# What jobs have been eliminated due to automation. **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [August 13, 2019, 2:41am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-jobs-have-been-eliminated-due-to-automation/838588 "2019-08-13T02:41:40Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![Ethilrist](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ethilrist/32/4604_2.png) [@Ethilrist](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ethilrist)\ **Post date:** [August 13, 2019, 10:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-jobs-have-been-eliminated-due-to-automation/838588/41 "2019-08-13T22:27:03Z")
Cotton picking. ---
**Author:** ![thorny\_locust](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/thorny_locust/32/431_2.png) [@thorny\_locust](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/thorny_locust)\ **Post date:** [August 13, 2019, 10:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-jobs-have-been-eliminated-due-to-automation/838588/42 "2019-08-13T22:27:24Z")
> [@Little\_Nemo](#): > > I think this points to a useful distinction. I’m sure there are people who own a cow or two and milk them by hand. But I doubt there’s anyone who hires somebody to milk cows. At most, there may be some people who work as general farm hands who milk a cow as a part of their job. > > There used to be people who milked cows for a living. But any dairy farm that’s producing enough milk nowadays to make it a full-time job is going to have automated milking. So while milking cows by hand still exists, the job of milking cows by hand has been eliminated. Milking machines don’t mean that no humans are involved. Humans are needed not only to deal with the machinery, but to attach and detach equipment, clean udders, check for mastitis, clean equipment – there’s plenty of other stuff. Hand milking of a particular cow is sometimes necessary. Dairy farms hire milkers all the time. ---
**Author:** ![scr4](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/59ef9b/32.png) [@scr4](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/scr4)\ **Post date:** [August 13, 2019, 10:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-jobs-have-been-eliminated-due-to-automation/838588/43 "2019-08-13T22:55:32Z")
> [@campp](#): > > Will the future bring crew-less trains? Probably. Eventually. Right now it’s an order of magnitude more difficult than the current driver-less big rigs on the highway. We’ll see. There are already crew-less commuter trains, like the [Copenhagen Metro](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copenhagen_Metro), and even a [heavy haul rail network in Australia](https://www.railjournal.com/freight/rio-tinto-completes-automation-of-pilbara-rail-network/). ---
**Author:** ![Voyager](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/voyager/32/133_2.png) [@Voyager](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Voyager)\ **Post date:** [August 14, 2019, 5:37am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-jobs-have-been-eliminated-due-to-automation/838588/44 "2019-08-14T05:37:57Z")
> [@scr4](#): > > There are tobacco & alcohol vending machines all over Japan, and many/most have age verification. Older ones use ID cards issued by the tobacco industry. Newer ones can read the standard driver’s license. Some use facial recognition to estimate the customer’s age. There used to be tobacco vending machines all over the US. But groceries still sold cigarettes. I doubt they will return in the US due to the potential for abuse, as a kid borrows a license from a parent to buy cigs. ---
**Author:** ![Voyager](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/voyager/32/133_2.png) [@Voyager](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Voyager)\ **Post date:** [August 14, 2019, 5:44am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-jobs-have-been-eliminated-due-to-automation/838588/45 "2019-08-14T05:44:41Z")
> [@WildaBeast](#): > > Secretaries aren’t completely gone, but many of the duties they used to perform (taking phone messages, managing the boss’s calendar, etc.) are now performed my technologies like voicemail and Microsoft Outlook. When I first became a manager at Bell Labs three managers shared a secretary. 30 years later one secretary supported a vice president and his 150 reports, and she wasn’t busy at all, and not from lack of trying to find something to do. People typed their own reports and memos. Tons of the paperwork they used to do, like time reports and vacation reports, are now done by apps. People book their own travel on line using the website of the company travel agent. Conference room booking is done online. No screening of visitors. The head of the entire Microelectronics division had an office with a secretary outside, but none of the VPs under him. But the job is not likely to ever go away, just be limited to support for very high level execs. ---
