Technology: Stealing Jobs Since Forever - 8 Jobs Made Obsolete By Technology

There's much banter, these days, about autonomous vehicles, or self-driving cars, and their realistic feasibility and also their impact on jobs, specifically, truck driving jobs.

The widespread adoption of self-driving trucks is still ways off, and not without plenty of safety, legal, and logistical hurdles to clear, but here's an interesting look at some jobs that used to be important, but were phased out by technological improvements:

• Log Driver: Before logging trucks and interstate highways, freshly cut logs used to be guided down rivers by, literally, guys with long poles, on their way to processing.
• Milkman: See, kids, back in "the day", home refrigeration wasn't nearly as widespread or reliable as it is today, so each day's milk was delivered fresh to your door, because there just wasn't a good way to keep it from spoiling.
• Lamplighter: Pre-electric grids and streetlights, someone had to manually light, refuel, and extinguish the street lamps.
• Rat Catcher: Not really the most glamorous job in the lot, but somebody had to do it. Not sure that they actually used rifles, though.
• Human Radar: Before RADAR, enemy aircraft was detected mainly by actually listening for the sound of their engines, and a whole array of odd-looking devices was designed around that.
• Ice Cutter: How else would you keep your daily milk delivery cold? Early refrigerators were ice-powered, which meant that whole crews of workers braved the frozen lakes to get ice to the end-user.
• Human Alarm Clock: "Knocker-uppers" were hired as literal alarm clocks, banging on people's doors and windows with sticks, pebbles, clubs, whatever was handy.
• Bowling Alley Pinsetter: Using small boys to set up pins after every roll was a commonplace occurrence before the advent of automatic pinsetters.

Jobs That Technology Made Obsolete

I wonder how many times a day someone would sneak up and yell in that thing.