Way back around 1950, I worked as a soda jerk in a couple of drugstores. Those jobs disappeared by 1960 when drugstores dropped soda fountains. Since then every job I ever held is still going strong: stock boy in an auto parts store, technician in a lab, teaching (and doing) math. They’re not going away for a long long time.
Me, personally, no.
But with regard to phones, a rare Bay Area thunderstorm knocked out the dial tone on my digital phone last week. In the old days a repair person would come out, not long ago you’d call a help desk. My internet still worked, so I went to the AT&T website, and it automatically and correctly diagnosed the problem and ordered me new kit. The only person I talked to during the entire process was the guy at the UPS store when I sent back the dead hardware.
When I was at MIT back in Bell System days we (illegally) installed lots of phones ourselves.
Same here.
I also worked as a PBX operator (“Switchboard!”) in college, as a freshman, but it was a pretty old board even then, and it was gone before I even graduated.
Yeah, I was a disc jockey. On a 6-hour weekend shift, I’d have to start planning a 2-minute pee break 20 minutes in advance. Now, drive by a radio station on a weekend, there are no human bodies inside. A computer is fitting ads into a satellite music feed.
I was a runner at the Chicago Board of Trade for a year, between High School and college. We runners literally ran with pieces of paper that had buy and sell orders on them delivering them to the traders in the pits and looked for their companies papers with the completed orders on the floor to pick up and deliver back to the order desk.
I’d guess there are in the world still a few open outcry pits left and some trading that happens with physical traders there, but most trading is electronic now. Few runners left.
My summer job in college in the early 1970s was as an elevator operator in a luxury apartment building on Park Avenue in New York. It was actually a manual elevator where you had to operate it with a big handle instead of just pushing buttons. They were obsolete even then. Our building kept them mainly for show.
I’m a fix-it techy type, doing mechanical, electrical, electronic, hydraulics, and pneumatics (all parts of modern robotics), so my job is never going away!
At least until someone invents/creates a robot that can repair other robots.
Just remembered one. In the summer of 1969 I was a messenger in Manhattan for an accounting company. The subway was so cheap then that no one used bicycles. I ran stuff all over the island - most of which would be faxed or emailed today.
New Yorkers, are there still bicycle messengers? I don’t recall seeing anything about people being run over by them in the Times lately.
I was a credit clerk. When customers wanted to charge a large purchase, the store would call us, and we’d look up the customer information in big books and determine on the spot whether to approve the purchase. That’s been completely automated.
I was also a radio disc jockey. In those days that meant selecting and playing records, reading commercials and news, even turning the transmitter on and off. Now there are radio stations that don’t even have a human being on site.
Actual total job elimination/replacement by automation has always been rare.
The main thing that actually happens a very great deal, is that once complicated and difficult jobs, are made easier using automation or other means, allowing employers to use lower paid, less skilled workers to do the jobs. So if you limit your search to ONLY jobs which were entirely eliminated, it will be an extremely short list.
The arrival of extremely low cost computing power in my area of employment, technology maintenance and support, has driven down wages steadily. When I was young, I had to have thorough detailed training and then build experience in the field, to be able to keep the various equipment and tool systems I supported, functioning. Once computers could be inserted into everything, adjustments and maintenance subtasks were gradually eliminated, to the point where a fresh trainee only had to be taught to swap out modules.
Unfortunately for me, my timing and my guesswork about the future was bad, so as my job declined in value to the system, my backup plan (IT support) was automated and shipped offshore as well.
One job that I’ve seen be almost entirely eliminated in my lifetime, is secretarial. When I began in the workforce last century, every business I went into had hundreds of people employed as secretaries. The ability to operate a typewriter well guaranteed you a living wage. Those jobs were mostly eliminated by the combination of three things:
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cheap personal computers, that the bosses could use themselves to directly communicate;
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the creation of complex word processing software, that eliminated the need for shorthand, for editing, and for presentation format knowledge;
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the elimination of any expectation of competent writing skills. This last is the most annoying to me. In order to get rid of even more workers to save money, badly written advertising and instructions are now considered a part of the deal for consumers.
One more thing, a lot of jobs were eliminated or cheapened, by another rather sneaky but now universal practice: shifting responsibilities from the product manufacturers, to the CUSTOMERS. When I started out in my own small role, any time a machine had problems, the users would immediately stop work, and call me in. I would do whatever was needed to get them working again. But during the 1980’s an 1990’s especially, all companies began requiring users to do their own troubleshooting, and half the time, to do their own parts replacements. That kind of shift has happened many times in the past as well, but in the last thirty years, the process has been tremendously sped up by the rapid transition to instant long-distance communications systems.
None of mine have, nor are likely to any time soon.
My first job was as an electrician’s assistant, mostly doing house calls for existing homes. I can imagine new-construction electrical maybe someday becoming automated, but we saw such a wide variety of problems (often caused by previous incompetent electrical work) that you’d need a full-on strong AI to be able to address all of them.
