Engineer in a Box?

Dr.Luke writes "Robert Lucky in a IEEE Spectrum Online article laments the state of today's engineering as progressively more removed from the "real" reality of tinkering and soldering "in a big musty laboratory" like Thomas Edison as engineers become more and more reliant on software tools and simulations. He fears that "math itself is slipping away into the wispy clouds of software that surround us" and that eventually engineers will be substituted by a bestselling software program Engineer-in-a-Box 2.0. What do you think?"

Comments

Re:Engineering is more difficult now

[Gyorg_Lavode]

It's the software tools that in many instances make complex engineering possible. I can design some small circuits by hand. And I can test them mathemtaically, but when I get a very complex circuit, the time it takes to do the transient analysis by hand is unreal compared to the trouble it takes to wire the circuit in PSpice and run a transient analysis.

Doing frequency analysis by hand is a true pain. Taking thousands, millions of digitalized points and performing the transformation required on them by hand is monumental compared to the trouble it takes to do the transformation and spectrum analysis in MATLAB.

In my college experience, (of which I am still a part), the designing is done by the human. The implementation, optimization, and testing is done using computer tools.

Computers speed up design to market time. They help optimize. They help test and show us how things work w/o the commitment of time and resources. But they DO NOT come up with new ideas. And I have been taught how to do everything by hand, if only for posterity, before I am allowed to use computer tools.