How has technology changed your industry?

[hobbsyoyo]

For aerospace, the increase in computational power and miniaturization of electronics has drastically lowered the bar for entry for companies to enter the market.

A lot of design work used to be very manual. Drafting tables and slide rules were the order of the day and so every task took much longer to complete. This meant more engineers were required to work on things in parallel. Now, small teams can finish larger tasks in a smaller amount of time. Calculating a simple trajectory, for instance, can be roughed in out in a few hours by a single person. It used to take a team of engineers and human computers several days to weeks to achieve similar results with arguably less accuracy.

As electronics continue to shrink, it makes it easier to build spacecraft and a great deal cheaper too. There was a long term trend upward in the mass of satellites that has now shifted dramatically in the other direction. While there will still be a place for 20,000 kg, $200 million dollar communication satellites for a long time there is a growing space for 10 kg, $200,000 satellites as well. There's a ton of innovation being driven by these two factors right now.

I'm not really sure how many jobs have been destroyed by the two above factors to be honest but I imagine it was quite dramatic over 2 or 3 decades.

You can also talk about the impact of technology on your life.

GPS and pocket computers impact just about every facet of my daily life but I'm also young enough that I've lived with them almost as long without them, especially when you consider no one has need of those things for 5-10 years to start out. Though its becoming very common for young children to be given electronics at a young age.

 

[Hrothbern]

I worked for 30 years in the traditional metal industry in Europe, in a technical niche big company.
During that period wages increased, energy cost increased, regulation cost increased, technical quality reliability increased, micro management/control top-down increased....
and the selling price to customers like automotive (car industry) stayed roughly the same, often lower. The revenue per head more than doubled (as proxy for jobs disappearing).
Because of: better equipment (technical and automation) operating at more hours per week, technical expert systems, company software systems, MS office, lean manufacturing, etc, etc
To note here is that during that process the typical technical craftsman became less and less needed at shop floor level.
I saw the same happening everywhere around me at customers in the metal industry. From small to big roughly the same countering package, accelerated by consolidation of smaller companies in bigger ones and clustering in denser industrial areas.

 

[Leifmk]

Well, I'm a computer programmer, so my industry basically exists because of technology.

(I specialize in keeping alive a particular legacy database from the 80s, written in an obscure language that fewer and fewer people who haven't retired even know anymore. It may be replaced at some point but things take time and it may well keep me busy until my own retirement even if that is 20+ years into the future.)

 

[Kyriakos]

I didn't have to write on wax notebooks, papyri, or parchment.

 

[Thorgalaeg]

Being a lawyer working for the administration, not much for me beyond using Microsoft Office instead of this:

About the administration in general it has changed a lot of things. Basically more process it yourself in Internet for the citizen and less public workers.

 

[caketastydelish]

Not employed yet but I graduate in less than a year with a Bachelors degree in Computer Information Systems. That said, I suppose we could be here all day with "how has technology changed my industry."

 

[Lexicus]

I can do a huge amount of stuff at my computer that I would have had to travel around the country for even as recently as 10 years ago.

 

[civvver]

I have a degree in computer science and am a software engineer by trade. I've worked at the same company, a supplier for automotive oems, for 13 years. So yes my industry is tech, but sure it has changed.

We still code in mostly the same languages as back when I started. C++ and java are core and that's about it with some of us doing some python or html5 and stuff for web portals. When I think about major changes in tech that directly impact my work four really stand out.

-Internet content. Even in the early 2000s when I was in school the internet wasn't that reliable for solving complex programming issues. Sure you could find like hello world examples and stuff, but if you were like struggling with resizing a windows pane or something programatically it was hit or miss. Now? Almost any programming problem you have encountered has been done. If you can't figure out a window's or linux api there's an answer online. If you can't figure out how to use a javafx table view there's examples. Heck the fact that there is a standard component for that available online is a big step, in the past you might have to write it yourself. So while programming remains very complicated cus the scale of most programs is growing and they integrate with a lot more systems now, the nitty gritty like syntax and function calls is getting easier because there are more examples. For a non programmer I'd use this analogy: It's like writing a book with no way to check spelling. Then comes along a hardcover dictionary but that's still kind of tedious to lookup. Then comes online spell checker. You still have to write the book but you don't have to worry about mundane details like how to spell restaurant (a word I always misspell).

-Digital distribution. Goes sort of hand in hand with internet content, but now we push software updates online, we can buy software products online and install instantly, we deliver our products digitally, we support remotely using the internet. Just changes everything.

-Computing power and memory. When I started memory usage was still kind of a thing to be concerned with. Not overly concerned, but a little. Most pcs didn't have gobs of ram. And they weren't super fast, but fast enough. So you still tried to code efficiently. Now? Heck it really almost doesn't matter unless you're dong like graphic rendering or something. The stuff we do is so trivial for a pc and we have so much memory it's like an afterthought.

