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AP PHOTOS: A look at jobs replaced by technology

Published: January 24, 2013 Comment on this article

Five years after the start of the Great Recession, the toll is terrifyingly clear: Millions of middle-class jobs have been lost in developed countries the world over.

photo - This combination of Associated Press file photos shows a worker, left, assembling a motor in a Mercedes Benz factory in 2008 in Berlin, and a robot, right, painting a brake drum at Webb Wheel Products, in 2013, in Cullman, Ala.. Thanks to robots, Webb Wheel hasn't added a factory worker in over three years, though it's making 300,000 more drums annually, a 25 percent increase. (AP Photo)

This combination of Associated Press file photos shows a worker, left, assembling a motor in a Mercedes Benz factory in 2008 in Berlin, and a robot, right, painting a brake drum at Webb Wheel Products, in 2013, in Cullman, Ala.. Thanks to robots, Webb Wheel hasn't added a factory worker in over three years, though it's making 300,000 more drums annually, a 25 percent increase. (AP Photo)

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Article Gallery: AP PHOTOS: A look at jobs replaced by technology

Worse, those jobs weren't just lost to China and other developing countries. No one got them. They vanished, victims of increasingly sophisticated software and machines that can do tasks faster, cheaper and often better than humans.

Here is a photo gallery of jobs especially hard hit by the technological onslaught: