Robots will not take your job | Hacker News Reader

Robots will not take your job

wired.com

15 pointstwowo7 comments

The "robotjobpocalypse" was pretty much always just a politically expedient way of scapegoating aggregate job losses caused by outsourcing and austerity.

It's also something that some companies (notably Foxconn & Restaurants) like to threaten regularly to keep their employees on their toes.

I would guess there are some former bank tellers that disagree.

Ironically, there are far more bank tellers now than before ATMs were introduced:

http://www.aei.org/publication/what-atms-bank-tellers-rise-r...

But of course, some occupations will be obsoleted by automation. The flip side to that is that it creates consumer savings that result in spending in new areas of the economy, which creates replacement jobs.

The push to get rid of the tellers is fairly recent.

Driven not by the normal ATM, but the recent full service ones.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/bank-tellers...

http://nypost.com/2015/05/28/chase-to-lay-off-nearly-5k-tell...

If you look at that chart, the growth rate in tellers dropped precipitously as the ATMs came online, and the stabilized at a very low rate (and that's absolute number of tellers, not proportion of population.)

The population grew about 24% between 1990 and 2010, while bank teller jobs only grew 10%.

But the 90's had a recession (the cause of that dip you mentioned), and ATMs allowed banks to expand instead of having to close offices because they couldn't keep them fully staffed. So ATMs either cost bank tellers 80,000ish jobs or stopped at least as many from getting fired in the 90's, while creating 50,000 more jobs.

None of it matters, because ATMs could still improve enough to replace bank tellers outright instead of just taking care of the low-hanging fruit that eats up half their time.

There's an upper bound to the number of branches a bank needs. So growth can't rely on building new branch offices as the number of required employees per office drops, like the article says happened.

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