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Just earlier this week, I was talking with a colleague about all the hidden jobs that no longer exist because of software. And these are not jobs that dramati

Just earlier this week, I was talking with a colleague about all the hidden jobs that no longer exist because of software. And these are not jobs that dramatically went away all at once, like a team of longshoremen being cut in the movies. Think of all the teams of bookkeepers (yes, actual people who penciled numbers in books) who were obsoleted by Excel being able to let a store owner do a calculation/scenario by himself that would take accountants a week to do. Think of all the secretaries whose work disappeared (or were no longer needed in proportion to the growing economy) as soon as personal calendar software and meeting invites became common. Graphic designers / publication layout experts you would pay because you didn't have desktop publishing software. There are more jobs lost silently to these kinds of developments than any factory being shut down dramatically. (for the US at least)

TLightful 6y ago
Counterpoint: I'm aware of Excel giving birth to many, many accountants!
seibelj 6y ago
Alternatively, a lot more businesses were created because the sum total of labor required to run a business went down, so businesses that would have been unprofitable back when it took a room of bookkeepers to manage a department store can now exist. People think that economics is a zero-sum game, but the endless drive for efficiency and productivity is what makes our world possible and lifted billions out of abject poverty. It is the opposite of zero-sum.
- jakearmitage 6y ago
  Absolutely. A friend of mine started selling her cookies online without any help from anyone tech-savvy. She found out about Wix, Canva, Stripe and a bunch of other tools and setup her own business during COVID. She's not coming back to her old job. Software empowers people.
  - mlrtime 6y ago
    Think about how many people run their business purely off of venmo or paypal alone.
- jjoonathan 6y ago
  The value that economics promises to create is wealth-weighted. By this metric, destroying the ability of a million people to eek by is a huge win if it makes a person worth ten million times as much worth twenty million times as much. Thankfully, as you point out, it often does the exact opposite and makes everyone richer! But not always, not reliably, certainly not as a fundamental guarantee. "The Wedge" plot illustrates this fickleness, where about 40 years ago the American story switched from "a rising tide floats all boats" to "rich get richer, poor get poorer." The economy kept growing, but the overwhelming majority of people not only did not manage to capture a share of the new growth, they did not even manage to hold on to what they had. Yes, those on top scooped up more money than those on the bottom lost -- but how is that supposed to be comforting? It frustrates me when certain elements preach the prosperity gospel while framing it as a matter of fact rather than self-serving faith. I personally have faith that we'll eventually figure out a compromise, but I don't believe that denying blatant trends helps us get there.
  - perl4ever 6y ago
    >if it makes a person worth ten million times as much worth twenty million times as much. But that never happens. Ten million multiplied by twenty million is 200 trillion. You can't make 200 trillion dollars by taking a dollar away from a million people. Nobody has ever made 200 trillion dollars from anything, but if they did, it makes no sense to think there's some way it could be done by impoverishing a million people who have almost nothing. It sounds as illogical as the Matrix use of humans as batteries.
    - chrisdirkis 6y ago
      I think you misparsed that sentence as "20 million as much [as 10 million as much as one of those people]", where it should be "20 million as much [of one of those people]". An x2 multiplier, instead of an x20 million one.
      - perl4ever 6y ago
        Well, ok. Does it make any more sense? Trying to put it in concrete terms - Jeff Bezos has maybe $180B. One ten-millionth is $18K. So the scenario is, suppose Bezos got his $180B by taking $1800 each from a million people, who relied on that capital to live, and somehow multiplied it by ten. Since nearly everyone rich has less than Bezos, anything that happens a fair amount would involve smaller numbers. It's not as absurd as making $200 trillion, but it still doesn't sound to me like a thing that happens to the extent that it says something about economics or utilitarianism or whatever. It seems like a contrived trolley problem to me.
- yblu 6y ago
  True. Although with the increasing rate of changes, there would be a point where people can't re-skill themselves faster than their jobs are replaced by AI or software. Imagine change to a completely different job every 5 years. Hopefully societies are mostly well-off to give people food while they are busy learning another craft that hasn't been made obsolete.
MisterBastahrd 6y ago
Most people don't know that computer used to be a job title, not a machine.
HumblyTossed 6y ago
Cashiers are on their way out. You can walk into any Walmart and see two people in line for 10 minutes because of the 50 available registers only 2 are open. Walmart wants to drive people to use the self checkout. I hate it because invariably something goes wrong and you have to compete for the sole person manning that section.
- raducu 6y ago
  I hate self checkout because it means more work for me.
  - Scoundreller 6y ago
    I hate self-checkouts because they treat me like a criminal because I have two hands capable of bagging and scanning at the same time. Or trying to do multiple scans and then bagging them all in one swoop. And god help me if I try to scale with 2 more hands.
    - michaelmrose 6y ago
