Inspired by this thread, I got curious as to how many Dopers have had a job that no longer exists due to automation. I’m not so much talking about “I used to program in BASIC but real programmers don’t use that anymore” or “My prior job is still being done, but somewhere else on the globe”. I’m more interested in “I had a job doing X, but now human intervention is not required (or greatly reduced the necessary workforce)”. And I don’t mean that you had to still be working the job when it happened, just think back over your career for examples.
Feel free to share how you adapted/moved on or whether you saw the writing on the wall soon enough to bail.
I can’t think of any of my prior jobs that have been completely eliminated. There are fewer retail clerk and bank tellers than there were when I was working in those jobs, but they are still around.
I used to weigh the veggies at the supermarket, and put the little stickers on the bag to say how much it cost. Nowadays, the auto-checkout takes care of that.
Mind you:
a) That wasn’t all of my job, I also had to keep the shelves stacked (but the weighing was the FUN part!), and
b) Having an employee on duty was as much loss prevention as anything else - stop people weighing out their papayas as potatoes. I guess they decided to trust their customers…
Not a full-time job, but in 1999 I filled in for machine operators at the local auto parts factory during their summer break. Those machines were from the 50s, now in a museum, and presumably replaced by something requiring a lot less human interaction.
My first non-babysitting job was PBX operator. I’m pretty sure they’ve all been replaced by phone trees.
Another part of that job was running the mimeograph machine - do those even exist any more? Yeah, I know, people still make copies, but copiers don’t have the same scent.
Then there was the flex-o-writer. I would feed in the pink punched tapes to make multiple copies of bills of lading so the clerks only needed to type in a quantity and a total. All of that is now on a computer, which is blissfully quieter than that clacking of the typing machine.
When I was in the Navy working as an electronics technician, there were computer programs to help troubleshoot problems, but sometimes the programs came up with the wrong answer, so the technicians still had a vital function.
I was a paralegal in a former life. The job of paralegal is still alive and well, but many of its onetime duties have been automated. 40 years ago, paralegals would check out and copy documents from courthouses and Federal agencies that the lawyers needed, and bring them back to the law office. That used to occupy maybe one-third of my time. Nowadays that’s a click of the mouse.
Another task that’s surely been automated is cite-checking of legal briefs - that is, going through and verifying that the cites to court decisions hadn’t been reversed or had their applicability narrowed by subsequent decisions. This involved checking each cite by hand against a standard reference (Shepard’s) which would tell you these things. I don’t keep up with these things, but it’s hard to imagine that that hasn’t been automated for a couple of decades by now.
I did a good deal of my work in trusts and estates. The number of estates subject to Federal estate taxation has been dramatically reduced, of course, as the minimum estate subject to that tax has gone from $60,000 in 1977 to several million at present. But estates, just like people, have income that gets taxed (on form 1041 instead of 1040), even if they aren’t subject to the estate tax. And that surely has the equivalent of TurboTax et al.
I used to work in Master Control at a television station. Most of the job (loading and cuing tapes, manually doing program switches, etc) is done by computers now: digital media with the transitions pre-programmed by an engineer. I assume the FCC still requires one guy to hang around and make sure nothing catches on fire.
My wife works in interpretation and translation. Much of that is done by stuff like Google Translate now for low-impact work although difficult fields like medical, legal or diplomatic translation still need a human touch.
A lot of my job is now done using automation, but my job has not been completely eliminated. OTOH, on jobs that I used to run a crew of 40, I now might have 12 people. And we get things done in less time, as well.
In 1979 I had a part-time job at a large hospital, as a file clerk. Part of my job was to take reports that had been transcribed in-house to the patient’s charts on the various floors of the hospital. I would start at the 10th floor and work my way down, manually filing the reports into the paper charts. I would also manually file reports into charts of the patients who had been discharged, in the file room. Now thanks to electronic medical records, that job is no longer necessary.
My first job involved collecting radio station information that was organized on an in-house Data General mini computer and then sold to clients. However, most of the collection and distribution was done manually, and now is almost completely online.
At the time, there were still guys who picked up multiple copies of the FCC’s daily reports and ran around (literally) delivering them to nearby engineering and law firms. I would go to the FCC building reading room to see the copies of applications and license information, which I then wrote down by hand on forms with information that was later typed into the minicomputer back at the office. Our main database and weekly updates were printed on a wide-paper line printer, which was then sent to a photocopy shop that made multiple reduced-sized copies on 8-1/2x11 inch paper, which were mailed to our subscribers.
Almost everything we did back then is now easily accessible via FCC.GOV.
Before going up to university 50 years ago, I had a temporary clerical job cross-checking the local authority housing department’s rent collectors’ returns. It meant using a mechanical adding machine to tot up what the rent collectors said they had collected and what had been paid into the rent account for each property. Work out just how many changes there would be to a modern system (apart from the fact that local authorities here mostly don’t directly administer social housing any more).
Not completely replaced but I spent some time in the early 90s making travel reservations over the phone. I’m sure the internet has made the massive call centers with hundreds of agents taking inbound calls 24 hours a day a thing of the past and travel companies can probably make do with 10% of the staff they used to have.
I get what you’re saying, but this is more an example of a company that refused to adapt to technology than jobs being replaced by automation. I mean, no one works for Kodak any more but every business they were in still exists.
No—well, unless you count “cashier at Borders Books”—but I actually worked at a place where another on-site job had been done by one of my great+ grandfathers after he first came to this country, but is now performed by a robot.
