago

You can deposit checks via the app pretty easily.

fweimer• 4 months 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.

ahartmetz9• 4 months 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.

monocularvision• 4 months ago

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• 4 months ago

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.

dylan6045• 4 months ago

Sounds like someone forgetting that for a large number of people, their mobile device is their only computer.

dehrmann2• 4 months ago

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.

bjtitus2• 4 months ago

Exactly. 96% of internet users use mobile phones. 62% use PCs.

freedomben5• 4 months ago

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

eloisant3• 4 months ago

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.

ericmay2• 4 months ago

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.

bluedino3• 4 months ago

Visioneer paperport!

I wonder if you can use a webcam?

freedomben5• 4 months ago

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.

ninalanyon2• 4 months ago

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.

dartharva• 4 months ago

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.

ahartmetz9• 4 months ago

I don't see what difference it makes. If you use cash, you draw it at the ATM.

jader201• 4 months ago

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.

forinti2• 4 months ago

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.

empyrrhicist2• 4 months ago

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.

wolttam• 4 months ago

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• 4 months ago

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• 4 months ago

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.

freedomben5• 4 months ago

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.

11235813212• 4 months ago

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.

ahartmetz9• 4 months ago

A small screen and shitty keyboard are friction to me shrug

conductr• 4 months ago

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.

snarf212• 4 months ago

Mostly easier in the sense that it is always in your hand already, not at home on the charger on your desk.

everdrive• 4 months ago

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• 4 months ago

I literally can't find where the bookmarks even are on Edge (I didn't care enough to search online).

simonw2• 4 months ago

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.

dylan6045• 4 months ago

Obviously, I've never used every. single. banking app, yet the ones I've used have signed me out of the app just as the web page does. Using FaceID makes it less noticeable, but it is signing me in each time I use it unless I've returned to it within the active session. Otherwise, it's logged out as expected.

Obscurity4340• 4 months ago

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• 4 months ago

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• 4 months ago

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• 4 months ago

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.

ahartmetz9• 4 months ago

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.

eloisant3• 4 months ago

No, the article is wrong about the iPhone.

It's the Internet that killed bank tellers.

ghaff6• 4 months ago

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• 4 months ago

It's also not the iPhone given Europe is 60-70% Android

lotsofpulp• 4 months ago

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.

raisedbyninjas• 4 months ago

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

kjkjadksj4• 4 months ago

My bank doesn’t allow for zelle access on PC. Otherwise I would never mobile bank.

jama2119• 4 months ago

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?

lizknope2• 4 months ago

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.

cheema332• 4 months ago

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• 4 months ago

Ever deposit a check via PC browser?

jdauriemma• 4 months ago

+1, this is my use case as well

aidenn02• 4 months ago

Not OP, but I have.

DonsDiscountGas2• 4 months ago

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

retired3• 4 months ago

An app on your phone can be more secure as you are using the device itself as a hardware token.

dmazzoni• 4 months ago

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.

aidenn02• 4 months ago

USAA used to offer that (scanning via a java applet), but sunsetted it in favor of using the app.

dfxm12• 4 months ago

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.

nunez2• 4 months ago

Yes...because banks have made it much more difficult to do online banking through a web browser as a forcing function to route people to their apps.

I actually switched to a credit union last year from Chase partly for this reason. Chase used to have m.chase.com, which was PERFECT for most of the banking I did while being extremely fast, even back in the 2G days. They Web 2.0'ed it in 2017 and deprecated m.chase.com in 2018 or so.

