The customers replaced shipping disk drives (or, in DoD's case, boxes of analog videotapes!) with transferring files over fiber and satellite links. NYT switched from reading stories aloud over bad phone connections to transferring files via satphone.

This displaced fedex package handlers and mailroom personnel, and stenographers.

In DoD's case, a physical library of surveillance drone videotapes, and everybody schlepping tape cartridges, was replaced with a remote-accessible video library. Nowadays digital video is streamed to Nevada and Utah in real time, and copied off there.

Similar stories apply for numerous other customer industries. These were all permanent changes. Aspera grew to a hundred-some employees in 2014, but must have displaced thousands.

Does this count as automation?

My current employer had a curiously very successful corona-quarter and building a solid backorder because we cannot have everyone in production right now.

We automate everything we can and still employ more and more people. We often think manufacturing when speaking about automation, but I think administration will be affected most (you won't automate anything if you fired your internal IT department).

We also build a fairly sci-fi robot to populate circuit boards for parts that cannot be fitted by reflow soldering. Great device to show off but the soldering women are just plainly faster and less error prone. And we have quite a high wage level.

But sales planning, accounting, reporting will be mostly automated at some point. Our own in-house production is steadily growing even with additional support by machines.

Of course it is bad if people out of job have no alternative. I think there should be state support for such cases instead of artificially keeping an industry alive.

All of these jobs were replaced by a spreadsheet decades ago.