There have been many advances in technology going across many different fields.  Global positioning systems have revolutionized things as diverse as luggage delivery and land surveying equipment.  GPS survey equipment can have important legal uses to determine property lines and recover minerals.  With improved record keeping systems, the importance of knowing where one property ends and another begins is vital to long term security.  Geographic information systems rely on capturing, storing, analyzing, managing, and presenting data for geographic understanding. Merging cartography, statistical analysis, and databases offer significant advantages over the old ways of collecting and crunching data. 

 Getting the right information at the right time and the right place will be increasingly important in the world of the future.  Buildings must be built in precise locations in many different cities.  This is especially important to building projects that can involve multi-million dollar investments.  Being off by inches at the base can affect the stability and safety of the whole project.  While there have always been surveyors who measure and make certain a project is laid out as it should be, the quality of their equipment has improved over the centuries from a simple plumb, level, square, and compass to GPS surveying equipment, scanners, total stations, digital levels, leveling lasers, and other land surveying equipment. 

 Having the ability to measure the area of a building project makes the length of time to complete a project decrease sharply.  Calculating lengths, coordination, the radius, and angles of different components accelerates project completion times and can earn a company big bonuses when they are finished swiftly and precisely. Laser technology is amazing for drawing a straight line across long distances.  This is one reason lasers are preferred by marksmen to target rifles that need to shoot across long distances.  There are gyros to help surveyors find true north, even inside a tunnel or other enclosed spaces where there is no way to see the visibility or weather.   Scanners can digitally record all the information needed at a work site, including the area of a room, distances between different objects, and even obtaining a three dimensional model of the area that can be stored in a computer drafting program to find and look at any issues that might develop.  Surveyors must be able to have their equipment function correctly in rain, wind, shine, and other damp and dark places, depending on the place being measured and recorded.