Everyone is worried about artificial intelligence and robots taking our jobs. But no one seems to be concerned about the jobs that were replaced by earlier technological innovations or even contemporary robots.Not too many centuries or even decades ago, some of these careers were common and well-paying. When more user-friendly technologies emerged to replace them, they vanished from existence. Rarely, technological developments demonstrated that the profession shouldn’t even exist.

10 Gong Farmer

What we now refer to as a bathroom (or toilet in Britain) was known as a privy a few centuries ago. Rather than a flush toilet, it was only an elevated board with a hole in the middle. People used to sit there and conduct business. Their waste descended into the cesspit beneath the hole.Before long, the cesspit became full and needed to be emptied. This was the gong farmer’s responsibility.Gong was the word for “going,” and farmer was the word for “harvesting” the “goings.” When the excrement reached their waists, the gong farmers emerged from the cramped cesspits. They occasionally hired a smaller boy to complete the task. The boys collected the excrement and loaded it into carts to be dumped and turned into fertilizer.The gong farmers stank a lot, which is understandable given that taking a bath was unheard of in the Middle Ages. Because of their foul odor, they were frequently restricted to their houses and were only permitted to labor at night.

The work was hazardous as well. Within the cesspit, the gong farmers could be killed by the toxic fumes created by the feces. But the generous compensation more than offset whatever danger or humiliation they endured. Following the emergence of sewage pipes and treatment plants in the 19th century, the position became obsolete. However, gong farmers are still practiced in several regions of the world.
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9 -Eleven Knocker Upper

People used the knocker upper to wake up decades before alarm clocks became widely used. Remarkably, the occupation persisted into the 1970s.The original door-knockers were those who rang or knocked on paying clients’ doors. They quickly realized, nevertheless, that this was detrimental to business. Frequently, neighbors would complain that the noise kept them awake. During the rounds, the knocker uppers also discovered that they frequently woke up nonpaying clients. So the knocker uppers got out their long sticks and began pounding on their clients’ windows.The paying client was awakened by the loud tap, but nobody else was awakened by its quietness. After three or four taps, the knocker uppers went without waiting to make sure their clients were still awake. With the widespread use of electricity and alarm clocks, the profession began to decline.By the 1970s, knocker uppers had become extinct, having gone out of commerce in the 1940s and 1950s.[2]

8 Ice Cutter

Ice cutters employed ice axes and, subsequently, handheld ice saws to remove ice from frozen ponds so that people could preserve their food from 1800 to 1920. Ice cutters began utilizing massive ice saws that needed horses to tow since the industry was growing so quickly.Between January and February, the natural fresh water in the northwest of the United States provided the majority of the ice. It was a laborious task. Ten-hour shifts were worked by ice cutters seven days a week in order to gather enough ice before March’s rising temperatures. There was always a chance that the ice cutters would fall into the icy water.The risks associated with the trade also affected the horses. They too could slip and plunge into the ice ponds. The ice was also tainted by their excrement. To clean up after the horses, the majority of ice-cutting companies even hired “shine boys.” The shine kid, carrying a waterproof wooden sled with him at all times, filled the excrement into it.Icehouses are types of warehouses used to store collected ice that is later exported to other parts of the US and Europe. The icehouses were constructed with two walls, elevated above the ground, and packed with materials like as hay, charcoal, bark, sawdust, straw, and sand to prevent ice from melting. Additionally, these buildings were placed far away from trees due to worries that the ice would get wet and melt.However, because ice may melt or develop incorrectly, the industry was not very predictable. For ice cutters, having two consecutive successful harvest seasons was unheard of. The farmers who own the ponds emerged victorious. There were occasions when they sold more ice from their frozen ponds than they actually produce. After the electric refrigerator was invented, the industry vanished.[3]

7 Matchmaker

Matchmakers used to use all-female labor forces to make matches centuries ago. These ladies were referred to as “matchstick girls.” It was a laborious and hazardous profession. This was particularly evident at businesses like Bryant and May, who employed hazardous white phosphorous to make their matches, paid low pay, overworked their employees, and had tight, regressive regulations.Bryant and May employed matchstick girls for fourteen hours every day. For small transgressions like dropping a match, chatting with coworkers, or arriving late to work, they were frequently penalized. The white phosphorous they worked with posed the greatest hazard to them, though.[4]Toxic is white phosphorus. It may result in “phosphorous necrosis of the jaw,” or “phossy jaw,” as the ladies used to refer to it. The mandible deteriorated from the illness. Occasionally, it traveled to the brain, resulting in a long, excruciating death for the patient. The only way to treat it was to have the injured jaw removed. But death can possibly result from this.

