Slashdot Mirror
In Banking, 70% of Front-Office Jobs Will Be Dislocated By AI (americanbanker.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: Some bankers and observers have suggested that only the boring parts of jobs, drudgery like data entry and filling out forms, will disappear so the humans will be able to focus on more interesting tasks, and that no actual jobs will be lost. Bank employees themselves seem to think this. In an Accenture survey released last week of 1,300 nonexecutive bank employees, 67% said they believe AI will improve their work-life balance, and 57% expect it will expand their career prospects.
But Autonomous Research also issued a report last week that estimated that in the U.S. alone, 2.5 million financial services employees will be "exposed" to AI technologies in the front, middle and back office -- 1.2 million working in banking and lending, 460,000 in investment management, and 865,000 in insurance. "These functions will see 20-40% productivity gains, or unemployment, depending on your vantage point," the report stated. About $1 trillion in costs will be exposed to AI transformation in financial services sectors by 2030, according to the report; $450 million of this would in banking. In banking, 70% of front-office jobs will be dislocated by AI, the researchers say: 485,000 tellers, 219,000 customer service representatives, and 174,000 loan interviewers and clerks. They will be replaced by chatbots, voice assistants and automated authentication and biometric technology.
And 96,000 financial managers and 13,000 compliance officers will be laid off as AI-based anti-money-laundering, anti-fraud, compliance and monitoring software fills in. Another 250,000 loan officers will lose their jobs to AI-based credit underwriting and smart contracts technology.
But Autonomous Research also issued a report last week that estimated that in the U.S. alone, 2.5 million financial services employees will be "exposed" to AI technologies in the front, middle and back office -- 1.2 million working in banking and lending, 460,000 in investment management, and 865,000 in insurance. "These functions will see 20-40% productivity gains, or unemployment, depending on your vantage point," the report stated. About $1 trillion in costs will be exposed to AI transformation in financial services sectors by 2030, according to the report; $450 million of this would in banking. In banking, 70% of front-office jobs will be dislocated by AI, the researchers say: 485,000 tellers, 219,000 customer service representatives, and 174,000 loan interviewers and clerks. They will be replaced by chatbots, voice assistants and automated authentication and biometric technology.
And 96,000 financial managers and 13,000 compliance officers will be laid off as AI-based anti-money-laundering, anti-fraud, compliance and monitoring software fills in. Another 250,000 loan officers will lose their jobs to AI-based credit underwriting and smart contracts technology.
No problem so long as we can repeatedly press "star", "pound", or "0" until we're connected to a human.
The end of slavery was going to take all the jobs. Then it was going to be industrialization that was going to take all the jobs. Then it was going to be immigrants. Than automation. Then globalization. Now it's immigrants again that are taking all the jobs.
Yet, after all that, we still have jobs in this nation.
Something tells me that even with the future of AI people will still find things to do.
I don't know how much more AI can reduce the number of manual jobs in banks. In Europe most activities can, and are, performed by ATMs. Either ones in-branch, in a halfway lobby or street-facing. Here they don't just dispense cash, buy will accept pay-ins of cash or cheques, allow you to order statements, chequebooks (if there are still any people who use them?) and they will even scan bills and pay them. The bill-paying system can also set up a direct debit so the same bill will be paid automatically in the future if you wish.
The only people who seem to actually require human interaction are those who are uncomfortable with the thought of pressing buttons and following on-screen instructions and those few who need something unusual such as a foreign currency conversion (although banks offer the worst exchange rates) or who want to pay-in a bagfull of pennies.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
Lets get the fuckin auto pilot working on de fuckin Telsa's b4 we start to worrin about dem take our jobs!
Auto-filling a PDF form is a lot easier than navigation in the physical world. Replacing many banking jobs wouldn't even require AI. A Perl script should be enough.
If you and , "they" are thinking of that stupid computer bitch that never understands what you say and won't send you a real person, then I'd say no fucking way it will happen.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Yes, there was employment after the industrial revolution. It took about 80 years for new tech to catch up and replace the jobs lost. During that time there was mass unemployment, poverty and wars. Lots of wars. Two lost generations. But hey, the survivors will thank us, right?
