Jobs that no longer exist today
vintag.es
vintag.es
http://www.boredpanda.com/extinct-jobs/
Not sure if it's licensed copying or blatant plagerism, since they technically give "credit" at the bottom, but if it's the latter, it would nice to see links to vintag.es banned from HN, since this is the sort of thing that just sucks the air out of the web.
For instance, will Huffington Post have issues later for starting to not care about the quality of their posts? Maybe.
Edit: Good lord Googling for "bights" rat catcher these sites have no shame - Going by other clickbaits I'm assuming the reddit thread is the original for now
In a combat situation, wires from fox holes that go to HQ or artillery are super important. These guys have to run over to fox holes laying or repairing wire from the switchboard during enemy fire. This type of communication cannot be jammed or intercepted remotely. At the switchboard they're doing exactly what you see in that picture, connecting lines to another manually, with like a SB-22:
http://www.prc68.com/I/SB22.shtml
Although there are more modern switchboards now, they aren't used by infantry. These things are sturdy and very simple to repair.
But usually it is done for illegal logging companies (it is illegal to log near a river, because the soil falls on the water and makes the river shallower).
First, Amazon rainforest is HUGE, VERY HUGE, dense, hard to navigate, among other things, this make patrolling it effectively impossible.
Second, there are still uncontacted tribes there, and they are very violent (it is the reason why they are still uncontacted, they DON'T want contact, and are not afraid to turn white or black people stalking around into arrow pincushions), and some other tribes that deeply distrust white people for past transgressions, thus wandering around is dangerous (including for the loggers, it is not uncommon to see natives vs loggers wars that leave a couple of people dead, also natives vs miners happen frequently too, Amazon rainforest soil is rich in very valuable minerals).
It is a very hairy problem, the brazillian government has two specialized agencies working on this (Funai, that works with native americans, and Ibama, that is the envionmental agency), has satellites dedicated to that (Brazil builds satellites to track deforestation, and I believe China launches them for us, since we exploded our launch platform and rocket), and there is the police and the army working with this.
That said, it is still not working, not because of the loggers, or miners, but because of corrupt politicians that own land there, there is a huge problem of politicians (and some other high power people, like judges) that "somehow" end with huge tracts of land that have only forest in it, then they clear the land to put cattle in it, the activity of illegally clearing forest to put cattle in its place is making the deforestation rate rise (instead of declining despite all the efforts).
Finally, a couple of non-profit workers and Ibama workers were murdered around the area, seemly usually by politicians, one notorious case two Ibama workers were murdered by a city mayor, that even after conviction and arrest still got re-elected (yay for democracy), and Dorathy Stang case http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorothy_Stang
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Obsolete_occupations
Snarky meta-commentors who insist on proper attribution soon to follow.
[EDIT] It's worse, no editor here, only copy-paste operator: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8949065
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_computer
The computer put the computer out of work.
It also turns out that the floor panels had a huge amount of engineering effort. Whenever other items being designed were blocked, the engineers worked on floor panels.
https://archive.org/stream/generaltheoryofp00adam#page/n2/mo...
even the Census 2002 Occupation Index[1] still lists a few of them:
- Chart computer
- Gas volume computer
- Geophysical computer
- Seismic computer
- Traffic rate computer
[1] http://www.census.gov/people/io/files/occ02_pdf.pdf[1] http://www.census.gov/people/io/methodology/indexes.html
I'm guessing what I mean here is that chalkboards serve as a shared resource, on which multiple humans can perform operations together, or with larger problems addressed in smaller chunks in tandem. It's not "parallel computing" per se, but it's an analog analogue.
Here's one for the "Hotel of Ice near the glacial Balea Lac in the Romanian Carpathians" - http://www.depotpicture.com/2014/08/italy-romanian-balea-lac...
As for jobs that surprisingly still exist, how about the people who manually, in San Francisco in 2015, set the Caltrain reader boards for each train at 4th and King.
http://www.npr.org/blogs/parallels/2015/01/15/377470376/carr...
Oxford also has some, but they may be faux.
Several of these jobs seem to involve poles. Other similar jobs, like [tree] fruit-picking, seem to lend themselves to use of stilts.
Stilts can be dangerous - but there are surely advantages too, a knocker-upper could knock on the window until they hear movement, they could also sell them a morning paper/loaf/whatever through the window; I'd imagine they could do their round faster too.
http://www.britishpathe.com/video/stiltmen-aka-stilt-men
My mother and her family used to pick hops. It was a holiday for them. They'd travel to the countryside for a week, work to pick hops and get a bit of money for it.
EDIT: thinking about stilts in an orchard are a bit scary. You have all that pressure on one skinny little stilt-foot, on mud which might be soft, walking through grass which might be long. I don't know if that's difficult or if I just have terrible coordination.
EDIT2: a google image search for [stilt-men orchards] returns many interesting images of stilts being used in orchards.
While a lot of jobs won't vanish the numbers needed should be drastically reduced.
Don't they still do this within, say, hotels?
Many hotels now have an automated system where you punch in a time on the phone's number pad and it stores it and robo-dials you.
Of course there a modern solutions to this problem but I kind of like the "human contact aspect" of it. It costs like $5.
Seriously, dont.
One of my worst experiences was working for some bank that used MUMPS and trying to recover the (accidentally) erased editor string before someone would notice that it was gone. (Yes, the editor is a string, and it behaves just like any other string and globals are auto persisted to disk so if you wipe the editor string then much good luck to you.)
It's a disease primarily limited to the healthcare system, in my experience.
MUMPS (har har) has it's origins in the medical world so there are a lot more people versed in mumps in that world that have domain expertise regarding hospitals but you'd hope that that chapter of the Cambrian explosion in programming was closed by now and that someone would come to their senses and would say: absolutely no more new development in MUMPS. (And 'Mapper' for that matter.)
They were dead-ends 30 years ago, they're not magically going to be better in 2015. Of course it would be hard to get rid of 1.8B euros using any other available technology so maybe that's were we can find part of the answer of why this happened.
Maintaining MUMPS code is an interesting exercise in pasta consumption, the language more or less dictates it.
See also: http://thedailywtf.com/articles/A_Case_of_the_MUMPS
Anyone want to build an LLVM backend + FFI module? Probably worth a small fortune to shops that want to migrate out of MUMPS
But I agree with you that if you can pull this off you'll be doing well financially.
Even better: a MUMPS -> Java automatic translator (or maybe Python or Ruby, but I think the Java would be an easier sell in that market).
[edit: specified which summer]
Unattended farming: check, Unattended factories: check and so on. Leisure time by the bucket but no value to your time at all. That will be the mother of all disruptions and I'm pretty sure that we're not even remotely ready for it.
Would you want your child to be educated by a machine? In a world where education is a pastime, rather than a productive tool, would you even bother?
Would we have algorithmic justice systems, or would you still desire a lawyer you can trust on a human level to take your side?
I don't see it happening in my lifetime, though. I think we're still millenia away from that.
Perhaps I've seen too many science fiction movies, like Transcendence, but I thought that was basically what was meant by "strong AI."
So I think it's reasonable to think that the development of a strong AI won't change things overnight and we could see decades of lag between first having a computer capable of strong AI at any speed and having a strong AI that outpaces humans.
Jobs where the it's important that another human is involved - prostitution for one.
Anything with social value, where the social value comes from specifically human effort being involved.
You can collect donations for a charity marathon. It's rather harder for a machine to do the same.
i.e. once we reach the in principle impossible goal
http://blogs.microsoft.com/firehose/2014/03/11/8-year-old-cr...