The provider that maintains my bank's online banking platform made it fast and lightweight, much like m.chase.com of yesteryear, while also adding more modern authentication security (2FA vs SMS).

joshuakcockrell• 4 months ago

Cofounder at Envelope here. Yes, a well polished banking app is much easier to use for many tasks

- Push notifications within seconds of swiping your card - Frictionless to check your balance/budget/cards with bio auth - Mobile check deposit (as others here have stated) - Instantly locking/unlocking your cards - Budgeting built-in

If, to you, "doing online banking" means "sitting down at my computer and scrolling through the PDF statements on Chase's website" (I don't blame you, I've been there), then yes, doing that on a desktop is much easier. I'd encourage you to take a look at how far banking apps have come recently.

pepperoni_pizza• 4 months ago

I do online banking on my phone. There's two reasons for it:

1) Because of regulations, I need to use my phone to log in into internet banking and to confirm every transaction (including online card payments) anyway. If I already have to find a phone, I might just use it all the way.

2) Invoices have QR codes on them nowadays, that you can scan with your phone and it will prefill all the account numbers, amounts, etc. That's easier than copy-pasting or rewriting it.

Now this is all actually terrible, because to live in a society, you need a bank account, and to have a bank account, you need Google or Apple-controlled smartphone. (there are some legacy banks that allow you to use SMS for second factor, but it's less and less common)

duskdozer8• 4 months ago

Most of the difference is intentional enshittification of the non-app UX because it pushes users onto a platform where they have less control over their device and thus less ability to avoid malware like ads and tracking.

giancarlostoro3• 4 months ago

How do you deposit a check on a PC? I know on a computer you can just take photos of the front and back, and deposit it.

throwawayffffas• 4 months ago

For inexplicable reasons I have found that some operations are only possible through the app. Ok they are not inexplicable, there is the illusion that the App is more secure and thus some high impact stuff is only possible through the app. At least in my bank.

NetMageSCW16• 4 months ago

It is not an illusion, unless you are on Android

djoldman• 4 months 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.

ahartmetz9• 4 months 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.)

Poacher5• 4 months 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)

bombcar• 4 months 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.

TheGRS• 4 months ago

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.

kccqzy2• 4 months ago

I still need to talk to a real bank teller before withdrawing $10,000 in cash. Above a certain amount my bank requires an ID in addition to a debit card and a PIN.

boxed• 4 months 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• 4 months 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• 4 months ago

60% is pretty well in “falling off a cliff” territory. The graph is misleading but that phrase, to me, is not.

kdheiwns• 4 months 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.

thisislife2• 4 months 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• 4 months 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.

bluedino3• 4 months 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• 4 months ago

The labor zero hyper-efficiency maximalists aren’t going to like this one.

onion2k• 4 months 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.

paxys2• 4 months 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?

aurareturn10• 4 months 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

[1]https://www.linkedin.com/news/story/entrepreneurial-spirit-s...

paxys2• 4 months 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?

raw_anon_1111• 4 months ago

Only because VC companies are throwing money at them. How many of them are actually profitable and long term sustainable

small_model2• 4 months ago

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.

haliskerbas• 4 months ago

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.

snarf212• 4 months ago

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.

lovich2• 4 months ago

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.

hackyhacky10• 4 months 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.

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.

ap993• 4 months ago

And the differentiator will be (even more than it is now) product vision since AI-enhanced engineering abilities will be more level.

laughing_man• 4 months ago

The number of software companies being started is probably at least partially the result of people not being able to find a job and starting a company as a last resort.

cjbgkagh4• 4 months ago

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• 4 months ago

If goods aren't being sold, then the price will drop.

irjustin• 4 months ago

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• 4 months ago

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.

win311fwg• 4 months ago

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.

carlosjobim6• 4 months ago

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.

bobthepanda• 4 months ago

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.

darkerside• 4 months ago

Jevons paradox strikes again

Cpoll2• 4 months ago

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.

