Real Estate agents and stock brokers should not exist.
There has been lots of discussion here about robots and technology changing our workforce (
here,
here,
here,
here,
here, and especially
here), but little recognition that this process is already happening.
Wikipedia killed the encyclopedia business. Google Maps killed paper maps. Craigslist killed newspaper classified ads. Millions of jobs writing, compiling, editing, and publishing printed materials no longer exist, whether or not those individual people actually got fired.
Kayak and Priceline and the like are currently killing off travel agencies. This isn't just replacing published materials with online equivalents, this is full-featured customer service operations being run almost solely by algorithms and automated reservation systems. They'll book your flights, hotel, car, book your evening's entertainment and throw in a coupon for dinner at a local restaurant. Currently, the only people who actually have travel agents are the disproportionately wealthy who don't care to economize. In ten more years, even those folks will just have their personal assistants book their travel online for them and then let a service like Google Now direct their travels, and travel agents will be no more.
TurboTax and TacAct are currently killing off tax-preparers (not accountants). Even ten years ago this was thought of as a service job that technology could never replace, yet here we are filing complex tax forms for free using algorithms and hand-holding decision support systems. I suspect there will always be a few tax-prep humans still working, mostly as volunteers for the poor and desperate who can't sit in front of a computer for long enough to file, but the former juggernaut industry of humans writing numbers on pieces of paper and then mailing those papers to other humans has largely evaporated.
I think Real Estate agents and stockbrokers are next. These are jobs that totally made sense in the analog world of 1950s America, and are basically ridiculous now.
Stockbrokers first: the floor of the NYSE is not full of sweaty men shouting buy and sell orders at each other, it's a TV studio backdrop for market news about what high speed computers did that day. There are no people actually setting stock prices by buying and selling from each other anymore. There are still some individual humans who buy and sell in person at the location of the exchange, but they do so using a computer and don't really need to be present, or have a stockbroker's license. The rise of services like Vanguard allows any schmuck to buy and sell at this second's current price from any internet-connected computer, and the long term trend towards indexing threatens the stockbroker's bread-and-butter business. No more hot tips, no more cold calling clueless investors, no more 4% load funds and per-transaction commissions. It's all automated, all free, and the job title "stockbroker" is about as silly as "buggy-whip manufacturer".
RE agents last, because I know we have some here and they will no doubt be offended. Your jobs are superfluous. Zillow and Redfin and Estately are crude tools but they are only getting better over time. Their algorithms will soon be better than your "gut feeling" about local real estate valuations. We'll still need some humans involved in the home-buying process, but that person really should be a lawyer, the transaction should only require one of them for both parties, and that person should not make 6% of the purchase price of a home. By what possible logic does a RE agent deserve to make ten times as much for selling a $500k home as for selling a $50k home? Is it anywhere near ten times as much work? Real estate lawyers should charge a set fee or an hourly rate to do the paperwork, and they should contract out the cost of hiring a bonded worker to open front doors in the same way they currently contract out the title insurance. All of the home shopping and comparisons, including the marketing for sellers, is already better done online. Eventually, the websites will be able to walk you through the paperwork too. Is signing a home purchase contract really more complicated than filing your taxes?
I think RE agents will last longer than stockbrokers or travel agents, just because some people currently are more needy about having their hands held while buying a house than they are about having their hands held while buying plane tickets or mutual funds. But that will change over time, too. We just have to wait for the population to catch up with what the technology can provide.