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.
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
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.
That’s not a bank teller’s job, at least not in the U. S. You’re confusing that job with something else.
Is an app really that much easier to use?
Many countries have functioning giro systems. The U.S. is just an outlier.
What about manufacturer rebates?
Granny can always give you cash or just send it directly to you account in the same way.
The only time I really saw checks used was when I was a child ~30-35 years ago and my parents used them. I did once cash a check from an elderly relative, but that was very unusual and only happened once. I didn't even know it was still possible to do that, my reaction was more like if someone had handed me a stack of punch cards to run on my computer.
There hasn't been anything an average person used checks for in the last decades in Germany. Except a few elderly people, nobody uses checks and there are no rebates via checks at all.
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.
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.
I wonder if you can use a webcam?
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.
The quality of the check images is not as big of a deal as you might think. No one is actually inspecting these unless the amount of deposit is near a limit or the account is flagged for suspicious activity. You definitely do not want to throw away the physical copy until the bank confirms the deposit.
You're basically the only person in America doing this. Tens of millions of folks are just scanning it with the app on their phone and it's objectively a much better experience lol. The resolution of the photo taken on your smartphone is beyond good enough, there's no need to over-engineer something here.
> You can't invade the user's privacy nearly as well in a browser (which is great for analytics/marketing), so there's a lot of incentive to the app creator to force a mobile app. But I think we should be honest that it's not for the user, it's for the company.
I agree with your first sentence, but not your second one.
Banking applications can certainly get more/different data on you from using the app, but the job of the bank is to protect money and to know their customer. Privacy is secondary, of course outside of things like other people knowing your account balance, unauthorized access, &c. That's for the bank, because they don't want to lose your money, but it's also for you because you don't want other people getting access to your money.
(I'm guessing you are because in the USA they spell it check, not cheque.)
I asked because the USA still seems to be stubbornly check-focused.
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.
I think Android and iOS are safer platforms than PCs and that's why banks want you to use your phone.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
- 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!
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.
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.
They are the first line of human-to-human contact with customers. They are able to sell new services or upsell existing services to customers, especially with the customer's data right in front of them. A new pleasant conversation plus "Oh by the way, did you know that you could get service ABC that would help you?" is something that an LLM or ATM can't do reliably.
There's a tremendous amount of opportunity available with well-trained tellers.
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.
That huge job loss also means no hiring. If you were a bank teller you would seriously need to consider a job switch
Any time I needed anything advanced, I get shuffled to someone else.
Getting rid of them isn't a good thing.
Entry-level jobs are important.
> 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?
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...
Plenty of businesses need very custom software but couldn't realistically build it before.
Previously, software devs were just way too expensive for small businesses to employ. You can't do much with just 1 dev in the past anyway. No point in hiring one. Better go with an agency or use off the shelf software that probably doesn't fill all your needs.
IE. If a top tier dev make $1m today, they'll make $5m in the future. If the average makes $100k today, they'll maybe make $60k.
AI likely enables the best of the best to be much more productive while your average dev will see more productivity but less overall.
How silly of me to rely on reality when it’s so obvious that AI is benefiting us all.
Anyways, this is the start. Companies are adjusting. You hear a lot about layoffs but unemployments. But we're in a high interest environment with disruptions left and right. Companies are trying to figure out what their strategy is going forward.
I don't expect to see a boom in software developer hiring. I think it'll just be flat or small growth.
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.
We have a massively distorted economy driven by debt financialization and legalised banking cartels. It leads to weird inversions. For example as long as housing gets increasingly expensive at a predictable rate the housing becomes more affordable instead of less as banks are more able to lend money. The inverse is also true, if housing were to drop at a predictable rate fewer people would be able to get a mortgage on the house so fewer people could afford to buy one. Housing won't drop below cost of materials and labor (ignoring people dumping housing to get rid of tax debts as I would include such obligations in the cost of acquisition). Long term it's not sustainable but long term is multi-generational.
We have a K shaped economy. Top earners take the majority. The top 20% make up 63% of all spending, and the top 10% accounted for more than 49%. The highest on record. Businesses adapt to reality and target the best market, in this case the top 10 to 20%, and the rest just get ignored, like in many countries around the world.
All that unlocked money? In a K shaped economy it mostly goes to those at the top, who look to new places to park/invest it, raising housing prices, moving the squeeze of excess capital looking for gains to places like nursing homes and veterinary offices. That doesn't result in prices going down, but in them going up.
The benefit to the average American will be more capital in the top earners' hands looking for more ways to do VC style squeezes in markets previously not as ruthless but worth moving to now as there are less and less 'untapped' areas to squeeze (because the top 10-20% need more places to park more capital). The US now has more VC funds than McDonalds.
The only solution here is to stop tying people's value to their productivity. That makes a lot of sense in the 1900s but it makes a lot less sense when the primary faucet of productivity is automation. If you insist on tying a person's fundamental right to a decent and secure life to their productivity and then take away their ability to be productive you're left with a permenant and growing underclass of undesirables and an increasingly slim pantheon of demigods at the top.
We have written like, an ocean of scifi about this very subject and somehow we still fail to properly consider this as a likely outcome.
If goods aren't being sold, then the price will increase.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
bdcravens•1h ago
bigstrat2003•1h ago
bpfrh•52m ago
It's also easier to scan payments via app than go to the bank, something that is only possible via native like apps
saltmate•20m ago