Found this pictorial on jobs technology has replaced, to some extent a lot of traditional surveying tasks have also been replaced by technology or the technology has allowed non traditional "surveyors" to do the tasks without using a surveyor.
Of course boundary and other professional decsions will still be required but does give pause for thought.
SHG
I remember visiting my Dad at his office at a Civil Engineering firm in the 1960s. They had a drafting room full of draftsmen. Now I do my own drafting.
The surveyor will never be replaced until machines can obtain insurance or otherwise be held monetarily responsible.
> The surveyor will never be replaced until machines can obtain insurance or otherwise be held monetarily responsible.
Perhaps so, but you just mean the 'licensed surveyor'. Look back at the day and old pictures of survey crews that set triangulation stations. They would have a whole party of 10 or more guys. A chuckwagon and cook, packmules, horses, linecutters, shotgun scouts etc. Offices full of draftsmen, in a survey firm, a 3 to 5-man crew doing property surveys.
A lot of engineers do preliminary design with a Google-maps topography. You have one-man crews doing rtk work with a network.
No, we're losing our jobs fast. We can global-position in HARN Points with only a few guys today instead of a survey party of 20 working for a year. And now we are replacing the need for that with CORS and GPS networks. How many solo-operators are out there already? How many operating abstract companies are there. How many can look up deeds online?
One of the problems I see with solo's is the size of a project they can do and the risk they can take one. There are limits to what one person can do. I think its more a niche and the legal part of boundary surveying is one that can be filled.
Maybe personal drones are in our future and you'd be able to be on the ground from the office (sounds good to my aging bones). Just fly the little dude out there, unfold the excavator and poke around. Of course some day we might actually have it all surveyed and properly into the GIS and there won't be all that much need for field surveying other than new and damage lines.
After seeing that new GEO Automation setup at the 2013 PLSO conference that DEA has... it's surprising where technology will lead us.
IF we choose to keep our hands and minds in it, and stop defining our roles in "traditional" means.
Our profession was in place to take the reins of that new fangled GIS technology
and it slipped through the hands of professional surveyors like water due to hesitating. We just created another profession to compete with due to our "inflexible" nature of wanting to hold on to the visions of how we were told the profession "was" in our youth.
We'd best keep our heads in the "game" and keep up, and be proactive about, what technology can do for our profession, or we'll give those new technologies away to other professions that will take that option away from us, just like GIS.
There will always be a place for our profession, it's how WE define our roles in it, and how we define what products and services we are able to provide.
For at the end of the day, we are a services profession, providing information, and our exptertise, like any other professional.
Whatever we do, we need to service our clients needs, just like any other profession, and if that means updating our technology skill set, then that's what we need to do to stay viable in an age of technology.
There are days, I do miss, a chain and transit...... 😉
> The professional side no (boundary and legal related). The purely measurement side would be a semi-no, but the number of people needed to do measurement has and will erode.
The number of people it takes to perform measurements have decreased, but the number of things getting measured has increased dramatically. I'm wrapping up a project where we scanned the walls of the C&O Canal before and after three small bridges over the canal were replaced in downtown DC.
If the technology that reduced the time and effort to make all those measurements (something like 300 million points collected) wasn't in place, then the work would never have existed in the first place.
> After seeing that new GEO Automation setup at the 2013 PLSO conference that DEA has... it's surprising where technology will lead us.
>
> IF we choose to keep our hands and minds in it, and stop defining our roles in "traditional" means.
>
> Our profession was in place to take the reins of that new fangled GIS technology
> and it slipped through the hands of professional surveyors like water due to hesitating. We just created another profession to compete with due to our "inflexible" nature of wanting to hold on to the visions of how we were told the profession "was" in our youth.
>
> We'd best keep our heads in the "game" and keep up, and be proactive about, what technology can do for our profession, or we'll give those new technologies away to other professions that will take that option away from us, just like GIS.
>
> There will always be a place for our profession, it's how WE define our roles in it, and how we define what products and services we are able to provide.
>
> For at the end of the day, we are a services profession, providing information, and our exptertise, like any other professional.
>
> Whatever we do, we need to service our clients needs, just like any other profession, and if that means updating our technology skill set, then that's what we need to do to stay viable in an age of technology.
>
> There are days, I do miss, a chain and transit...... 😉
Great Post:good: