Alex Mayyasi

This is a machine who's literally an automated teller machine, and you're a bank teller.

What's going to happen to you?

This is a machine literally designed to automate your job.

The surprising thing he found is that for decades, the number of bank tellers employed by banks continued to go up.

Not like fast, you know, it was slow growth, but, you know, the number of bank tellers did not go down.

It kept going up for decades.

But then there were kind of two things that happened that helped explain why bank tellers did not go to extinction because of ATMs.

One is this kind of interesting phenomenon where sometimes technology that automates part of your job, it will actually make it so much cheaper to do that thing that companies do more of it.

So in this case, banks, by installing ATMs, the cost of running a bank branch went down.

And as a result, they didn't say, OK, let's fire all the bank tellers.

They said, oh, great, let's open more bank branches.

And so the number of tellers at each branch went down.

But because they were opening new branches to serve more customers, the number of tellers went up.

And another is this dynamic that there are some cases where machines or technology just automate 100% of someone's job.

But it's actually more common that a part of your job is automated.

Researchers, economists like to say that tasks are automated, not jobs.

So for bank tellers, maybe they spent less time counting cash and handing it to customers because the ATM could do that.

But that meant that the bank tellers had more time to do things that ATMs could not do, like talk to customers and say, hey, have you thought about signing up for a credit card with our bank?

Or, hey, we have great financial advisors who could help you plan for retirement.

And so a machine explicitly designed to automate their job didn't necessarily put them out of work because they could do other things with the time that it freed up.