Jobs that no longer exist

> hose are probably the last 10 remaining.

Towers to watch for wildfires are still in use https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire_lookout_tower

That job still exists, except in the very far future, and is known as a "mentat"

Farmers. In 1850, >70% of people in the U.S. were farmers. Today <2% are. (Source: http://www.nytimes.com/1988/07/20/us/farm-population-lowest-...)

Well cloth / clothing manufacturing is probably the largest decrease I can think of. From the cotton pickers, to the spinsters, to the weavers, and tailors. Much of it has been mechanized.

The difference with robots though is that they can actually 100% out perform humans in the not to distant future. Once a robot has hands as agile and controllable as ours, and once they have energy requirements that are cheaper than ours, I don't see how humans could compete with them in non-cerebral jobs. And there is a good segment of the population that can only do physical work.

I'm not sure you can blame refrigeration on the absence of milk delivery people. In England, we had milkmen/milkmaids well into the late 1990s, despite refrigeration. Electric milk floats (sometimes carrying orange juice and bread, too) were a common early morning sight and sound.

Dock workers (almost entirely replaced by containerization).

Some things come to my mind:

- wooden barrels / casks for wine beer

- coppersmith (not sure about the exact term. i mean people who create pans and pots by hand)

- basketmaker

- coachbuilder

Interesting fact: Cuban cigars are named thing like Romeo y Julieta or Monte Christo, because those were the books read aloud as those cigars were being rolled.

How is a lector different from audible/youtube/podcasts?

I wonder how important they were for union support, seeing as how they often read left-leaning stuff. Why did this job disappear? Does it have something to do with the decline in the organisation of labour and unions?

Came here to say this, its sad really, quite convenient and I miss the noise of the electric milk float at 4am, always knew that meant it was time to stop coding and go to bed! Depends where you live though, still heard it in Dorset.

Good find. That is true that most of these jobs are gone now.

As you noted, that's duckpin bowling, which uses differently shaped pins than "standard" ten pin bowling; shorter yet heavier. The New York Times did a nice mixed media piece a while ago on the sport and its fading popularity, which in part is because the additional difficulty in creating a mechanized pinsetter for this type of pin. There was a successful pinsetter invented, but the manufacturer went out of business in the 70s and declined the license the patent to other companies. Now there is a dwindling number of vintage pinsetting machines left, many of which have been cannibalized for parts to keep existing machines running.

0: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/29/sports/duckpin-bowling.htm...

Out of curiosity, are they faster or slower than mechanized pinsetters?

The entire medieval bookmaking process, from velum and inks to lettering to illumination (illustrations) was fascinating. And extraordinarily expensive.

http://history.stackexchange.com/questions/21161/how-long-di...

Figure that a single book was 1/2 to 1/3 a man-year's labour, of rare and skilled talent. They were more bespoke jewelry than media, and often treated as such.

If you think about the falling costs, and increased access, to information over the span of centuries, it's staggering.

Another former record store employee here. I disagree about music discovery being easier now. I find I got much better recommendations from other music nerds than I tend to get from algorithms. The depth and nuance of micro-nano-pico genres is something that hasn't really been well replaced by machine learning IMO.

I have a Google Play music subscription and its recommendations are pretty consistently bad. I don't get it. I have given it all my music and it monitors how often I listen to every song. Why can't it figure out what types of hooks I like? The human-curated playlists are almost always better; even if I don't like every choice, there's still some ineffable spark of a single human personality that gives unity to the selections.

I have a travel agent in my street. Here in Germany they are omnipresent. But when I count how many people on Tinder got "Traveling" as their only hobby, I can see why.

We had door to door salesmen back when I was young (15-20 years ago), they sold vacuum cleaners for Vorwerk or Kirby. High end systems, very expensive and they showed them at your home, my mother bought 2, so it worked haha. Then there are salesmen that sell stuff like scented candles, Tupperware, Dildos etc. pp. which throw tiny parties for their sales events at customers livingrooms. Not exactly door to door salesmen, but they visit customers at home to sell them things.