      Many machines are no longer using the scale. For example walmart and home depots both work like this while most grocery stores still do.
  - kepler1 6y ago
    You mean, it's not the 25% discount lane to you?
    - raducu 6y ago
      In my country, I've never seen any discounts for self checkout.
- vangelis 6y ago
  Cashiers at least know how to bag. Most people using self checkouts move at speed of a sloth on ketamine.
Aerroon 6y ago
These kinds of jobs being replaced by software is an increase in efficiency. Those people well by and large end up doing something else that's useful for society. A digger (machine) replaced a lot of workers with shovels, but in the long-term it has clearly been good for society.
- AlexandrB 6y ago
  Has it? Those gains in productivity seem to be increasingly captured by the executive and capitalist class[1]. "Society" is 90% people who have not seen much benefit to their bottom line. [1] https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/ https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/
  - Johnjonjoan 6y ago
    This is a point that is being missed. I think one way to solve it is creating institutions that invest in the job cutting technology on behalf of workers. This way workers pick up the productivity gain and not the businesses that employ the technology. It would be a massive shake up and would seem very seizing the means of production in a indirect way though.
  - Aerroon 6y ago
    The graph would very heavily depend on definitions, wouldn't it? Such a sharp change should easily be tracked down to a specific event. The entire economy doesn't just decide to to things differently in sync without an external factor. So, what happened at that time?
    - zippy5 6y ago
      To be fair, looks like the graph starts to flat-line in 1972-1973. I think that lines up with Nixon leaving the gold standard in 1971 and going to China in 1972. It's possible that globalization may have ended labor scarcity in the U.S. and thus labor has no leverage to capture productivity gains.
      - 6y ago
wil421 6y ago
My father-in-law provides a good counterpoint. He worked at a bridge span builder when PCs were coming out. A supplier gave them 5 Apple computers for buying something. His boss told him to throw them away it’s just some fad. That night he picked up a manual and learned a little BASIC and put together a program to do some calculations for manufacturing bridge spans. It would normally take 3 guys 2 days double checking and redoing the precise calculations but the Apple II took minutes. Now 3 guys were free to do other things and a bottle neck was removed. The company could take on more work and the boss was pleased. “Take those things out of the trash!” What the boss really didn’t understand was the software you needed to buy to make the computer useful.
- maxk42 6y ago
  This is called "productivity". It's the reason the world isn't full of unemployed horse-and-buggy drivers right now.
- x86_64Ubuntu 6y ago
  In this case, the man-hours per bridge drop. But how many man-hours were available in the field pre-computer? So now we've got excess man-hours and we've got a choice. Either move those man-hours to higher value tasks OR release the bridgespanneteers from the job. And that's the conundrum we face with automation where we remove bottlenecks, and we can't retask the capacity.
- skwb 6y ago
  |What the boss really didn’t understand was the software you needed to buy to make the computer useful. I would almost change it to say "what the boss didn't really understand was how to use the computers to make my employees more productive". I think the specifics in how you automate is incredibly important, and there are many cases of how it can fail. 737 Max MCAS system is a prime example of how ramming automation through without consideration of "human factors" leads to massive failure.
skwb 6y ago
| Think of all the teams of bookkeepers (yes, actual people who penciled numbers in books) who were obsoleted by Excel being able to let a store owner do a calculation/scenario by himself that would take accountants a week to do. And now accountants have a much greater ability to keep track of a firms financial health, allowing them to grow more efficiently! | Think of all the secretaries whose work disappeared (or were no longer needed in proportion to the growing economy) as soon as personal calendar software and meeting invites became common. And hence forth came executive assistants, who could focus on more important features of their job such as managing a calendar rather than retying memos! | Graphic designers / publication layout experts you would pay because you didn't have desktop publishing software. And now graphic designers can produce amazing movies, the complexity of which would dumbfound animators from the 1930s! In almost all your cases, the productivity of these positions has grown, enabling more efficient use of their time and resources. Sure, it's required to know how to use Excel, Outlook, and Creative Studio to be productive in these newer jobs, but they it's precisely because we have integrated these tools into our workforce that we can be so productive. I see an analogy to asking "what are radiologists going to do when the AI comes"? Sure, maybe the older radiologists who don't use AI tools may be outdated and either learn to use newer tools or retire, but radiologists are not fundamentally going away. And other positions that may outright be antiquated, it's a moral imperative to create a robust welfare and career focused educational system to ease transitions pains.
asdff 6y ago
If this were a concern, unemployment would have skyrocketed after Microsoft office was released and never recovered to this day. However, decades later, there are still secretaries who schedule meetings and manage electronic calendars, bookkeepers who type numbers into excel spreadsheets, graphic designers and publication layout experts who are versed in professional publishing software, and even accountants.

