ATMs didn't kill bank Teller jobs, but the iPhone did

Re:ATMs didn't kill bank Teller jobs, but the iPhone did by onetimeusename on Thursday March 12, 2026 @01:36PM (#47354437)

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.

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Re:ATMs didn't kill bank Teller jobs, but the iPhone did by jama211 on Thursday March 12, 2026 @02:26PM (#47355126)

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?

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Re:ATMs didn't kill bank Teller jobs, but the iPhone did by bwestergard on Thursday March 12, 2026 @02:33PM (#47355204)

Quantitative measures of this are very poor, and even those are mixed.

My subjective assessment is that agents like Copilot got better because of better harnesses and fine tuning of models to use those harnesses. But they are not improving in the direction of labor substitution, but rather in the direction of significant, but not earth-shaking, complementarity. That complementarity is stronger for more experienced developers.

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Re:ATMs didn't kill bank Teller jobs, but the iPhone did by jygg4 on Thursday March 12, 2026 @02:59PM (#47355510)

Agree. Nice to see a post with proper economic thought on the topic.

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Re:ATMs didn't kill bank Teller jobs, but the iPhone did by mekoka on Thursday March 12, 2026 @03:09PM (#47355650)

This LLM ability is directly proportional to the quantity of encoded (i.e. documented) knowledge about software development. But not all of the practice has thus been clearly communicated. Much of mastery resides in tacit knowledge, the silent intuitive part of a craft that influences the decision making process in ways that sometimes go counter to (possibly incomplete or misguided) written rules, and which is by definition very difficult to put into language, and thus difficult for a language model to access or mimic.

Of course, it could also be argued that some day we may decide that it's no longer necessary at all for code to be written for a human mind to understand. It's the optimistic scenario where you simply explain the misbehavior of the software and trust the AI to automatically fix everything, without breaking new stuff in the process. For some reason, I'm not that optimistic.

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Re:ATMs didn't kill bank Teller jobs, but the iPhone did by jama211 on Friday March 20, 2026 @02:14PM (#47458463)

You don’t have to convince me of that, I’m feeling quite secure in my job for the minute. I’m just aware that we may look at the actual code less and less as confidence in it grows or outpaces confidence you’d have in a an equivalent human reviewer. There’ll always be jobs in handling the riff raff of the machines at some level of abstraction.

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Re:ATMs didn't kill bank Teller jobs, but the iPhone did by onetimeusename on Thursday March 12, 2026 @03:23PM (#47355803)

I am not saying AI's abilities are the shortcoming here. The problem is that people need to trust that software has certain attributes. For now, that requires someone with knowledge to be part of it. It's quite possible development becomes detached from human trust. As I said that would reduce the number of developers but the ones who are left would have to have deep knowledge to oversee it and even that may be gone. Whatever happens in the future, for now I think people will have to level up their knowledge/skills or get a new career and that's probably true for most professions.

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Re:ATMs didn't kill bank Teller jobs, but the iPhone did by hn_acc1 on Thursday March 12, 2026 @04:27PM (#47356580)

It's probably an 80/20 or 90/10 problem. Tesla FSD also seems amazing to some percentage of the population, but the more widely it get used, the more cracks are appearing.

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Re:ATMs didn't kill bank Teller jobs, but the iPhone did by hn_acc1 on Thursday March 12, 2026 @04:29PM (#47356613)

And then you let them train themselves and no one notices when they "accidentally" remove the guardrail prompts from the next version. And another 10 years later, almost no one remembers how "The Guardian" learns new things or how to stop it from being evil.

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Re:ATMs didn't kill bank Teller jobs, but the iPhone did by jama211 on Friday March 20, 2026 @02:12PM (#47458439)

That’s a little out of scope of my comment but yes, that’s another worry.

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Re:ATMs didn't kill bank Teller jobs, but the iPhone did by 9rx on Thursday March 12, 2026 @06:26PM (#47358132)

> They might still require a human in the loop, but for how long?

For as long as a human remains the customer.

Once humans become the proverbial horse supplanted by the automobile... I don't suppose glue really cares.

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Re:ATMs didn't kill bank Teller jobs, but the iPhone did by jama211 on Friday March 20, 2026 @02:12PM (#47458430)

I just meant to have a similar level of confidence in the code as if it was checked by an also fallible human. Not a long reaching philosophical point.

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