The writer is author of ‘How Progress Ends: Technology, Innovation, and the Fate of Nations’ and an associate professor at Oxford university
Whenever AI automation anxiety arises, optimists like to point to the bank teller. US vice-president JD Vance repeated the idea last year: ATMs automated the teller’s core task and yet teller employment rose for three decades. The implicit assumption is that if automation could not kill the teller, surely AI will not kill the accountant.
As economics writer David Oks has noted, this reassurance is premature. Once customers could deposit a cheque by photographing it and send money without visiting a branch, the teller was replaced — not by a better machine in the bank but by the customer outside it.
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