-Mobile computer. Probably the biggest change cus it's driving every future product now as pcs are phased out and everything becomes cloud based and universal platform. We once tried to launch a mobile device on windowsce. Now? Tablets and phones run the same os as the pcs for the most part or port easily.

 

[Lemon Merchant]

Better meds! Woohoo! My patients are much better off than they would have been 20 years ago with the advancement in psych meds.

Not everyone's needs have been addressed fully, but it's better than it was.

 

[caketastydelish]

Professional student here. It's better and easier than ever to play video games and jerk off to porn.

More seriously, things like LinkedIn make it much easier to get internships and jobs.

 

[Bamspeedy]

Headset tells me where to go and what cases I need to get, whereas decades ago I would have to print out a sheet and look at it (hundreds of times an hour). Now instead of cussing at a printer for a paper jam or because they lost their paper, people are cussing at the voice recognition program.

No need to fill out a form with all the redundant information about SS#, name, department, signature, etc. for every day off when needing to use vacation time. Just log onto the computer and pick the days. Can even do this from home and not on a company computer.

Over the road truckers bringing in freight, used to take 10-15 minutes to check in at the security gate, much of it to make (multiple) copies of several documents. Now it's going paperless.

Computers to analyze the store orders to maximize truck space to minimize the number of trucks needed to ship freight to the stores.
Programming the computer to realize the store ordered a full pallet so you take the pallet straight to the truck, instead of removing the shrink wrap from the pallet, putting it in the pick slot, someone taking each case of the pallet individually, then wrapping the whole pallet again with shrink wrap. (still a work in progress, and sometimes when you got 50 cases on a pallet and the store ordered 49, it would be best if it just forced the store to order one more case).

A whole bunch of other stuff, but some of that, if it makes my job easier, they just increase the standards/expectations, so in the end my job isn't any easier, I'm just making the company more money (which I may or may not see in my own pocket).

[rant]
Engineers.

Many operate under the assumption of a 'perfect world'. The idea may look good on paper or in theory, but in the real world it is a complete disaster. While there are some successes, there have been just as many failures.
[/rant]

 

[Ajidica]

A lot. I work at a commodity exchange in the audit and investigation department, and our industry today is virtually unrecognizable from thirty years ago. (Heck it was pretty different ten years ago.)
Open outcry trading pits are basically dead, the presence of electronic audit trails makes it trivially easy to reconstruct trading activity, and complete anonymity enforced by electronic trading platforms means the most common potential trading violations (like pre-arranging trades outside the pit or preferential trading) are all but impossible to do. Firms no longer need to have offices at the exchange to tell their traders what to do or make cash transactions as it can all be done electronically. Doing market surveillance has also gotten a lot less cumbersome as we no longer kill several trees a month printing out all the summary reports and daily trade activity, the ability to quickly pull, sort, and filter is ace.
Additionally, due to the prevalence of electronic trading, we no longer have the swarms of secretaries and assistants who were in charge of processing trading cards and manually updating the account books.

 

[stfoskey12]

I'm still in college, but I'm majoring in meteorology, so I'll go with that as my topic.
Technology has drastically changed meteorology. Prior to the inventions of the thermometer and barometer in the 1630s-1640s, meteorology largely consisted of looking at the clouds and the behavior of animals to gain a rough idea of what would happen in the next 24 hours or so. Once it was known that low pressure is associated with storms, the air pressure, and particularly the change in pressure, could be used to see if a storm was coming. Rain gauges (from 450 BC.), anemometers (from 1450), weather vanes (from 50 BC), hygrometers (from the Han dynasty, more effectively from 1818), and other devices also allowed people to measure current atmospheric conditions.
The next major technology that changed meteorology was the telegraph. This allowed information about atmospheric conditions in other parts of the world to travel faster than the air masses themselves. For example, in the great cold snap of 1899, when temperatures as cold as -2°F (-19°C) were recorded as far south as Tallahassee, FL, warnings of the cold were provided to orange and other subtropical crop growers a day or two in advance. Around the same time, weather balloons started to be used to sample the troposphere and later stratosphere, providing atmospheric measurements throughout the atmosphere. This allowed for the ability to measure instability and risk for thunderstorms, as well as provided an idea of upper level winds and the jet stream.
The invention of radar in the 1940s allowed meteorologists to see the distribution and intensity of precipitation in a given region, providing better knowledge of where storms are. This allowed for better forecasting for severe thunderstorms and tornadoes, around the same time as the issuance of the first tornado warning (1948). Propeller airplanes were also first flown into hurricanes around this time. Weather satellites allowed better monitoring of clouds over large areas, including hurricanes.
Over the past few decades, the biggest change has been the growth of computer models used to forecast the weather. These models can often predict atmospheric changes as much as a week in advance. For example, the blizzard that hit D.C. in 2016 was well forecast as much as five days out, and the possibility of a storm was known further out than that. Hurricane Irma was reasonably well forecast four or five days out, too.

