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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?"
Bob did a lot of datacomm science behindo ral_histories/transcripts/lucky.html for details.
the major modem advances that came out
of Bell Labs. See http://www.ieee.org/organizations/history_center/
Bob Lucky is one of the wisest engineers on the planet. Read on:
m l
http://www.lanl.gov/projects/sfc/96/bios/lucky.ht
Robert W. Lucky is Corporate Vice President of Applied Research at Bellcore.
He was born in Pittsburgh, Pa., and attended Purdue University, where he received a B.S. degree in electrical engineering in 1957, and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in 1959 and 1961. After graduation he joined AT&T Bell Laboratories in Holmdel, NJ, where he was initially involved in studying ways of sending digital information over telephone lines. The best known outcome of this work was his invention of the adaptive equalizer - a technique for correcting distortion in telephone signals which is used in all high speed data transmission today. The textbook on data communications which he co-authored became the most cited reference in the communications field over the period of a decade.
At Bell Labs he moved through a number of levels to become Executive Director of the Communications Sciences Research Division in 1982, where he was responsible for research on the methods and technologies for future communication systems. In 1992 he left Bell Labs to assume his present position at Bellcore.
He has been active in professional activities, and has served as President of the Communications Society of the IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers), and as Vice President and Executive Vice President of the parent IEEE itself. He has been editor of several technical journals, including the Proceedings of the IEEE, and since 1982 he has written the bi-monthly "Reflections" column of personalized observations about the engineering profession in Spectrum magazine. In 1993 these "Reflections" columns were collected in the IEEE Press book Lucky Strikes...Again.
Dr. Lucky is a Fellow of the IEEE and a member of the National Academy of Engineering. He is also a consulting editor for a series of books on communications through Plenum Press. He has been on the advisory boards or committees of many universities and government organizations, and was Chairman of the Scientific Advisory Board of the United States Air Force from 1986-1989. He was the 1987 recipient of the prestigious Marconi Prize for his contributions to data communications, and has been awarded honorary doctorates from Purdue University and the New Jersey Institute of Technology. He has also been awarded the Edison Medal of the IEEE and the Exceptional Civilian Contributions Medal of the U.S. Air Force.
Dr. Lucky is a frequent speaker before both scientific and general audiences. He has been an invited lecturer at about one hundred different universities, and has been the guest on a number of network television shows, including Bill Moyers' "A World of Ideas," where he has discussed the impacts of future technological advances. He is the author of the popular book Silicon Dreams, which is a semi-technical and philosophical discussion of the ways in which both humans and computers deal with information.
Dr. Lucky and his wife, Joan, currently reside in Fair Haven, NJ.
For the definitive answer to this thread, see "Profession" by Isaac Asimov. If you search, the text is available on the web. I won't ruin the story by giving away the ending, but it is one of my all-time favorites.
As an "engineer", I welcome the updated software release, but I don't expect to run out of things to do!