[eli]

Better OCR (and, cynically, perhaps a higher tolerance of error to cut costs) is making the human handwriting readers obsolete.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/04/us/where-mail-with-illegib...

[jonknee]

And much less hand addressed mail. It's much easier to OCR a printed label.

[dchichkov]

I wouldn't be surprised if modern domain specific OCR can give you an error rate that beats that of a time-constrained human reader.

[taeric]

While I agree with you at the general level, it sounds like these trained individuals are ridiculously good at what they do. Even seven years ago, to be able to take a crack at an envelope in just 10 seconds and type out the result is impressive.

[mortehu]

And their jobs are getting harder:

"It used to be that we'd get letters that were somewhat legible but the machines weren't good enough to read them. Now we get letters and packages with the most awful handwriting you can imagine."