 

[tuckerkao]

Well, I'm a computer programmer, so my industry basically exists because of technology.

The electronic goodies got more powerful and cheaper throughout the times, moneywise, computers like robots never get tired and emotionless, eventually they'll finish our daily works within several minutes if we can give just few correct commands.

At least, I don't have to write paper letters anymore, emails are so much more convenient and cost no stamps.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

Not employed yet but I graduate in less than a year with a Bachelors degree in Computer Information Systems. That said, I suppose we could be here all day with "how has technology changed my industry."

That's the point though.

 

[sophie]

A lot of different things. Digitization of manuscripts has made archival research absurdly easy to do these days. Prosopography was a pipe dream when it was originally proposed, but we're starting to get some incredible findings from prosopographic approaches. Digital Humanities is in the process of revolutionizing the way every humanities/social sciences approaches research.

Even down to the rough nitty-gritty by-hand archive work. Before you'd get a week in the archives to get all you needed, and anything you wanted to bring back with you had to be transcribed by hand, meaning only a handful of the most critical documents. Now (with a few excepted archives), you can just use a phone and photograph hundreds of folii in a matter of hours.

 

[Virote_Considon]

I work in the printing industry right now.

Because of technology it's boned right now, tbh fam.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

I work in the printing industry right now.

Because of technology it's boned right now, tbh fam.

I thought bound books were going through a bounce back though? And there seems to be no shortage of flyers and advertisements I get in the mail.

A lot of different things. Digitization of manuscripts has made archival research absurdly easy to do these days. Prosopography was a pipe dream when it was originally proposed, but we're starting to get some incredible findings from prosopographic approaches. Digital Humanities is in the process of revolutionizing the way every humanities/social sciences approaches research.

Even down to the rough nitty-gritty by-hand archive work. Before you'd get a week in the archives to get all you needed, and anything you wanted to bring back with you had to be transcribed by hand, meaning only a handful of the most critical documents. Now (with a few excepted archives), you can just use a phone and photograph hundreds of folii in a matter of hours.

What's prosopography?



More on aerospace -

SpaceX gets a ton of accolades for landing and relaunching their boosters but it's worth pointing out that not a single thing about their rockets is inconceivable for the 1960s except the computing power on board. Like most rockets and satellites, the computers a Falcon 9 runs aren't even that impressive by consumer standards but they are orders of magnitude (easy 3 or 4) faster than what was available back then.

The onboard computers are only a tiny sliver of the story though. The computers that took over the offices and obsoleted the draftsmen are what really made the things that SpaceX does possible. This is also why it's so hard to suss out how many jobs computers took away. For every draftsmen that got laid off there was a new opportunity for 'rocket landing leg engineers' - a job title that itself was an oxymoron just five years ago. It's not just that some jobs didn't exist before the miniaturization of electronics, it's that some jobs couldn't exist before then.

 

[sophie]

I thought bound books were going through a bounce back though? And there seems to be no shortage of flyers and advertisements I get in the mail.

What's prosopography?

To put it very crudely - it's a research technique in which you assemble an enormous spectrum of documents on a period, individual, or group of individuals, and compare them so as to reveal underlying structures and institutions at play that would not have been otherwise revealed through a more narrow documentary approach. As I said, owing to the sheer size of the data you have to work with to achieve anything in the way of tangible results, this methodological approach was largely unfeasible when it was first proposed in the 60s (unless you're someone like Ladurie), however the advent of computing, computer databases, and metadata have made this process rather more trivial now.

To give a concrete example of its applicability - Hillay Zmora, in a monograph published 5ish years ago used a prosopographic approach to study feud and declarations of feud between noble families in late medieval/early modern Franconia. Prosopography was able to reveal a definite relationship between declarations of feud and exchange of money and territory between feuding families, leading Zmora (iirc - I read the whole thing in one sitting at a bar) towards a recontextualization of feud, not as instances of interfamilial violence, but as a cultural/ritualistic practice essential to the establishment of prestige/legitimacy or to certify the transfer of territory between estates. Moreover, he was able to, by tracking the instances of these exchanges, to establish a clear periodization for when this feuding culture was at its peak, when it faded away (as well as theories as to why).

Or another really iconic example would be Emannuel LeRoy Ladurie's Montaillou, in which he sifted through literal mountains of inquisitorial accounts of Cathars and used comparative analysis of the common elements of the texts to draw out aspects of 12th century French village peasant life. So, for example, Ladurie looks through a number of documents in which villagers talk about bed, sleeping, and waking up, and is able to deduce, from the fact that all or most of the men mention getting dressed (or else rushing out of the house naked for some reason or another), that your average villager in southern France slept in the nude or else without a shirt.

That sort of thing.

 

[tuckerkao]

I work in the printing industry right now.

Because of technology it's boned right now, tbh fam.

The Print Press Technology was firstly discovered in the Renaissance Era, surprisingly our computers still require printers to function ideally today.