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Engineer in a Box?

Posted by michael on from the i-love-the-smell-of-solder-in-the-morning dept.

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?"

2 of 344 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Who is Robert Lucky? by __aadkms7016 · · Score: 2, Informative

    Bob did a lot of datacomm science behind
    the major modem advances that came out
    of Bell Labs. See http://www.ieee.org/organizations/history_center/o ral_histories/transcripts/lucky.html for details.

  2. Re:um Profession by puetzc · · Score: 2, Informative

    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!