9
OPINION
The long view on generative AI
Like electronic scientific calculators, personal computers, and CAD systems – generative AI is just another new tool in our toolbox.
I am an ancient engineer. Or, perhaps a better term would be a Methuselan engineer. “Ancient,” while not completely inaccurate, might suggest something set in stone, unchanging, while “Methuselan” conveys the sense of a long journey of adaptation and evolution. It implies continuing survival and endurance shaped by the march of technology, and always endeavoring for continuous advancement.
Sam Liao, Ph.D., MBA, PE
When I began my engineering studies in college, computations were a manual ordeal. Addition and subtraction were done by hand, multiplication and division by slide rule, and trigonometric functions and logarithms came from lookup tables. Then, during the summer between my freshman and sophomore years, the Hewlett-Packard HP-35 electronic scientific calculator became an affordable reality. A year or two later, Texas Instruments introduced a competing model, and just like that, the engineering profession ditched the slide rule and hand calculations. The electronic calculator brought speed, precision, and fewer errors – and it freed us from carrying cumbersome paper handbooks filled with trig and log tables.
The productivity boost was undeniable, but it came at a cost. We lost some of the mental math fluency and problem-solving tricks that once defined our craft. Was that entirely bad? What we gained in efficiency, we indeed traded in and gave up some of our other capacities. At the time, our professors cautioned us not to blindly trust the 10-decimal-place precision our calculators provided. With slide rules, we worked with two or three significant digits, forcing us to think thoroughly about the magnitudes of our calculations. From those days in the 1970s, the evolution of technology has been staggering. We’ve moved from mainframe computers to minicomputers, from microcomputers to powerful devices that fit in our
See SAM LIAO, page 10
THE ZWEIG LETTER FEBRUARY 17, 2025, ISSUE 1573
Made with FlippingBook flipbook maker