TLightful 6y ago

Counterpoint: I'm aware of Excel giving birth to many, many accountants!

seibelj 6y ago

Alternatively, a lot more businesses were created because the sum total of labor required to run a business went down, so businesses that would have been unprofitable back when it took a room of bookkeepers to manage a department store can now exist. People think that economics is a zero-sum game, but the endless drive for efficiency and productivity is what makes our world possible and lifted billions out of abject poverty. It is the opposite of zero-sum.

jakearmitage 6y ago
Absolutely. A friend of mine started selling her cookies online without any help from anyone tech-savvy. She found out about Wix, Canva, Stripe and a bunch of other tools and setup her own business during COVID. She's not coming back to her old job. Software empowers people.
- mlrtime 6y ago
  Think about how many people run their business purely off of venmo or paypal alone.
jjoonathan 6y ago
The value that economics promises to create is wealth-weighted. By this metric, destroying the ability of a million people to eek by is a huge win if it makes a person worth ten million times as much worth twenty million times as much. Thankfully, as you point out, it often does the exact opposite and makes everyone richer! But not always, not reliably, certainly not as a fundamental guarantee. "The Wedge" plot illustrates this fickleness, where about 40 years ago the American story switched from "a rising tide floats all boats" to "rich get richer, poor get poorer." The economy kept growing, but the overwhelming majority of people not only did not manage to capture a share of the new growth, they did not even manage to hold on to what they had. Yes, those on top scooped up more money than those on the bottom lost -- but how is that supposed to be comforting? It frustrates me when certain elements preach the prosperity gospel while framing it as a matter of fact rather than self-serving faith. I personally have faith that we'll eventually figure out a compromise, but I don't believe that denying blatant trends helps us get there.
- perl4ever 6y ago
  >if it makes a person worth ten million times as much worth twenty million times as much. But that never happens. Ten million multiplied by twenty million is 200 trillion. You can't make 200 trillion dollars by taking a dollar away from a million people. Nobody has ever made 200 trillion dollars from anything, but if they did, it makes no sense to think there's some way it could be done by impoverishing a million people who have almost nothing. It sounds as illogical as the Matrix use of humans as batteries.
  - chrisdirkis 6y ago
    I think you misparsed that sentence as "20 million as much [as 10 million as much as one of those people]", where it should be "20 million as much [of one of those people]". An x2 multiplier, instead of an x20 million one.
    - perl4ever 6y ago
      Well, ok. Does it make any more sense? Trying to put it in concrete terms - Jeff Bezos has maybe $180B. One ten-millionth is $18K. So the scenario is, suppose Bezos got his $180B by taking $1800 each from a million people, who relied on that capital to live, and somehow multiplied it by ten. Since nearly everyone rich has less than Bezos, anything that happens a fair amount would involve smaller numbers. It's not as absurd as making $200 trillion, but it still doesn't sound to me like a thing that happens to the extent that it says something about economics or utilitarianism or whatever. It seems like a contrived trolley problem to me.
yblu 6y ago
True. Although with the increasing rate of changes, there would be a point where people can't re-skill themselves faster than their jobs are replaced by AI or software. Imagine change to a completely different job every 5 years. Hopefully societies are mostly well-off to give people food while they are busy learning another craft that hasn't been made obsolete.

MisterBastahrd 6y ago

Most people don't know that computer used to be a job title, not a machine.

HumblyTossed 6y ago

Cashiers are on their way out. You can walk into any Walmart and see two people in line for 10 minutes because of the 50 available registers only 2 are open. Walmart wants to drive people to use the self checkout. I hate it because invariably something goes wrong and you have to compete for the sole person manning that section.

raducu 6y ago
I hate self checkout because it means more work for me.
- Scoundreller 6y ago
  I hate self-checkouts because they treat me like a criminal because I have two hands capable of bagging and scanning at the same time. Or trying to do multiple scans and then bagging them all in one swoop. And god help me if I try to scale with 2 more hands.
  - michaelmrose 6y ago
    Many machines are no longer using the scale. For example walmart and home depots both work like this while most grocery stores still do.
- kepler1 6y ago
  You mean, it's not the 25% discount lane to you?
  - raducu 6y ago
    In my country, I've never seen any discounts for self checkout.
vangelis 6y ago
Cashiers at least know how to bag. Most people using self checkouts move at speed of a sloth on ketamine.

