Guest column: A caution about artificial intelligence

My early days of college study included using a slide rule and writing FORTRAN programs for a mainframe computer. Later, a Texas Instruments calculator made tedious engineering calculations less stressful, although not necessarily any more correct.

In the early 1980s, the electric utility where I was a senior engineer purchased personal computers for all engineering personnel. We were to take them home and teach ourselves how to use them. In the office, my trusty HP calculator remained an everyday tool, along with the company’s mainframe computer.

Decades later, my consulting engineering practice carried out much of our structural analysis using programs such as StruCalc, Forte, and ClearCalcs. Computers could perform calculations in a fraction of the time it would take a human being to do them by hand.

When I was Shelter Island’s town engineer, we had occasion to model wave action in Coecles Harbor. I spent several days working through the problem by hand and developing what seemed to me a reasonable depiction. I then gave the assignment to a summer intern.

I was surprised when I returned from lunch and he happily announced that a solution had been found using software to which he had access. What took me several days of part-time effort was reduced to less than an hour.