The Calculating Stars

Electronic computers, arriving to do the arithmetic that women were employed to do.

Elma and her colleagues work as human computers for the space programme, doing orbital mathematics by hand, while the machines that will replace them are installed in the next room.

Obsolescence — The work goes, and standing goes with it.

The only work here where the displacement is historical rather than speculative. Worth reading alongside Player Piano: same argument, seventy years apart, opposite conclusions about who gets to stay.