We could all be dinosaurs. The Economist predicts that robots are going to replace telemarketers, accountants, and retail workers, and Bill Gates says software bots will take even more jobs.
This isn’t the first time that whole swaths of the labor market have gone extinct: The Industrial Revolution did away with gigs that your great-great-grandparents might have had that sound preposterous to us today.
Based on the Bureau of Labor Statistic’s occupational classification list from 1850 and some research of our own, we found several bizarre-sounding occupations that are now totally extinct.
Additional reporting by Vivian Giang.
"Computer" used to be somebody's title. Before electronics took over, these workers — usually women — would convert figures and crunch other numbers by hand.
Factory workers needed a little entertainment, so a lector read news and literature aloud to them.
Before everyone had refrigerators, milk quickly went bad. So you'd need it delivered regularly by your milkman. With home refrigeration, this profession disappeared.
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