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AP PHOTOS: A look at jobs replaced by technology

Published: January 23, 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 Steven Herman, left, head of the Library of Congress storage facility, at the Library of Congress in 2003, in Washington, and left, a "bookBot", an automated retrieval system at the James B. Hunt Jr. Library at North Carolina State University in 2013, in Raleigh, N.C. Many middle-class workers have lost jobs because powerful software and computerized machines are doing tasks that only humans could do before. (AP Photo)

This combination of Associated Press file photos shows Steven Herman, left, head of the Library of Congress storage facility, at the Library of Congress in 2003, in Washington, and left, a "bookBot", an automated retrieval system at the James B. Hunt Jr. Library at North Carolina State University in 2013, in Raleigh, N.C. Many middle-class workers have lost jobs because powerful software and computerized machines are doing tasks that only humans could do before. (AP Photo)

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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.