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
in an economy with a "3.9% unemployment rate". That should tell you something if you're even paying a _little_ attention. That unemployment rate is bunk. People left the job market when they couldn't get jobs that paid enough to go to work. As the economy got worse they eventually ran out of money or relatives and had to do whatever. Hence the 'gig' economy and what not.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
There still seems to be individuals who want that face to face interaction with a person. I know an android may fill in that aspect of business in replacing the face to face but that's years off in both robotics and AI with human behavior so it can seem relatable. The financial institution I work for seems to be focusing on relationships with the community. One thing they could automate(or eliminate) is middle management.
There will come a time with AIs when they are advanced enough to recognise and provoke emotional reactions in people to get a corresponding response. This is what Narcissistic people do and I think it's reasonable to draw the comparison because AIs don't have any emotions, it's a computer.
I came to this realisation about narcissists from a book I am writing that is a study of their style of psychological abuse. What I observed was that for those people they are disconnected from the normal emotions of a fully functional human being and are usually only left with shame. Except an AI doesn't even have shame.
Consequently I deduced that a narcissistic human in that state has had many of the normal functions of a human being atrophied (because of the abuses they themselves suffered) so in that sense they have similar attributes to the type of computing power we may see in the coming decades.
To be specific, people with these personality disorders have responses based in rote learning, they learn what an appropriate response is instead of generating one from emotions they don't have, they then respond to provoke a response from a person based on similar rote learning. That's not a lot different from the way an AI collects and responds to inputs.
Turning things upside down, were we to examine a human brain from the perspective of computing power and then reduced it's functionality just how much would you have to take away to get a AI in 20, 10 and 5 years from now considering the state the technology is at now?
Just how damaged would a human brain have to be to mimic an AI?
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
You do know that immigrants create jobs as well as occupying them, right?
Also, who will retrain the employees and enforce shorter workweeks without some kind of communist/socialist intervention? Most companies I know don't want to spend money on retraining, and want employees to work as many hours as possible, presumably so they don't have to pay benefits to additional employees. They may also resent paying a living wage for 30 hours of work instead of 50. So they might need some strong-arming to go along with your plan.
Think of what some smart people can do with an AI:
"Actually, I'm paying off a mortgage early."
AI: You're in the wrong line, customer. Over there
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
If all standard consumer accounts are that way though, and you need a minimum of $750K in deposits to rate a real human banker to talk to, you won't have a choice.
> they were the jobs data from LAST YEAR.
If you'd like to see the effects of ever-increasing automation, machines getting better and better, compare those last-year numbers to earlier years. Check out how real (inflation adjusted) median income has changed in the last 10 years (up 8%), the last 20 years (up 25%), the last 50 years (up 50%).
All it's going to ever be used for is oppression on a scale we can barely conceive. Just think what could be done with the absurd quantity of data the NSA is slurping up, all in anticipation of an "AI" to process it and come to biased and fallacious conclusions! Having some fucking algorithm deduce which citizens are problematic and flagging them to be "taken care of" sounds like progress to me! There's just no way such a system could possibly have a false positive rate so high that it's practically useless for its stated purpose, I refuse to believe it!
we're giving more and more money to a smaller and smaller group of people. Rather than "trickle down" they're using that money to buy out their competitors. They've got so much of it they can and will pay 2-3x what any sane person would. Then they can make their money back because they have a virtual monopoly. Years of weak anti-trust enforcement in the name of ending "job-killing regulations" lets them do it.
The people who are setting you up have been hard at work on it since Regan was in the Whitehouse. Obama was a minor bump in the road (very minor, he's still a Corporate Democrat) but they've bought out pretty much everything now. That last tax cut was overwhelmingly unpopular. A Tax Cut. Unpopular. Let that sink in. And It _still_ passed. The ruling class were going around saying if it didn't they'd cut the politicians off. We've got open bribery and nobody seems to care. Seriously, at this point I don't think you or me stand a chance...
