Cotton picking.
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.
There are already crew-less commuter trains, like the Copenhagen Metro, and even a heavy haul rail network in Australia.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Paste-up artists. Yes I was once one of these. Although the legacy lives on in the quaint expression “cut and paste.”
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 
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.
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.
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.
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.
Noone combs cotton by hand anymore. It used to consume huge amounts of labor.
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 was well established and radios had become ubiquitous.
Part of the background story in “Rabbit Run” was Rabbit’s father losing his job to automation in 1969. He was a linotype operator.
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.
nm
Thats why we dont see cabooses anymore.