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"exec" writes:

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

To add a simple date to a tombstone in the late 90s, Ron Richard, an engraver based in Southern Massachusetts, would trace the numbers onto a sheet of rubber and cut them out with an X-acto knife. By the time he'd placed the stencil onto the stone and run over it with his sandblaster (sand bounces off of the rubber portions of the stencil and carves rock exposed in the voids in between), about 20 minutes had passed.

Today, the same process takes Richard about five minutes. "It's far, far different," Richard says of his job nearly 20 years after he started his business, Northeast Stonewriters.

Richard now uses his laptop computer, which he brings with him to the cemetery, to lay out the text he wants to engrave. He uses a specialized printer, designed for the sign industry, to cut the rubber stencil according to the appropriate sizes and fonts.

Engravers and etchers like Richard, according to a survey by the US Department of Labor, now have the most automated occupation in the United States.

In the context of the current narrative of robots and software taking over jobs, this sounds like a sad story. But when I called a handful of etchers and engravers who have been in the business for decades, that's not the story they told me.

-- submitted from IRC

Original Submission