Dylan16807• 4 months ago

.66 * 1.4 = .92, so it's even less.

keeda• 4 months ago

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.

onetimeusename2• 4 months ago

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.

jama2119• 4 months ago

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?

rayiner2• 4 months ago

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• 4 months ago

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• 4 months ago

we're going to find out

plorkyeran• 4 months ago

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.

whatisthiseven2• 4 months ago

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.

mullingitover5• 4 months ago

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.

babypuncher4• 4 months ago

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.

wagwang• 4 months ago

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

dheera• 4 months ago

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.

whiplash451• 4 months ago

More likely, we will never know

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productivity_paradox

roncesvalles3• 4 months ago

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.

bluefirebrand3• 4 months ago

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

alex435786• 4 months ago

cutting out menial decisions such as customer service. … Each person in the US hired to do that job would spend their entire paycheck

This person can no longer get a customer service job, but why can’t they get another job? Customer service is hardly career with a huge sunk cost in training and with a non-fungible skill set.

If they go get another job, compared to the base case of economy = customer service, we now have economy = customer service (AI) + new job.

victor1062• 4 months ago

cutting out menial decisions such as customer service

This is cited so often. We tried it at a large scale with some of the best engineering talent but unfortunately the humans on the other side preferred speaking to and interacting with a human by a wide margin.

We are still trying with the latest AI models but humans are still doing better at serving other humans.

In one of our studies, we observed by a large margin that our customers would hang up immediately on knowing that they are interacting with an AI system.

I have heard this from others as well.

WalterBright9• 4 months ago

that money goes to a mega-corp and the savings is passed on to execs

And the execs invest that money back into the economy.

matheusmoreira3• 4 months ago

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

im3w1l• 4 months ago

In my humble opinion, money is a distraction most of the time when trying to understand economic matters. Instead it's better to take opposite view: looking at the flow of goods and services.

AI will allow higher production of goods and services. If producing goods and services becomes cheap enough (and it's looking like it will become dirt cheap), then it will not take much redistribution for it to reach the masses.

I think the true crisis will be one of purpose. That we live meaningless lives of leisurely abundance.

eru• 4 months ago

My prediction is no, because productivity gains must benefit the lower classes to see a multiplier in the economy.
It decreases savings rate and encourages spending among the class of people whose money imparts the highest multiplier.

Huh, what? What kind of multiplier stuff are you talking about here?

The central bank looks at the overall spending in the economy (well, including forecasts), and compares that with its targets. They adjust their policy stance accordingly to try and hit their targets.

If people become more or less likely to spend their money ('multipliers') the central bank can and will adjust the amount of money available.

SergeAx• 4 months ago

My prediction is that when Chinese factory-cities adapt to tremendous demand, we will see a new digital Renaissance with teraflops of compute in toasters and kettles. And we will laugh at laptops with 8 GB of RAM so hard.

Your compute is someone else's sand.

suzzer99• 4 months ago

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• 4 months ago

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.

manwe150• 4 months ago

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_dude8• 4 months ago

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 × 67 = 9,380

100 × 100 = 10,000

net difference -620 or just over 6% (loss)

croes• 4 months ago

And then came 2008, so that boom was built on fraud.

thaumasiotes• 4 months ago

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.

9rx7• 4 months ago

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• 4 months ago

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% 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• 4 months ago

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.

tzs2• 4 months ago

A lot probably depends on who can do the new jobs.

In many past cases where new technology eliminated jobs it was accompanied by new jobs related to the new technology that the people whose jobs were eliminated could do, or could reasonably learn to do, and with good enough pay to maintain their standard of living.

Lose your job working in a horse drawn wagon factory because companies are switching to motorized trucks for deliveries? Those trucks are way more complicated to build than wagons so there should be plenty of new jobs in the truck factories.

With AI it seems much less likely for that to generate new jobs for people replaced by AI in as direct a way as trucks did for wagon makers.

kulahan2• 4 months ago

It's completely untrustworthy, so eventually we'll hit an inflection point where we discover that we either cannot use AI anywhere we need trust, or we'll put a human middleman in there. The latter sounds much more realistic. There will be plenty of jobs.

