The Cover Letter
Begun, legend says, by Leonardo da Vinci writing to the Duke of Milan. Ended written by machines, read by machines.
Survived by the referral
Room III
In memoriam.
Things AI has ended. A few came back. Light a candle.
Dates are approximate. Grief is not.
Seeing Is Believing
Born with the daguerreotype. Died the week a fake photo of the Pope in a puffer coat fooled millions.
Survived by reverse image search
The Typo
For five centuries it proved a tired person had been here. Now perfect prose makes readers suspicious.
Survived by suspiciously perfect paragraphs
The Entry-Level Job
Employment for 22 to 25-year-olds in the most AI-exposed jobs fell 16% in relative terms, Stanford found. The bottom rung is where people learned.
Survived by the senior hire
The CAPTCHA
Built to tell people from programs. Programs now pass it faster than people.
Survived by the question it could not answer
The Support Agent
Klarna said AI did the work of 700 agents, then began hiring people again when quality fell.
Survived by itself
The Handwritten Exam
Declared obsolete by laptops. Brought back, because ink in a quiet room still proves who wrote it.
Survived by everyone relearning to write fast
We have been replaced before.
Ordinary jobs machines took long ago, and what came next.
“Computer” was a job title before it was a machine.
1660s to 1930s
Lamplighter
Lit and snuffed the street lamps by hand, at dusk and again at dawn.
- Replaced by
- Electric light and timers
- What came next
- A handful still tend London’s remaining gas lamps.
1800s to 1970s
Knocker-up
Woke factory workers before their shifts by tapping on bedroom windows with a long pole.
- Replaced by
- Cheap alarm clocks
- What came next
- The job lingered in a few English towns into the 1970s.
Since 1878
Switchboard operator
Connected every telephone call by hand, plug by plug.
- Replaced by
- The automatic exchange, invented by an undertaker who believed an operator was sending his customers to a rival
- What came next
- Switchboard operators are on Microsoft’s 2025 list of the 40 jobs that overlap most with AI.
1700s to 1960s
Human computer
Did science’s arithmetic by hand. At NACA and NASA many were women, among them Katherine Johnson and Dorothy Vaughan.
- Replaced by
- Electronic computers, which also took the job title
- What came next
- Vaughan taught herself and her team FORTRAN and moved them into programming.
1890s to 1950s
Pinsetter
Reset bowling pins by hand, often boys working late into the night.
- Replaced by
- The automatic pinspotter
- What came next
- Bowling boomed once machines set the pins.
Since 1865
Lector
Read newspapers and novels aloud to cigar rollers, paid out of the workers’ own wages.
- Replaced by
- Radio, and Tampa factory owners who removed them after a strike in 1931
- What came next
- Cuban factories still have lectores. The Montecristo cigar is said to take its name from a novel they read aloud.
1800s to 1930s
Ice cutter
Sawed blocks of ice from frozen lakes, packed them in sawdust and shipped them around the world.
- Replaced by
- Mechanical refrigeration
- What came next
- Boston’s Frederic Tudor once shipped New England ice all the way to Calcutta.
1850s to 1960s
Elevator operator
Drove the car, levelled it with the floor and made small talk with strangers.
- Replaced by
- Automatic lifts, pushed along by a 1945 strike in New York
- What came next
- People would not ride alone until lifts got calm recorded voices and a big red stop button. Remember that when you meet a driverless car.
1450 to 1890s
Compositor
Set every letter of every page by hand: capitals from the upper case, small letters from the lower.
- Replaced by
- The Linotype machine
- What came next
- The headlines on this page use a revival of the Fell Types, bought for Oxford in the 1670s.