I worked at a company that had an entire floor of telephone operators. Now they have none. I wouldn't be surprised if they are all gone from this company in the entire USA.
On site techs? Also all gone. Replaced by commodity equipment and installed by people making $12 an hour.
You still had telephone operators 10 or 20 years ago?
The earliest telephone backbones that didn't require operators anymore are from the 1920s. Operators were still used for international calls, but definitely not after ~1990.
Source: There is a telecommunications museum across the street from my workplace.
I assume that automation will hollow out some job titles, and then maybe totally kill them, and others it will just whittle down, with an increasing speed of the whittling over the coming decades.
Other people have provided some interesting job titles that have, if not been totally deleted, at least depleted to such a degree as to be slightly anachronistic.
You do need to define “disappear” very carefully. It’s quite rare for jobs to truly disappear, but they can effectively disappear. Example: there are still horse drawn carriage drivers, but as a percentage of the labor force it has disappeared.
Manufacturing jobs may have become less in numbers but they are no way near gone. So i’m not sure that really counts as a valid answer.
Same with mechanics. These jobs are not gone but possibly shrunk in total # of jobs. Quality may have gone up but so has complexity of repairs.
Now, farmers. Again, these jobs may have shrunk but the jobs are still there. I could count on both hands of families I know living in proximity to me that run family farms for business. You can drive 30 miles from me and go through three towns that are maintained because of farm land.
edit: on mobile so didn’t see your decline != elimination note at first
> Manufacturing jobs may have become less in numbers but they are no way near gone. So i’m not sure that really counts as a valid answer.
so, a large shrinkage of jobs isn't a decline? if the definition of jobs disappearing is the whole profession being eliminated then you'll never have any jobs "disappear" ... there will always be artisans in any field: look at blacksmiths for instance. so i'm not sure how these wouldn't be valid.
same goes for mechanics, and farmers. the number of jobs have shrunk - those jobs have disappeared. for farmers it's due to an increase in factory farms and labor saving devices, sure there are still farmers (and quite a few where i live, where locally grown food is sought after), but for the most part those jobs have disappeared.
unless we're operating on a different definition of "disappear"? if 100 people have a job that is now being done by 25 people due to either decline of need or mechanization, then those 75 jobs have disappeared.
Farmers? Have you eaten in the last couple of days? Not to mention mining and manufacturing. OECD is a global organization looking at world wide changes, movement of jobs elsewhere doesn't mean they've disappeared.
Accountants have massively changed. Excel can do what it took a room of accountants before. Tools that can mupliply the output of one perosn are "replacing" jobs.
Admins and secretaries are largely indistinguishable beyond the reduction in some stupid tasks (now delegated to office managers or workplace resources).
Their numbers have shrunk, though. There used to be a 1-1 relationship between middle-managers and secretaries, now you have a PA for the boss and maybe a couple admins every hundred people or so (hr, facilities).
Maybe the professionals, but not the concept. I feel like appliances have gotten more numerous and crappier, but spare parts and repair videos/instructions are easier to find than ever. Often the failure modes are so common for a single model over enough time (e.g. whenever X is the symptom for Y, it's typically an issue with Z).
Which is the upside of automation and AI "taking jobs away from people"; the adoption of new technologies makes things cheaper, easier and more accessible, so more people do it than before, resulting in a bigger market and more net economic activity in that space, and maybe even more of the people who carry out that role, not fewer.
Check processing went from a building of 700 people to almost none, in one place that I know of. This was driven by the move to imaging checks electronically which I believe is called electronic presentment.
