The AI Automation Paradox - an ATM Story

The Curious Afterlife of a Bank TellerOr why robots have been weirdly bad at their one job In 1985, if you had told a bank executive that thirty years after the rise of the ATM the United States would employ more bank tellers than ever, you would have been gently escorted from the premises. Probably by a security guard. Maybe even by a teller. And yet, this is what actually happened. The Plot Twist Nobody WroteThe American Enterprise Institute's James Pethokoukis revisits a story that should be tattooed on the inside of every techno-pessimist's eyelid. When ATMs arrived in the 1970s, the obvious prediction was the obvious one - machines do tellering, tellers stop tellering, slow piano music plays over a montage of unemployed cash-handlers staring at the rain. The actual sequence of events, as economist James Bessen documents in Learning by Doing, was less Greek tragedy, more weird sitcom. Yes, ATMs reduced the tellers needed per branch. An average urban branch went from needing about…