My experiment with ChatGTP didn't leave me with any great sense that my career was in danger. Asked to simulate an elastic ball bouncing on the ground led to some very poor scripts, which I could correct BECAUSE I knew the answer. But yes, anybody whose job can be reduced to stringing together phrases that other people have used on roughly the same subject is in danger.

Cheers

Greg Locock


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Right. I don't think structural engineers are in immediate danger. I asked ChatGPT for the weight of a 10 ft long southern pine 2x10, seasoned and dressed, and the answer was off by 50%. It even had a calculation.

I also asked it for the tensile strength of a specific steel and it gave the yield stress. Google gave the correct answer and added a note about the search taking 0.45 seconds. Ha.

Still, AI is moving VERY fast. I'm working on an academic job search right now, and at least 80% of the applicants listed it as major research area. It's all over the place in the journals. I bet it'll be in our world pretty soon. I think it'll be more like the call centers, where people are trying to integrate it without it being a pest, or dangerous distraction in our case.

JMO but I haven't seen any notable improvements in either AI for either call-answering or autonomy the past decade, just an increase in the media coverage. Do-loops in phone-answering are especially terrible, I force every IT dept and supplier to give me a direct contact number for a human. I dont doubt that use of the technology is increasing and replacing lower-skilled jobs but I wouldn't call it an improvement aside from possibly saving money on calls by trading accuracy for volume.

The only improvement in call centers has been in the voice recognition, but even there, it's still pretty pitiful.

The only thing worse is when they still connect to some rando in South Asia.

TTFN (ta ta for now)
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Not many years ago the local IEEE section had a presentation on AI. Per that person, we're still in the machine learning stage and will be for many years to come. With time, I think AI will encroach on engineering but it will still need oversight.

Pamela K. Quillin, P.E.
Quillin Engineering, LLC
NSPE-CO, Central Chapter
Dinner program: http://nspe-co.org/events.php

AI, will avoid a graet number of nowdays jobs, as computation and robothics did.

luis

I suppose there are some jobs which consist of cutting and pasting wikipedia level stuff together, but without oversight you'd never know whether it was true or not.

Cheers

Greg Locock


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As is often the case, the expertise is in asking the right questions; otherwise, it's just the blind (user) leading the blind (ChatGPT).

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