We've spent over 300 years doing the Luddite song and dance. To be clear, I have no problem with Luddites and do not view them negatively, but to imply that this productivity enhancer is magically special in a way no other one was needs some kind of incredibly solid explanation.

edit: as an aside, I do wonder how, if ever, we'll make the transition over to a world where people don't need to work. It seems like every time we think we might be getting closer, the first response is fear.

parpfish• 4 months ago

note that the teller's job duties shifted as well.

with ATMs, they wouldn't hand count money for withdrawals and deposits as much. they'd be doing more interesting and challenging things.

same thing will happen with AI automation -- the easy parts disappear, and youre left with undiluted 'hard parts' in your job. some people might like the change, but we'll probably learn that you need a good mix of deep/hard problems and light/breezy problems to keep mentally engaged and prevent burnout.

Tklaaaalo• 4 months ago

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

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

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

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

iainmck29• 4 months ago

to be honest, too hard to predict but I think it will. We just can't predict how it will change. I'm optimistic it will open people up to more creative work rather than drudgery. Alternatively maybe people move to more physical presence required style work which is probably more rewarding for many anyway.

zx13719• 4 months 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• 4 months 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.

twosdai3• 4 months 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• 4 months 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.

twosdai3• 4 months 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.

sothatsit2• 4 months 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.

twosdai3• 4 months ago

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.

danesparza• 4 months 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.

twelve402• 4 months 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_model2• 4 months 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• 4 months 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• 4 months 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• 4 months 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.

ahartmetz9• 4 months ago

In general, it's just multiple times as long as it should be.

GuB-42• 4 months 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• 4 months 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• 4 months 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)

layer82• 4 months ago

For better or worse, the iPhone kickstarted the mobile revolution.

CamouflagedKiwi• 4 months 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• 4 months 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• 4 months 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.

forinti2• 4 months 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• 4 months 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.

lchengify2• 4 months 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• 4 months 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• 4 months 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• 4 months 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.

bogtog• 4 months ago

Not listed here is how banks themselves have changed to be almost entirely online

Sorry what? Was this not the central theme of the article? (albeit with a title that used the word "iPhone" to be catchier)

lchengify2• 4 months ago

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

giancarlostoro3• 4 months ago

American Express savings has no physical branches. Heck its not unique to them, there's other banks with no physical branches.

Steppphennn• 4 months ago

Cash App is probably the biggest. I was surprised how many gen z people I talked to say they use cash app for everything from direct deposit to their tax returns.

HarHarVeryFunny3• 4 months ago

I have a hard time believing that Redbox had much of an impact on Blockbuster, and they certainly weren't changing the video rental paradigm.

Netflix's original DVD-rental by mail business no doubt ate into Blockbuster's business to some degree, and with their huge inventory was more of a head-on competitor than Redbox which could only offer a vending-machine full of options - the most popular ones.

What really killed Blockbuster was streaming video, not just a way of "automating" the DVD rental business - it was the paradigm shift, similar to the mobile banking vs ATM shift that TFA describes.

mattmaroon3• 4 months ago

That sounds logical but the timeline doesn’t match up. Blockbuster filed for bankruptcy in 2010. This came after years of decline.

Netflix streaming launched in 2007 and ended 2010 with only 20 million users. (They currently have over 15x that). I was using it from the start, they had barely any content back then, Hulu was pretty new, and that was the entirety of the streaming universe. Netflix’s first major original content, House of Cards, came out in 2013.

Blockbuster peaked in 2004. Redbox was just getting started.

Blockbuster’s fall loves to get shoved into 100 different narratives, none of which match the facts. It was death by 1,000 papercuts. Netflix. Redbox. Cable system technology improving drastically. Cable TV improving drastically (this happened right around the time Blockbuster peaked, great book on how/why called Difficult Men). TV show quality in general improving drastically. The rise of HBO. Poor management. Etc.

jama2119• 4 months ago

Not sure it’s great to start this with jd Vance…

pelagicAustral• 4 months 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.

cheema332• 4 months 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• 4 months 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.

tingletech• 4 months 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• 4 months 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• 4 months 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• 4 months ago

pretty degrading to call what they do useless

we all need to do something

array_key_first2• 4 months 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.

cogman102• 4 months ago

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_k3• 4 months ago

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?

cogman102• 4 months ago

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.

kccqzy2• 4 months ago

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.

idop2• 4 months ago

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.

pwagland• 4 months ago

Economics has this concept called revealed preferences[1]. These are preferences that people don't say that they want, but is what they actually use preferentially. An example of this the ordering machines that you normally now see in fast food places these days. People often say that they'd rather order by a cashier, but when given the choice of using one of these machines, or waiting a few minutes in line to get a cashier, they overwhelmingly choose for the automated option.