**Author:** ![Author\_Balk](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/e0b2c6/32.png) [@Author\_Balk](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Author_Balk)\ **Post date:** [August 14, 2019, 5:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-jobs-have-been-eliminated-due-to-automation/838588/46 "2019-08-14T17:53:54Z")
I’ve been in IT for many years. What I do changes about every five years, even if I have the same position. I can come up with a lot of things that people don’t do anymore (like making those rell tapes they used on mainframe computers), but I have never seen anybody lose their job because of automation. But, people have their job responsibilities change all the time. ---
**Author:** ![PoppaSan](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/poppasan/32/189_2.png) [@PoppaSan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/PoppaSan)\ **Post date:** [August 15, 2019, 12:17am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-jobs-have-been-eliminated-due-to-automation/838588/47 "2019-08-15T00:17:53Z")
Iceman, fill the boilers on steamships, pick up horse apples on Main Street, hand stack pallets at a factory, hand mill all the tiny metal components of almost anything you use, hand carve thread screws, duplicate a manuscript by hand, pony express rider, collect leeches for the local medical practitioner. tl;dr technological obsolescence of positions has been occurring for centuries. ---
**Author:** ![WildaBeast](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/wildabeast/32/6_2.png) [@WildaBeast](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/WildaBeast)\ **Post date:** [August 15, 2019, 12:29am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-jobs-have-been-eliminated-due-to-automation/838588/48 "2019-08-15T00:29:23Z")
Longshoreman is another one that while not totally eliminated, now thanks to containerized shipping one worker with a crane can load or unload a ship, a job that used to require dozens of workers loading/unloading individual crates. ---
**Author:** ![jaycat](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/jaycat/32/3015_2.png) [@jaycat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/jaycat)\ **Post date:** [August 15, 2019, 2:05am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-jobs-have-been-eliminated-due-to-automation/838588/49 "2019-08-15T02:05:30Z")
Paste-up artists. Yes I was once one of these. Although the legacy lives on in the quaint expression “cut and paste.” ---
**Author:** ![Melbourne](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/b5e925/32.png) [@Melbourne](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Melbourne)\ **Post date:** [August 15, 2019, 2:36am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-jobs-have-been-eliminated-due-to-automation/838588/50 "2019-08-15T02:36:52Z")
> [@WildaBeast](#): > > \*If you’ve ever seen the old _Twilight Zone_ episode “The Odyssey of Flight 33”, they actually portray a 707 with 5 men (of course they were all men, it was the 1960s) in the cockpit. It seemed like they were supposed to be captain, first officer, flight engineer, navigator, and radio operator. I suspect this was dramatic license; I’m not aware of any commercial aircraft having that many people in the cockpit, at least in the jet age. I think a WWII era bomber would have been crewed that way, though, so maybe that’s where the writers got that idea. I recently noticed that the Kee Bird, B-29 Superfortress, 1947, had both a navigator and an astro-navigator. Astro-navigation has been replaced by gps: navigation has been simplified to the extent that the Captain does it. Recently retired from my local government was a women who started as a tracer. Tracing plans. A job that was eliminated by various kinds of photocopying, and the people who used to maintain the plan library and do the photocopying have now been eliminated by on-demand printing. In addition to the automated trains, there are now automated ports and automated mines. The last step of going fully automated is one small step for man, one big step for mankind, because you don’t have to make the workplace safe for humans anymore. No fully automated ships I know of. Once they get the fully automated mines connected by the fully automated trains to the fully automated ports loading the fully automated ships to the fully automated factories, the next step will be eliminating the consumers 🙂 ---