2009 I worked in an HR office (public service) where two typists worked, people recoreded letters all the time and they typed them with headphones on. I don't know if they still work there.

A friend of mine lives in Berlin and heats with coal. She says many flats in the east of Berlin are still heated with those coal ovens. Sometimes she buys the coal at the store and sometimes she gets deliveries.

Also here are regular markets with greengrocers and one of them even drives through my street once a week and sells from a truck. He has a bell and yells stuff like "POTATOOOOOS. FRESH APPLES AND CARROOOOTS" etc.

And a friend of mine works as a bookseller.

The first two are still around. I know someone whose wife has a travel agency: it's a specialty business now. And I have an aerial photo of my house that was sold by a door to door salesman. I also get sales people going door to door in my neighborhood selling anything from trash pickup to carpet cleaning.

Appliance repair businesses are still around, they just focus on high-end appliances now.

We actually have this in many developed places, albeit only for vegetables. Urban people subscribe to an "organic farm coop" and receive a set of season vegetables per week. They don't have much choice, but the upsides are:

- No intermediary/supermarket involved: Margins are fully paid to the producer who can either get a decent pay, work less or pay better materials,

- Vegetables are ripe, but needn't be nice, filtered or advertised in a fancy packing,

- Delivery at the reception of your company,

- The producer has forseeable recurrent revenue, just like developers for cloud services.

I've seen this in 2 French cities and in Sydney, so I bet it exists in San Francisco and most major cities.

There are multiple companies like this in germany/austria. Basically a subscription to organic food (Vegetables, bread, cheese,...). You never know exactly what you get, but most of the time you are ok with it.

One example: http://www.adamah.at

Check for a local CSA.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community-supported_agricultur...

Just want to reiterate how nice a CSA share can be. Sometimes you need to be a little creative in the kitchen, but it's less expensive than buying the same quality elsewhere.

Also, I have several friends that run/work on organic farms and CSA memberships are critical to their ability to survive as small farm operations.

I know that service exists in some areas. In Utah, we used Winder Farms. They drop off an order once a week. Their apple juice and milk was good but their produce was always sub-par. The prices were crazy.

Because milkmen don't exists anymore - at least not in the U.S. or Canada. Houses were built with little doors from the outside into a chillbox for the milkman to directly place the milk inside.

We have a handful of them in London, too: https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2015/dec/25/londons-last...

Technically, they aren't rats, but "muskrat catcher" is a profession in parts of Europe. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muskrat#In_human_history:

"In some European countries, such as Belgium, France, and the Netherlands, the muskrat is considered an invasive pest, as its burrowing damages the dikes and levees on which these low-lying countries depend for protection from flooding. In those countries, it is trapped, poisoned, and hunted to attempt to keep the population down"

And they also have been replaced by Exterminators, who take care of all sorts of "pests" and insects usually with poisons or traps.

Is there a reason why using cats is not effective?

Its not like rats aren't around any more.

Computers will not write code by themselves. Someone else's code will be so Great that a lot of people will think it's intelligence by its own, but it will still be someone else's code.

Flawless code for a fraction of the cost, matter of time?

They are still around, but far less than they use to be. I remember as a kid you would find a shoe shine guy setup in the lobby of most buildings fill with professionally dressed people.

Certainly work place attire has become more casual across the board, but there are still places where people dress up like lawyers. I find them still in train stations where there is a large enough traffic of people to support it. It goes to illustrate that fewer people are getting their shoes shined when a shoe shiner requires half the workforce in a city to pass them by instead of just occupants of a single building.

It is perhaps that shoes are simply more disposable than they were before.

We still have them in NYC. Right outside of Grand Central too (aka not the poor part of town).

This was highly illegal and frowned upon in polite society, but doctors needed the body parts to study anatomy and paid for them.

By chance I've recently read Dicken's "A Tale of Two Cities", which uses the banker's messenger secretly moonlighting as such a resurrectionist digging up bodies at night, as a plot device. Quite a fun read.

Computers is one job that comes to mind (as in human computer, one who computes).