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
It seems to be a revolution but infact it will hurt the humans.
GS Home Remodeling
AI will strip more jobs than foreign workers already do.... the only way you will get better work/life balance is if you actually own the AI, or the business that uses it.
Question: do you go to a teller to get money or do you go to the ATM? Many people still like to go to the bank. Especially older people. There are already fewer people working in bsnking.
I hardly go to a bank. Last thing I did was send a question via a webform. That sees to it that the answer can be given with less time used by the person answering. E.g. autentification is alteadu done. No need to look up the account.
Only that means that you need about 50% of the time. Now guess if they are givong that back to the people in ectra free time to baance the work/home time or if they are going to fire 50% of those people. And even if they do not fore anybody, you can be sure they do not hire new people.
And that is just a form. Not even any AI involved.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Train the people? They are unable to pay for it now. Less working hours? Now THAT is what socialism is about. So why not start with that?
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
If everybody became a C++ Ninja with a PHD in Computer Science and another in Math, then there would be no unemployed people. Because we know Google could employ 160 Million of such Ninjas.
And all those nasty manufacturing jobs can be done in a sweatshop in China. That's good for Google and Apple. Both have spent lots of good money to bribe Clinton. There must be a Return on Investment !
And yeah, who cares about fellow Americans, if they are mere manufacturing workers. They should eat cake !
Question: do you go to a teller to get money or do you go to the ATM? Many people still like to go to the bank. Especially older people. There are already fewer people working in bsnking.
I remember reading somewhere that after the introduction of the ATM, the total number of bank tellers actually went up. Yes, with ATMs, banks now needed less tellers per branch. This however made branches cheaper to operate, so they opened more of them.
But who am I kidding? Bankers are all about making more money for themselves, and screw the customer and the horse he rode in on.
So this will make probably make the experience of dealing with banks even more teeth-grindingly frustrating.
If that doesnt fully solve the problem, we can go to a shorter work week to distribute remaining work evenly among more people in smaller chunks. There is no need for communist/socialist basic incomes and other crackpot ideas.
I don't see how enforcing a shorter work week (while keeping the same total income I presume, i.e. increasing the hourly wage - otherwise, what is the point exactly?) is less communist/socialist/crackpot than a basic income (which is just a cheaper way to distribute welfare payments to the unemployed, which already exist in most countries).
Either way, you're advocating for intervention in the economy to stop companies doing what you presume they would otherwise do: fire people they don't need anymore.
"and they will even scan bills and pay them."
Until the image recognition fails because something is hand written and you need a human to do it manually.
The only people pressing for reducing actual humans in banks are the banks themselves (to save money) and millenial geeks who break out in a cold sweat whenever they have to engage in human interaction. Normal people actually like having a fallback option of an actual person being able to help.
As soon as there is no longer an oversupply of labour, employers will get much nicer. Basic law of market economy.
Or that might get them to accelerate their investment into replacing human labour with machine labour. Especially if they want to compete globally with companies based in countries with cheaper labour. Or they might outsource production to a cheap labour country. Or... there are many possible outcomes, the one you list is just one possible of many. It's been seen before.
The one thing no one has mentioned is that there is a way to reduce the cost of labour in advanced Western countries without cutting people's net earnings: drastically cut income taxes. Western tax systems are heavily focused on taxing income from salaries and wages. This makes human labour expensive, and stimulates businesses to think of replacing it. Cut my taxes by say 30% and I'll be willing to work for a lower gross salary - hell, I can probably get a raise in net terms while my employer also saves money.
There is really no need for hysterics. First, stop all immigration. Now. This is so that the remaining work can go to our own citizens.
Yeah, let's not panic...as you suggest a "solution" that has proven impossible for even Trump to pull off and not look like the largest asshole in the universe. But hey, don't panic.
Secondly, retrain employees for the jobs that are available, as needed.