6 Rectal Teaching Assistant

As we were engrossed in discussions about whether artificial intelligence and robotics will eventually replace us in our work, robots quietly stole the position of rectal teaching assistant.When diagnosing prostate cancer, medical professionals frequently feel the prostate gland by sticking their fingers into the anus. They were once trained using a live human being’s rectum, a technique known as rectal teaching assistants. In the entire UK, only one individual had the authorization to become one.A robotic rectum that resembled a real human rectum was created by scientists at Imperial College London in response to concerns about the lack of rectal teaching assistants. Regrettably, the UK’s sole licensed rectal teaching assistant lost his job as a result of the robot’s development.[5]The robot, according to its creators, is superior to a human. Medical staff may view the inside workings of the robot rectum on a computer screen thanks to cameras installed inside the device. They could never have accomplished that with a human.

5 People as Computers

When Barbara Canright was hired as a human computer by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California in 1939, the first human computers were born. Everything from the force needed to launch an airplane into the air to the quantity of rocket propellant needed to launch a rocket into space had to be calculated by Canright.Pencils and paper were used to perform the intricate computations. A rocket’s journey time required a whole day to calculate, and other computations can take up to a week. Eight notebooks could be filled with a single calculation. After the United States entered World War II, Melba Nea, Virginia Prettyman, and Macie Roberts joined Canright.Following the battle, the human computers focused their energies on the space race. They were in charge of the computations that launched the Voyager spacecraft, the first unmanned rover on Mars, the US satellite into orbit, and Neil Armstrong and the Apollo 11 crew to the moon.When NASA began experimenting with mechanical computers in the 1950s, the human computers were still in the lead. The majority of individuals thought that people could be trusted more than robots. However, computers quickly replaced humans in the workforce.[6]

4 Pin Boy

A few decades back, bowling alleys hired young boys who were known as pinsetters, pin spotters, or pin boys to manually fix the pins after they fell and give the balls back to the bowlers. The labor was frequently part-time and paid little. It was quite taxing, though, as the boys frequently worked until midnight.When Gottfried Schmidt created the mechanical pinsetter in 1936, things began to change. Despite being semiautomatic, the pinsetter still needed to be operated by humans. Certain bowling alleys stuck with using pin boys instead of switching to mechanical pinsetters. Fully automatic pinsetters, on the other hand, quickly replaced semiautomatic pinsetters and pin boys.[7]

3 Lamplighters

The eighteenth century saw the introduction of public lamps. They needed a lamplighter to light them at night and take them out in the morning. They were fuelled by fish oil. Later developments of the fish oil streetlight gave rise to the gas lamp. But that called for a lamplighter as well.These experts lit the lamps at night and put out the flames in the mornings using long poles. Lamplighters were also in charge of keeping the lamps clean, maintained, and repaired.When the first electric streetlamps were introduced in the 1870s, the profession began to decline. In the United States, gas types were superseded by electric lamps. But because electric lighting were controversial in the UK at the time, gas lamps were used there for many years. In the end, the UK switched from gas to electric lamps.Their lights were criticized for being unattractive, dazzling, and excessively bright for the time of day. Others brought up the cost of electricity. The British Commercial Gas Association purposefully hindered the widespread use of electric lamps by endorsing gas lamps as a superior substitute.[8]Electric lighting became the norm only in the 1930s. For historical reasons, some 1,500 gas lamps are still in use in London.

2-Log Driver

Wood that had been cut down deep in forests was rolled into rivers and let to flow downstream long before trucks and railroads arrived. It did, however, occasionally become caught in miles-long logjams that required dynamite to break free and may entail tens of thousands of logs. The task of transporting the drifting logs downstream and releasing the logjams gave rise to an entire industry. We referred to the men as log drivers.[9]It was a laborious and hazardous profession. These crews frequently used specialized boats to track the logs. At times, they would even leap from one log to another while the wood moved downstream. Unlucky log drivers trying to clear logjams or escorting logs drowned after falling into the sea. Some fell between the logs and were crushed to death.

1 Collector of Leeches

In the 1800s, there was a brief craze for leech collectors that quickly vanished. Bloodletting was a practice done in the past to remove blood from the body in an attempt to treat illnesses. Leeches were used by doctors to draw blood from their patients.Soon, leech collectors began to arise to meet the increasing demand for leeches. Poor women who collected leeches from ponds and other locations where the animals were common performed these tasks frequently. The collectors lured the leeches with the legs of old horses or, in the preferred, less expensive approach, their own legs.[10]Before removing the leeches, the women let them feed on their blood for around twenty minutes. This is because a leech that is not hungry is harder to separate from its host. However, this frequently led to serious blood loss and wounds that bled for hours. However, the bleeding brought in more leeches, which was advantageous to the business.Leeches became hard to come by, and the profession began to die out. At about the same time, medical professionals began to question the efficacy of bloodletting. Medical progress quickly demonstrated that the procedure was risky and ineffective. The practice of bloodletting was outlawed, and leech collectors followed. The leeches that were spared from extinction were the winners.