Completely eliminated? I think only elevator operators have completely been eliminated. I believe that there are still telephone operators who are basically receptionists and can transfer you to your party, blah blah blah. If we go back a bit, I think telegraph operator has actually been officially removed as a job by the government. Generally, while automation eliminates some or even most jobs it doesn’t eliminate them all.
I found this article that kind of explains the concept, and there is a helpful chart:
In the early 1950s, my father was in college, and had a summer job working for the local railroad. He was hired as a fireman (whose job entailed shoveling coal and managing the fire), despite the fact that the railroad had just finished the switch to diesel-electric locomotives – I’m not sure if it was due to the laws still requiring firemen, or a labor contract requiring them, but the net of it was that he worked as a fireman, on a diesel locomotive.
He said that his job largely entailed riding around in an locomotive and waving to children.
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, in downtown Chicago.
But, yes, it’s a job that’s close enough to extinct to qualify as “completely eliminated.”
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.
Open outcry floor traders are almost completely gone. There are still a few left on the NYSE floor and in the CBOE options pits. Most of the Chicago commodities pits have gone completely electronic.
Unless I get paid for doing it, it isn’t a job. Grocery store checkout people are not going to be eliminated anytime soon since you need to be 21 to buy alcohol. The gas pumpers of old have become convenience store cashiers, and there are a lot fewer of them.
Assembly lines used to be more about there being people lined up, and I’m sure that many of the specific jobs on such lines have been completely eliminated.
Right, but the gas station attendants never had to be there, right? They were there as a service and that service has been taken away – it wasn’t due to automation. That’s really my point. Unless you mean some early gas pumps that had to be pumped by hand or something? Before my time. It’s like saying free meals in economy flights have been automated away – no, they just stopped providing them. Same with the gas station attendants.
It’s funny, because in NJ, we have people who pump our gas, but you generally can’t buy alcohol in grocery stores, so those could be automated away. Of the dozens of supermarkets near me, I can only think of two that sell beer, wine, or liquor.
There are exceptions for almost every job listed. Elevator operators? I still have seen a couple of them in the last year (in tourist tower type things).
Telephone operators still exist within a lot of companies to direct calls to the appropriate department. Certainly banks of people on the phone are still common although they aren’t physically moving wires around.
Home milk delivery is available in my area and we’ve even used it.
Keypunch operators are gone, but generically they were data entry of which there is still a ton.
Overall it’s hard to find jobs that are completely eliminated. Harder still if you look worldwide (e.g. not every cow on earth is attached to a machine).
Overall this automation thing is kinda BS. We are really good at optimizing mass production but we suck at optimizing anything bespoke. You can automate a factor to use less labor and get more output per input of labor, but machines require a lot of maintenance. So you can produce more product cheaper and sell more but you can’t necessarily apply this to things not made in a factory.
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.
Self-service gas stations require some automation, unless you want to go to a totally honor system (let the customer tell the cashier how much gas they put in). And I think it was the automated pumps with built-in credit card readers that finally made the gas station attendants obsolete.
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.
That third person in the cockpit was actually the flight engineer. But I believe there was a time even longer ago when there were four people in the cockpit: two pilots, a flight engineer, and a navigator*. Around the 1950s or 60s technology eliminated the need for full time navigators in the cockpit, although I’ve read that at least in some countries pilots were expected to know how to used a sextant and navigate by stars into the 1970s.
Meanwhile, I believe the flight engineer’s job was to monitor and manage the various systems on the plane during the flight, although not being a pilot I don’t know exactly what that entailed. Automation eliminated this job on pretty much any plane designed from the 1980s on. There are probably still a handful of older 747 and DC-10s and such flying for cargo companies that require flight engineers, but these days the crewmember filling the flight engineer is simple a lower ranking pilot. It used to be that “professional flight engineer” was a career unto itself that didn’t require being a pilot, but rather having a detailed knowledge of the plane’s systems.
*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.
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.