Tying this back to your first point, the revealed preference is that people would rather fill their own gas tank, rather than be forced to wait for someone to come and fill it for them.

Bagging groceries is different, however the revealed preference is that people would prefer the lower price/lower service supermarket, and those that need the help have to ask for it.

You are correct that everyone needs to earn a living, I think that most people would prefer that others can earn a living doing a somewhat meaningful job, in a somewhat safe manner.

The reason that much of this isn't automated has nothing to do with ensuring that jobs exist, but rather that the cost of automation is higher than the cost of labour. This is what op is talking about.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revealed_preference

elAhmo• 4 months ago

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• 4 months ago

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• 4 months ago

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

charlieyu1• 4 months ago

Because mass unemployment is a bad thing, and the costs are lowered so people can actually survive on lower wages. Meanwhile young people in the West cannot even get a minimum wage job at McDonald’s

nottorp• 4 months ago

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

Do you WANT to do that?

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

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

duskdozer8• 4 months ago

That's great. I'd not be opposed to you having the option to do those things by yourself. Personally though, I'd rather just have someone who's paid to do it than have ads pumped into my ears as I pump gas or mess with the finicky self-checkout machines as someone watches me anyway. Now, if giving these things up would result in those employees ending up with a better station in life or more meaningful work, that would be something to consider. But in reality, the only result of forcing me to do those things will be higher corporate margins. So, no thanks.

nitwit005• 4 months 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• 4 months 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• 4 months 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• 4 months 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• 4 months ago

I think old people who liked to interact with bank tellers passing on is a possible factor too?

jacquesm3• 4 months 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• 4 months ago

How do you explain the data contradicting this? I believe that your bank did this but the data seems to show otherwise.

jacquesm3• 4 months 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.

foxglacier3• 4 months 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.

lukeigel• 4 months ago

David Oks at it again.

atmosx• 4 months 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• 4 months 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

Archived docs:

https://bitsavers.org/pdf/ibm/4700/

Article on the history of ATMs:

https://computer.rip/2026-02-27-ibm-atm.html

(ChatGPT was of no use figuring this out)

jopsen2• 4 months 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• 4 months 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• 4 months 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.

tossandthrow2• 4 months 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.

techblueberry4• 4 months 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.

techblueberry4• 4 months ago

Maybe there are a lot of bad managers (almost certainly there are) but I feel like a lot of the talk about what a manager doesn’t address the true role of a manager, the whole point of a manager is to address uncertainty, and look to the future. The manager shouldn’t have any “tasks” per say, but in the vending machine example, they’re the one that keeps an eye on their suppliers, negotiates, changes suppliers if one fails, decides how much inventory to store in a warehouse.

But like, I as a manager try and delegate the coordination role yes. Unlike an IC, loosely speaking the more ‘tasks’ I’m doing as a manager, the more I consider myself to be failing at the job.

nlitsme• 4 months 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• 4 months 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• 4 months 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.

mattmaroon3• 4 months 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.

techblueberry4• 4 months 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?

mattmaroon3• 4 months 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• 4 months 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• 4 months 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.

NoSalt• 4 months 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• 4 months 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

HarHarVeryFunny3• 4 months 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.

tuatoru2• 4 months 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• 4 months ago

You mean a smartphone?

tuatoru2• 4 months 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• 4 months 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• 4 months ago

No labor saving device ever has. It's how we got into this mess.

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

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