Art 23 ↔ Art 26 — Job displacement from automation may reduce workers' right to work and fair compensation (Article 23) while technological advancement supports broader access to education and economic understanding (Article 26); content analyzes this tension without resolving it.

bdcravens 2026-03-12 15:01 UTC link

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.

ahartmetz 2026-03-12 15:09 UTC link

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?

djoldman 2026-03-12 15:11 UTC link

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.

paxys 2026-03-12 15:18 UTC link

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?

AngryData 2026-03-12 15:27 UTC link

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.

GuB-42 2026-03-12 15:56 UTC link

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.

forinti 2026-03-12 17:46 UTC link

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.

lchengify 2026-03-12 18:28 UTC link

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.

pelagicAustral 2026-03-12 18:35 UTC link

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.

tingletech 2026-03-12 19:45 UTC link

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.

stephbook 2026-03-12 20:26 UTC link

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.

jacquesm 2026-03-12 23:30 UTC link

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.

atmosx 2026-03-13 04:38 UTC link

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.

LarsDu88 2026-03-13 07:35 UTC link

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.

nlitsme 2026-03-13 08:01 UTC link

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.

Otterly99 2026-03-13 11:42 UTC link

I feel like even the phrasing of the original assumption that "we have more bank tellers now that we had before", which seems to imply that ATMs didn't affect or even boost the number of bank tellers is flawed.

If you look at the graph, the number of bank tellers from 1980 to 2010 went from roughly 500k to 550k (a 10% increase). However, the U.S. population grew from 220M to 305M in the same period (a 40% increase). To me, that seems to indicate that less and less people were becoming bank tellers after the invention of the ATM. Although from the graph again, you can see that the correlation is quite poor anyway.

mattmaroon 2026-03-13 11:49 UTC link

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.

NoSalt 2026-03-13 14:55 UTC link

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.

HarHarVeryFunny 2026-03-13 16:00 UTC link

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.

sjeiuhvdiidi 2026-03-15 10:07 UTC link

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

bigstrat2003 2026-03-12 15:07 UTC link

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.

dylan604 2026-03-12 15:12 UTC link

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

forinti 2026-03-12 15:16 UTC link

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.

ahartmetz 2026-03-12 15:20 UTC link

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.)

aurareturn 2026-03-12 15:22 UTC link

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...

conductr 2026-03-12 15:23 UTC link

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.

mrweasel 2026-03-12 16:04 UTC link

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.

bobthepanda 2026-03-12 16:12 UTC link

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.

saltmate 2026-03-12 16:28 UTC link

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

Cpoll 2026-03-12 16:58 UTC link

> 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.

jollyllama 2026-03-12 17:29 UTC link

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.

rayiner 2026-03-12 17:40 UTC link

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.

whatisthiseven 2026-03-12 18:00 UTC link

> 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.

cheema33 2026-03-12 18:47 UTC link

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.

cogman10 2026-03-12 20:34 UTC link

That labor cheapness is enabled by a cheapness of cost of living. Those things all tend to feed onto each other.

> I always feel sad about these people, trapped in an economic system that forces them into useless labour when they could spend their time learning actually useful skills.

It's useful labor. Yes you could do it yourself, but it gives them a job which they can ultimately use to afford food and where they live.

I mostly only feel bad for kids doing that sort of labor as it means they aren't getting an education. But for an adult? It speaks to something a bit right about their economic situation that they can stay a float by merely fetching items in a store.

I wish in the US that it was possible for someone to make a living doing doordash or instacart.

nine_k 2026-03-12 20:36 UTC link

> 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?

kccqzy 2026-03-12 21:35 UTC link

Some countries prioritize having low unemployment numbers, because they believe that unemployment leads to unrest. Governments can choose to subsidize the cost of labor to achieve this.

Also I think it is preposterous to claim that these people are trapped.

idop 2026-03-12 21:48 UTC link

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.

nunez 2026-03-13 01:59 UTC link

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).

metalcrow 2026-03-13 01:59 UTC link

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

citizenpaul 2026-03-13 07:06 UTC link

>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

tossandthrow 2026-03-13 08:07 UTC link

> 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.

ardeaver 2026-03-13 08:48 UTC link

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.

bogtog 2026-03-13 10:38 UTC link

> 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)

techblueberry 2026-03-13 12:40 UTC link

“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?

techblueberry 2026-03-13 12:47 UTC link

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.

duskdozer 2026-03-13 13:43 UTC link

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.

giancarlostoro 2026-03-13 13:58 UTC link

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

HarHarVeryFunny 2026-03-13 15:38 UTC link

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.

tuatoru 2026-03-14 04:41 UTC link

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.

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