Common Jobs That Might Be Gone in 10 Years

The writing has been on the wall for quite a while now. Robots are coming — coming to take over human jobs. Burying one’s head in the sand is no longer an option: those whose professions are likely to become obsolete should already start considering a career switch. In case you wonder what jobs are at most risk, here’s our list:

Cashiers
Ask a random person on the street what common job is likely to be automated out of existence first — you’ll most likely hear about that one in response. With the rise of self-checkout machines, cashiers will be replaced in no time. Soon we’ll miss those friendly conversations at the checkout lane.

Travel agents
Believe it or not, there was a time where it was almost impossible to go on a trip without first paying a visit to a travel agency. We don’t need their help anymore: sadly for travel agents, now we can arrange everything related to our trip online.
Although hardly anyone except travel agents themselves could have noticed, this industry is slowly dying.

Taxi dispatchers
Thanks to apps like Uber, we no longer require calling a middleman to order a taxi — everything is pretty much automated now. Although you still can dial a phone number in order to call a cab, this job is likely to be extinct in the near future.

Paralegals and legal assistants
If you think that automation will only affect low-skill jobs, you’re wrong. Thanks to machine learning, paralegals are being replaced by bots capable of performing many repetitive tasks, such as legal research, document review and other types of law-clerk job — with stress on the “clerk” part. Of course, this trend does not affect practicing lawyers — they will always be in demand. Yet, even they should get prepared to compete with AI; law schools, on the other hand, should consider including programming courses in their curriculum.

Financial clerks
Finances are being affected in the same way as law — though chatbots and virtual assistants are not capable of comprehensive financial planning yet, they can perform some basic tasks and already outperform their human colleagues on some levels — and replace them.

Telemarketers
Do we really have to discuss that one? Everybody hates these intrusive phone calls, but they provide jobs for millions of people. Sadly for them, these jobs will soon be automated. No one will mourn telemarketers, but we still bet that even when it comes to vacuum cleaners, anyone would rather speak to a human being — not a machine.