**Author:** ![SamuelA](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/c77e96/32.png) [@SamuelA](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/SamuelA)\ **Post date:** [August 15, 2019, 7:43am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-jobs-have-been-eliminated-due-to-automation/838588/51 "2019-08-15T07:43:22Z")
> [@Akaj](#): > > Why would autonomous trains be \*more \*difficult than autonomous trucks? Trucks on the highway have far more variables to manage than trains on rails. Trains don’t have other trains changing lanes in front of them. They don’t even have to steer. They aren’t more difficult. But I make the following prediction: There will be widespread, close to ubiquitous automated cars and trucks while most trains, ships, and airliners will still be piloted/crewed by humans. Why am I making this prediction? Trains, ships, and airplanes actually all have simpler environments to operate in. While they are more technically complex to run than driving a car, present software is more than adequate to the task. The reason is **market scale**. Driving is a very hard task to automate, and it’s requiring the development of state of the art software that heavily uses machine learning. How much is it going to cost in total? Let’s say the cost is 100 billion dollars. GM is already in it 20 billion, or is it 40 now? Planes, trains, and ships are easier, but the intricacies of operating fairly complex diesel locomotives and scanning the track ahead and reading old maps and dealing with faults is still a complex task. Ships require coordinated efforts between a whole crew and maintenance and repair, including at sea, of complex systems. Planes are similarly complex. So it’s going to cost a lot of money to automate all the elements of these tasks, especially in the planes and ships case. Lets say it’s 5 times easier, and the cost is 20 billion. That’s why. There are very few ships and airliners in the world, while there are hundreds of millions of cars. You are splitting any potential revenue from savings on paying crew far fewer ways. ---
**Author:** ![xnylder](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/x/bbce88/32.png) [@xnylder](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/xnylder)\ **Post date:** [August 19, 2019, 5:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-jobs-have-been-eliminated-due-to-automation/838588/52 "2019-08-19T17:46:52Z")
A few people have mentioned secretaries, but more obsolete than that is the role of secretarial pool typist. My mother was one of these: Her sole task was taking oral dictation or hand-written notes from various employees and typing up the results for correspondence or official records. I suppose it made sense back in the day when typewriters were unforgiving and unwieldy. Nowadays a similar role only exists in specific fields like medical transcription, and even then speech-to-text software can perform the task. ---
**Author:** ![msmith537](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/d9b06d/32.png) [@msmith537](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/msmith537)\ **Post date:** [August 19, 2019, 6:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-jobs-have-been-eliminated-due-to-automation/838588/53 "2019-08-19T18:09:24Z")
> [@campp](#): > > Because a 12,000 foot long vehicle that weighs thousands of times what one truck does, all while going up and down hills, and because it can’t stop really quickly. > > Drone trucks? OK, let’s see how that goes for a few years. Drone trains? I’m just positing it is quite a bit more difficult to control trains without continuous organic feedback. I’m going to go with Akaj on this one. Just because a train is bigger and takes longer to stop doesn’t make automating it any more complex. It’s on rails that travel over known terrain between known switching points. It basically just needs to be told “stop”, “go” and “how fast”, with sensors adjusting for weather, track conditions, slope, etc. An automated truck has to deal with all those things, plus maneuvering around random traffic and other obstacles all in real time. ---
**Author:** ![carrps](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/carrps/32/2957_2.png) [@carrps](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/carrps)\ **Post date:** [August 19, 2019, 8:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-jobs-have-been-eliminated-due-to-automation/838588/54 "2019-08-19T20:42:28Z")
> [@kenobi\_65](#): > > There’s at least one public building I know of which still has manual elevators, and actual elevator operators (who do more than just push buttons): the [Fine Arts Building](https://www.chicagomag.com/city-life/January-2018/The-Last-Manual-Elevator/), in downtown Chicago. > > But, yes, it’s a job that’s close enough to extinct to qualify as “completely eliminated.” When I worked at the Petroleum Building in downtown L.A. in the 1970s they still had manually-operated elevators. I tried googling to see if it’s still true, but I couldn’t find anything, so I assume they’ve been automated. I also found out that the ground floor coffee shop has been converted to a rum bar. :mad: They had an awesome burger called the Canadian Burger, because it had a slice of Canadian bacon in it (the owners were French Canadian, but I don’t know if that was significant). But I often ordered their Speedy Breakfast for lunch – two eggs any style; choice of bacon (2 slices), sausage (2 links), ham slice or hamburger patty; cottage potatoes; choice of toast; and either coffee or oj … for $1.06. And it was delicious. ---