Oh, this one again. There's a valid reason a billion humans hold highly repetitive simple jobs, and often for their entire life. Because they're not mentally capable of getting an education and being re-trained. We humans have advanced in many ways, but mental capacity isn't one of them And the entire point of automation is to take the "available" jobs.
If that doesnt fully solve the problem, we can go to a shorter work week to distribute remaining work evenly among more people in smaller chunks.
The overwhelming majority lives paycheck to paycheck, and your suggestion is to cut paychecks by 50%. Good luck with the angry mob, because you're sure as shit not going to convince employers to double their payroll costs.
There is no need for communist/socialist basic incomes and other crackpot ideas.
Understand that UBI in the future will be nothing more than that old time-tested "crackpot" concept we call Welfare today. If Welfare was such a stupidly insane idea, then we would have probably figured out how to get rid of it long ago. Humans will become unemployable. You have that problem today, and that problem will grow considerably tomorrow. Figure out how you're going to sustain families and lives, because taxing the automation overlords to pay for it sure as shit won't work; we can't get the rich to pay taxes now.
They said the same about the ATM and in return that made it cheaper to open more bank offices, essentially creating more banking jobs. Those doom and gloom folks also forget that people are very attached to their hard earned money and rather trust a person than a machine. Having real people at real brick and mortar locations will become the biggest differentiator.
Why is this never discussed? Decision making at the executive level could much more efficiently be carried out by AI.
He who forgets will be destined to remember. - EV
I'm sure a lot of people think that getting rid of all the overhead in every industry is a good idea...everything will be super-cheap, no one will pay for expensive middlemen in a transaction, etc. What I think people don't realize is that this overhead they want to get rid of is what's actually holding the economy together.
Especially in banking, both front- and back-office workers make at least a decent middle-class salary, and some make much more than that. If the pace of worker replacement is too fast, all the consumption these workers use their pay for will be removed from the system over a very short time. These workers won't pay taxes, won't buy houses and cars, won't have children, etc. Corporate office work used to be a secure alternative to factory work or the service industries...but it looks like we're in for a big change. What I wonder is what these workers will end up doing...I worked in banking IT earlier in my career and there are legions of people essentially doing manual paperwork processing, even though the paper is computer data these days.
All I'm saying is that if we want AI to take over, we're going to have to rip down the entire work-to-consume economic model, and that is not going away without a major fight.
When I actually need to go into the bank for something it's because it's something their webpage or telephone automated system can't handle and therefore I need an actual human being to help me, not some half-assed pseudo-intelligent so-called deep-learning algorithm 'expert' system.
We yeah, if you choose exclude most of the income increases, you don't have much income increase left.
As the Pew article you linked mentioned, benefits have increased 60% in the last 15 years, partly due to tax changes. The wages you cite used to be used to pay for medical care, child care, etc. Employer-covered medical (which is not included in hourly wages) has increased 79%.
The trend in recent decades has been toward tax-free compensation such as medical, dental, HSA and FSA, 401k matching, etc. Nearly half of my compensation is various tax-advantaged accounts rather than wages.
According to the CBO, between 1979 and 2011, gross median household income, adjusted for inflation, rose from $59,400 to $75,200, or 26.5%. However, once adjusted for household size, after-tax real median household income grew 46%.
I should ignore your question since it starts with a nice bomb of racism.
But the basic answer is, people work jobs making things, get paid for those jobs, then spend the money buying things. Then other people get hired to make the things they buy, and the economy and employment grow. Or if they're entrepreneurially minded (many U.S. immigrants are), they may form a successful business and begin hiring other people themselves.
This works even if they are illiterate or are born in a country you're afraid to visit.
> The number of positions that come with medical benefits is falling
Thanks for the belly laugh. You might find it interesting to go look at the actual numbers for medical benefits over the last 50 years.
Well, I have to admit whenever I go into a bank it is generally pretty boring. Presumably the AI wouldn't have to be very "intelligent." But maybe I'm just being snarky.