Aerroon 6y ago

These kinds of jobs being replaced by software is an increase in efficiency. Those people well by and large end up doing something else that's useful for society. A digger (machine) replaced a lot of workers with shovels, but in the long-term it has clearly been good for society.

AlexandrB 6y ago
Has it? Those gains in productivity seem to be increasingly captured by the executive and capitalist class[1]. "Society" is 90% people who have not seen much benefit to their bottom line. [1] https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/ https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/
- Johnjonjoan 6y ago
  This is a point that is being missed. I think one way to solve it is creating institutions that invest in the job cutting technology on behalf of workers. This way workers pick up the productivity gain and not the businesses that employ the technology. It would be a massive shake up and would seem very seizing the means of production in a indirect way though.
- Aerroon 6y ago
  The graph would very heavily depend on definitions, wouldn't it? Such a sharp change should easily be tracked down to a specific event. The entire economy doesn't just decide to to things differently in sync without an external factor. So, what happened at that time?
  - zippy5 6y ago
    To be fair, looks like the graph starts to flat-line in 1972-1973. I think that lines up with Nixon leaving the gold standard in 1971 and going to China in 1972. It's possible that globalization may have ended labor scarcity in the U.S. and thus labor has no leverage to capture productivity gains.
    - 6y ago

wil421 6y ago

My father-in-law provides a good counterpoint. He worked at a bridge span builder when PCs were coming out. A supplier gave them 5 Apple computers for buying something. His boss told him to throw them away it’s just some fad. That night he picked up a manual and learned a little BASIC and put together a program to do some calculations for manufacturing bridge spans. It would normally take 3 guys 2 days double checking and redoing the precise calculations but the Apple II took minutes. Now 3 guys were free to do other things and a bottle neck was removed. The company could take on more work and the boss was pleased. “Take those things out of the trash!” What the boss really didn’t understand was the software you needed to buy to make the computer useful.

maxk42 6y ago
This is called "productivity". It's the reason the world isn't full of unemployed horse-and-buggy drivers right now.
x86_64Ubuntu 6y ago
In this case, the man-hours per bridge drop. But how many man-hours were available in the field pre-computer? So now we've got excess man-hours and we've got a choice. Either move those man-hours to higher value tasks OR release the bridgespanneteers from the job. And that's the conundrum we face with automation where we remove bottlenecks, and we can't retask the capacity.
skwb 6y ago
|What the boss really didn’t understand was the software you needed to buy to make the computer useful. I would almost change it to say "what the boss didn't really understand was how to use the computers to make my employees more productive". I think the specifics in how you automate is incredibly important, and there are many cases of how it can fail. 737 Max MCAS system is a prime example of how ramming automation through without consideration of "human factors" leads to massive failure.

skwb 6y ago

| Think of all the teams of bookkeepers (yes, actual people who penciled numbers in books) who were obsoleted by Excel being able to let a store owner do a calculation/scenario by himself that would take accountants a week to do. And now accountants have a much greater ability to keep track of a firms financial health, allowing them to grow more efficiently! | Think of all the secretaries whose work disappeared (or were no longer needed in proportion to the growing economy) as soon as personal calendar software and meeting invites became common. And hence forth came executive assistants, who could focus on more important features of their job such as managing a calendar rather than retying memos! | Graphic designers / publication layout experts you would pay because you didn't have desktop publishing software. And now graphic designers can produce amazing movies, the complexity of which would dumbfound animators from the 1930s! In almost all your cases, the productivity of these positions has grown, enabling more efficient use of their time and resources. Sure, it's required to know how to use Excel, Outlook, and Creative Studio to be productive in these newer jobs, but they it's precisely because we have integrated these tools into our workforce that we can be so productive. I see an analogy to asking "what are radiologists going to do when the AI comes"? Sure, maybe the older radiologists who don't use AI tools may be outdated and either learn to use newer tools or retire, but radiologists are not fundamentally going away. And other positions that may outright be antiquated, it's a moral imperative to create a robust welfare and career focused educational system to ease transitions pains.

asdff 6y ago

If this were a concern, unemployment would have skyrocketed after Microsoft office was released and never recovered to this day. However, decades later, there are still secretaries who schedule meetings and manage electronic calendars, bookkeepers who type numbers into excel spreadsheets, graphic designers and publication layout experts who are versed in professional publishing software, and even accountants.