**Author:** ![Damuri\_Ajashi](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/898d66/32.png) [@Damuri\_Ajashi](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Damuri_Ajashi)\ **Post date:** [August 20, 2019, 9:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-jobs-have-been-eliminated-due-to-automation/838588/55 "2019-08-20T21:37:31Z")
Noone combs cotton by hand anymore. It used to consume huge amounts of labor. ---
**Author:** ![ticker](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/d07c76/32.png) [@ticker](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ticker)\ **Post date:** [August 20, 2019, 10:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-jobs-have-been-eliminated-due-to-automation/838588/56 "2019-08-20T22:59:53Z")
[Ruth Belville](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruth_Belville) used to “sell” Greenwich Mean Time by setting her watch by the clock at the Royal Observatory, Greenwich daily, then touring around the city allowing her subscribers to set their own timepieces from hers. Nobody took up the role after she retired, possibly because by then the [BBC’s time signal](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenwich_Time_Signal) was well established and radios had become ubiquitous. ---
**Author:** ![JWT\_Kottekoe](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/3ec8ea/32.png) [@JWT\_Kottekoe](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/JWT_Kottekoe)\ **Post date:** [August 22, 2019, 2:38am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-jobs-have-been-eliminated-due-to-automation/838588/57 "2019-08-22T02:38:06Z")
Part of the background story in “Rabbit Run” was Rabbit’s father losing his job to automation in 1969. He was a [linotype](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linotype_machine) operator. ---
**Author:** ![Kobal2](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/kobal2/32/20_2.png) [@Kobal2](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kobal2)\ **Post date:** [August 22, 2019, 5:33am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-jobs-have-been-eliminated-due-to-automation/838588/58 "2019-08-22T05:33:35Z")
> [@SuperAbe](#): > > [Elevator operators](https://www.google.com/amp/s/qz.com/932516/over-the-last-60-years-automation-has-totally-eliminated-just-one-us-occupation/amp/) There are still some grooms in super posh hotels I believe. Old one, but I nominate knocker-uppers. No, not your skirt chasing brother-in-law - I’m talking about the guys who used to do the rounds in factory towns with a long stick used to knock on upper floor windows to wake people up. Replaced by alarm clocks, which in turn have been replaced by phones. Public criers have been replaced by newssheets, which created (or rather boosted) the profession of public \*reader \*; but edumacation more or less took care of those beggars. ---
**Author:** ![Fiddle\_Peghead](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/fiddle_peghead/32/3506_2.png) [@Fiddle\_Peghead](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Fiddle_Peghead)\ **Post date:** [August 27, 2019, 8:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-jobs-have-been-eliminated-due-to-automation/838588/59 "2019-08-27T20:18:12Z")
nm ---
**Author:** ![Urbanredneck](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/u/ea5d25/32.png) [@Urbanredneck](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Urbanredneck)\ **Post date:** [August 27, 2019, 9:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-jobs-have-been-eliminated-due-to-automation/838588/60 "2019-08-27T21:56:16Z")
> [@campp](#): > > The railroads have dropped employment in all sectors. 70 years ago, the move from steam to diesel took a lot of labor out. Modern brakes have reduced the need for other men to ride along as brakemen. Today they are even using remote controlled switchers in yard situations. > > Will the future bring crew-less trains? Probably. Eventually. Right now it’s an order of magnitude more difficult than the current driver-less big rigs on the highway. We’ll see. Thats why we dont see cabooses anymore. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-jobs-have-been-eliminated-due-to-automation/838588.md?page=2) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-jobs-have-been-eliminated-due-to-automation/838588.md?page=4)