"I'm excited about some of the new technological applications that I see in mineral exploration," said Rick Rule, president of big resource investment group, Sprott US Holdings.

"I'm excited about the idea that the industry will develop tools that will enable us to better target covered deposits, which I think is something we're going to have to do as an industry over the next 20 years."

Rule, a veteran investor in the mineral exploration space, cut his teeth in the petroleum sector. He says change occurred a lot faster, a lot earlier in oil and gas exploration.

"In the exploration part of the business for most of my mining career anything that we didn't literally stumble over - meaning anything that didn't outcrop - seldom got found," Rule said.

"I remember coming into the exploration industry in mining from the exploration industry in oil and gas, and I guess because the oil and gas business is so much larger with so many more participants, that the progression of technology in oil and gas was a lot faster than it was in the mining industry.

"If you look back at the disruption that has occurred more recently in oil and gas as a consequence of things like measurement-while-drilling, horizontal drilling, fracturing, and 3D seismic,  the changes wrought in oil and gas and their ability to lower their unit costs of production and their finding costs simultaneously has changed that industry."

George Salamis, geologist, company promoter and leader, and backer of Canada's DisruptMining initiative (with Goldcorp), said forget the hype, mining was moving fast to embrace change, technological and cultural, and was finally positioned to sell itself more effectively as a sector with an attractive future.

"I did not think the mining business I was used to could change this fast," said the Integra Resources CEO.

"There used to be so much inertia built into what the industry did. The change has been so phenomenal - it's happening now."

Salamis believes one way or another technology is going to be disruptive for mineral exploration.

"We are just now seeing the advent of machine learning algorithms to comb through immense piles of data," he said.

"Immersive technologies such as augmented reality and virtual reality are also changing the way we interrogate data sets and develop mine plans.

"The discoveries that will be made as a result of the application of new technologies will directly flow benefits through to investors.

"Equally important, when one starts to digitise what one does - in other words applying technology to become better at what one does - the cost of what one produces typically goes down, which translates to increased bottom-line profit, and potentially more cash being returned to investors by way of dividends."

If Exploration Insights principal Joe Mazumdar is right, and "necessity is the mother of all invention", mineral explorers could be entering an era of potentially significant disruption.

Brad George, director of International Geoscience, says the industry has major challenges, the main one being the brain drain that continues to rob the modern industry of critical knowledge and experience.

"We don't notice the lack of exploration success because we are still protected by the buffer of the massive successes of previous generations," George said.

Copper is among the vital commodities seemingly facing global mining-inventory shortages in the years ahead.

"Of the world's top 10 producing copper mines, only one of them was discovered in the last 25 years," George said.

"We are going to hit a brick wall at 60mph in about 10 years' time, but we won't know about it until it is too late as the lead time now from first discovery to production is pushing 15 years."

Australia is just one of the mature mining economies also facing critical human-resource deficits in future.

"It [availability of geologists] has gone from feast to famine in about six months," said George.

"Speaking to a client the other day, they had to import a geologist from South America to run a drill program in Meekatharra as there was simply none available in Australia.

"Every time we go through this cycle it gets worse. The older people die, retire or change careers, and the universities shut up shop. It is simply no longer an attractive career."

And then there was the question of the skills being transferred from one generation to the next. George, a geologist for several decades, believes many "young geos are not up to scratch".

"Last boom they were all ripped from uni and put on rigs and so didn't learn the real skills. We are trying to find people to help in Nigeria and no one in Australia is good enough. We have to go to UK and find recent graduates that have the theoretical grounding in the really hard things like structural geology and metamorphic petrology.

"Graduates are simply not being given the 10 years of varied industry experience they need to become proper scientists and engineers."

On the subject of need and invention, George said he was "not really that fussed about technology as I tend to think it is overplayed".

"But I do think we are in trouble."

Mazumdar agreed with Rule that a way through the mineral exploration malaise was technology.

"In the mining industry the best ores with respect to grade, metallurgy, location have predominantly been found such that the innovations must make us better at exploring for new deposits with high grade," he said.

CSIRO Minerals director Jonathan Law said in his view an almost inevitable transition from near-surface mines to underground projects meant high grades weren't enough.

"There needs to be a major technological focus on exploring at depth," he said.