All of my subsequent jobs have been interacting with children and/or students, and they’re unpredictable enough that, again, humans will be needed for the foreseeable future. Automation might decrease the number of humans needed, or make the human work more effective, but it’s not going to replace us entirely.
Long ago, I was the board boy who kept a sharp eye on the ticker tape projection, and wrote with chalk on a very large blackboard the latest stock prices as they came over the wire. When the market opened, I couldn’t keep up with the action, and the “board sitters” in the room would shout out to me as I furiously hopped from one panel to the next. “Telephone (AT&T), up an eighth!” “Standard Oil, down a half!”
After about an hour, the tape slowed down enough that I could take a break, and when I got back, the board sitters would update me from memory so I could update the chalkboard. We kept track of about 150 important stocks on the board display.
If anyone walked in and wanted to know the price of a stock that was not on the board, he could go over to a broker, who would look it up on the Quotron. But it might be faster just to shout out the stock name and a board sitter would probably have the latest price in his head.
The brokerage employed two girls who sat at the Quotrons all day and answered the phones. These were provided to good customers, not the general public. They were kept busy. “Telephone?” “59 and an eighth, on a block of 10,000.”
After the office closed, I had to wipe off all the chalk and oil the board with furniture polish to get it ready for the next day.
The brokerage I worked at was one of the last to automate. Most others in the neighborhood had already installed those clickety-clackety boards, which were eventually replaced with digital displays. Nowadays, I’m not sure stock market board displays of any kind exist. I’m not sure walk-in brokerages exist.
Later, I had a job in the brokerage’s back office during the paperwork crunch of the 1960’s, when the backlog of transaction processing was so bad the 5 day a week stock market reduced their hours to 4 days/week so we could catch up. At my company, each stock transaction was punched onto an IBM card and fed to the 360 in batches, but there was no program to handle the calculations (commission, taxes, etc.) for bond trades, so we did those by hand.
We handled large stock trades for mutual funds, and I had to phone (no email or fax) the trade department of each fund and verify our numbers were correct for that day’s trades so we could catch both human and computer mistakes in time. We used mechanical calculators and looked up fees in books.
Stock certificates were hand-delivered between brokerages by couriers. You can imagine how reliable this was. I wasn’t in New York, but I understood that the certificates were typically delivered by old men in long coats, stuffed with a million dollars worth of paper, walking down Wall Street between firms. Anytime a stock sale was made, but the certificate didn’t get delivered in time, this was a “fail,” and many people were employed just to track these down and/or replace them.
None of these jobs exist now.
25 years ago, my job was a lot more labor intensive. Now my job involves sitting in front of a computer more monitoring the robots that do all the crap I used to do.
I’m still a typesetter, though it’s now digital prepress. I suppose the role and job description has changed over the years. As well as deadlines. Where once we had a week or two to get a book out, it’s now or two days.
Where my shop once had 100+ people, it’s now me, and a new trainee doing all the first pass stuff (me mosly), while another gal + the trainee do most of the second and third passes.
We also have a few proof readers in-house, though we send some stuff out to freelance proof readers.
We mainly use InDesign.
Yeah, that is a pretty dead career, though my company has a couple of them. We also contract out to a half-dozen or so freelancers.
I don’t know. My wife’s book got proofread to hell. (It was great.) And The New Yorker still does a good job. But for a lot of writing, the drive to get it out right now means that there isn’t time to get it 100% correct.
My first job was a pinsetter in a bowling alley. It was already partly automated. Pick up the pins by hand, put them in the ten slots in a rack, push the rack down and release the pins. and let the spring-loaded rack rise back up out of the way. Nickel a line, work two adjacent lanes at once.
My first real job in accounting included about a month’s work every year to prepare the department’s input to the annual report. Hundreds of amounts copied from account records onto table-top size paper spreadsheets (in pencil), totals calculated down and across, recalculated several times when the grand totals didn’t match, then reviewed, corrected, reviewed again, then updated as accounts were finalized for year-end. A few years later we got an IBM PC with Lotus 1-2-3 v.1.0, and the whole thing could be done in a few hours, including updates and corrections. When I retired, the accounting system directly produced near print-ready financial statements. My previous job included a lot of correspondence with clients, typed up by our in-office secretarial pool - all of whom disappeared a couple of years later.
My wife worked in a small publishing company, producing small-run books and technical manuals. She did typing, proofreading, and produced print-ready copy on an IBM phototypsetter. Those jobs and the whole business model have pretty much been automated out of existence.
Not so fast.
She’s not a Doper, but kaylasmom used to develop X-rays, first at military clinics in Hawaii, then at a hospital in Los Alamitos, CA (where her workload would occasionally include X-rays of the racehorses at the track two miles down the road).
I’m in Anaheim. Please provide the location of the nearest Fotomat. 