For more than three decades (the 1960s, 70s, and 80s) I spent a good deal of time in library stacks. When I went to other universities and conferences I'd spend time in their libraries. I also knew where all the bookstores were. Nowadays most of my library research is done with search engines. As Turing said, search is an important part of artificial intelligence.
In the 1960s I used slide rules and function tables. By the 1970s those got replaced by desktop and then pocket calculators. These, in turn, became programmable.
Beginning in the early 1970s by the end of the 1990s my plasma physics experiments were pretty much completely automated.*
In the 1950s we'd tell the auto club where we wanted to go on vacation and they would send us maps with the routes marked out. Today Siri will direct you as you drive.
And then there's word-processing, email, spam filters, texting, spellcheckers, autocomplete, compressor/summarizers, code completion, self-parking, self-driving, GPT, etc.
Each of these is a specialist.
Although a lot of my work has been taken over and done for me I've still found plenty more to do.
* See, for example, Trans. Kansas Academy of Sci., 101, pg 132, 1998 and 99, pg 85, 1997 and my blogs of 1 and 2 November 2011.
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