http://misc-stuff.terraaeon.com/articles/slide-rule-prices.html Miscellaneous Stuff Home Contact Slide Rule Some Things I Realized about AI while Contemplating Slide Rule Prices on Ebay 8-31-2022 A few days ago, I noticed that the prices of World War 2 era slide rules have fallen to below $20 US. Fifteen to twenty years ago, they were selling for $50-$80. My guess is that the people who used slide rules in their professions and were willing to pay over $50 to re-experience the nostalgia of playing with one again are now all dead. Just for fun, I learned to use a slide rule at the end of the 1970's. Part of what I realized as a result is that slide rules are an elegant computing solution. They require no power. They last forever. And, they work well enough to solve most problems where an individual understands the basic principles associated with the problem he is trying to solve. Performing calculations with slide rules was part of what forced generations of scientists and engineers to understand the approximations they were using to solve problems. No, slide rules do not work for things like computational fluid mechanics and Monte Carlo simulations, and that is my point. We can usually solve problems sufficiently well without resorting to complicated methods. In contrast, our approach in engineering these days is to use computers to simulate everything down to 15 digits, because we really no longer understand what we are doing. Most engineers today will strenuously deny this, but many no longer have high-level insights into the problems they are trying to solve. And, they don't know that. I have mentioned this to a few of my fellow engineers over the years and they have looked at me like I was speaking ancient Aztec. Engineers in many industries are focused on the details and reliant on the simulations to put all the pieces together to make a coherent whole. The problem with simulating everything to death is that it actually helps keep us ignorant of basic principles. Engineers have been stuck on the simulation approach for so long that they no longer have the option of going back. When I was a young engineer, older, experienced engineers and engineering managers understood basic principles and the big pictures of the things they were working on. As a result, they knew when proposed solutions just did not look right. Here is a much over-simplified and probably unrealistic example that I am making up off the top of my head, because I have never been civil engineer. If I were a civil engineer back in the 1960's and proposed that my company build a bridge with a span of 100 meters between support columns using only stone and mortar, a more experienced engineer would have looked at my design and known immediately that a span that long requires steel. Without doing any calculations at all, he would have known that my design could never have worked. Today, although we could argue, my feeling is that nearly all of the engineers who were capable of similar insights in their fields have been retired for decades and are probably dead. Today, an engineering manager may look at the same proposed solution and decide to put a 10 man team on the problem for 6 months simulating the bridge at a cost of a million dollars. Another issue is that many of us are too lazy or insufficiently interested to do less simulating and more thinking. During my career, I have worked for more than one engineering manager who has announced to everyone who worked for him that the simulation was "the truth". He did not want to be bothered with the actual truth (i.e. flaws and inaccuracies in the simulation), because he was simply not interested. My guess is these managers had decided to abdicate all responsibility for their project's outcome, because they had a simulation to use as a scapegoat. If the train derailed (so to speak), it was the simulation's fault, not theirs. This is an illustration of the blame transference mentality that to some extent affects us all, which is why renowned social psychologists Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson wrote a book about it, Mistakes were made (but not by me). My bridge design scenario is probably not a great example, because I am not a civil engineer. I work in a completely different industry that spends an almost incalculable amount of money on computer simulations. I would not be surprised if in total my industry spends in the US alone close to 100 billion dollars a year simulating everything they do. The US government (i.e. the tax payers) pays for most of it. The simulation-first approach to design is one of the reasons engineers in the US take 15 years and spend tens of billion of dollars of tax payers' money designing a new fighter aircraft. In the 1950's and 1960's a single company could put out one or two new fighter prototypes for testing every year. The simulation approach is also one reason NASA has spent 20 years and I have no idea how many billions of dollars on the Aries and SLS programs in its attempt to come up with something to replace the space shuttle. And they will probably lose that job to Elon Musk, who is spending a small fraction of the time and money. The difference is that Musk apparently knows what he is doing. I am sure that his engineers also use simulation, because as I said, that is what engineers do these days, but my guess is that Musk's executive insights have successfully minimized that in order to save huge amounts of time and money. Am I arguing that we should throw away our computers and go back to slide rules? Absolutely not! Some problems can only be solved by computer simulation--because we really do not know enough to solve them any other way. I also understand that a complicated relationship exists between design work and testing, and I do not mean to minimize the significance of that. But, most design problems can be solved with simpler, less expensive, less time-consuming methods and tools and more experience and knowledge of basic principles. One problem we face is the perennial one of, if you are holding a hammer, every problem looks to you like a nail. Over-simulation is a issue in many of our industries, and I think it is one of many reasons that our standard of living has gone down over the last six decades. When we have a very large percentage of our scientists and engineers wasting time with tools that are not appropriate for their jobs, we are all indirectly paying their salaries without really getting what we are paying for. Unfortunately, extremely few who run companies and governments are capable of seeing the big picture well enough to know how to increase efficiency in order to increase our standard of living by spending less money looking for workable solutions to problems. This is the world we live in, and it is a shame. We could be doing so much better than we are. Now, we are compounding the problems we have brought upon ourselves through our over reliance on computer simulation by trying to apply artificial intelligence to solve our problems. In so doing, we are merely removing ourselves even further from a basic understanding of how things work. Are we really too lazy to learn basic principles and methods of applying them to obtain the solutions we seek? Will we really throw up our hands and finally announce to each other that we are too stupid to solve our problems? Are we really willing to suffer whatever ill effects may come from applying some magical voodoo artificial intelligence to do all the work for us? Why am I even asking these questions? I have lived long enough to know the answer to all of them. Yes! If foolishly placing faith in artificial intelligence is the great existential filter implied by the Fermi paradox, then we may be about to filter ourselves out of existence. Even if it is not, we may further bankrupt ourselves in more ways than monetarily while looking for something to do the thinking for us that we are too lazy and too irresponsible to do for ourselves. --Tie --------------------------------------------------------------------- [Donate] Copyright © 2019-2022 terraaeon.com. All rights reserved.