An op-ed, short for “opposite the editorial page”, is a written prose piece, which expresses the opinion of an author usually not affiliated with the publication’s editorial board.
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In the late 90s, we were told engineering software was going to replace engineers.
My thermodynamics textbook came with a 3.5-inch floppy disk loaded with digitized steam tables. That felt revolutionary.
Instead of flipping through paper charts and interpolating by hand, with the accuracy of your answer dependent on the thickness of your pencil, you typed in P & T and a tiny, unimpressive piece of software gave you a precise answer instantly.
About the same time, early reservoir simulators were forecasting production curves decades out.
First-generation drilling software was modelling torque & drag and designing how many centralizers you needed.
Finite element programs were producing beautiful, authoritative-looking colour stress plots.
The outputs looked certain.
And every greybeard engineer said the same thing:
“Use the software, kid. But understand the first principles behind it. Because if you don’t, you won’t know when it’s wrong.”
Thirty years later, that warning has stuck with me. Anyone can run a model. But if a program tells you that you need a 800-inch beam to span something that actually requires a 4-inch beam and no internal alarm goes off, that’s not a software problem. That’s an understanding problem.
Software doesn’t replace judgment. It amplifies it.
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Fast forward to this year. I’m building a house and needed to size structural steel members to span between columns for my deck.
In the past, I would have handed that to a junior engineer, let them run the calcs and then reviewed their assumptions, loads, and code references before signing off. The review step, the questioning, the sanity check, the “sniff test”, is what the ring and the stamp are all about.
This time, I asked a commercial LLM. Seconds later, I had a clean, confident answer.
And I still checked it. I reviewed the loads. Pulled out an old textbook. Looked up the building code. Ran a sniff test.
Because sometimes AI is right. And sometimes it is confidently wrong.
That’s the part people underestimate. AI doesn’t fail loudly. It fails fluently.
It produces structural answers, legal summaries, medical explanations, financial forecasts, all wrapped in authority.
Thirty years ago, simulation tools lived inside engineering departments. A junior ran the model. A senior reviewed it. Experience owned the output.
Today, AI removes that structure.
The “junior engineer” is now a browser tab.
The “review” is optional.
The confidence is built in.
If you grow up with only knowing software or AI, if you never learned to read those damn steam tables, you may never develop the instinct to challenge the answer.
To me, that’s the real risk in AI.
Maybe AGI turns out to be an apocalyptic event. I don’t know. But from where I sit, now one of the greybeards, the danger isn’t AI. The danger is losing the habit of thinking.
The tools will keep getting smarter, but they will never take responsibility for the answer.
That part is still ours.
Jeremy Nielsen is a Oxbow-based professional engineer.
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- 0102 Lori Carr Coal Extended0102 Lori Carr Coal Extended
- 0100 Turnbull Project Manager0100 Turnbull Project Manager
- 0099 Mryglod Steel 1080p0099 Mryglod Steel 1080p
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- 0095 Fast Trucking nearly 70 years good at it0095 Fast Trucking nearly 70 years good at it
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- 0049 Scotsburn Dental soft guitar0049 Scotsburn Dental soft guitar
- 0041 DEEP Since 2018 now we are going to build0041 DEEP Since 2018 now we are going to build
- 0032 IWS Summer hiring rock trailer music
- 0022 Grimes winter hiring
- 0021 OSY Rentals S8 Promo
- 0018 IWS Hiring Royal Summer
- 0013 Panther Drilling PO ad 03 top drive rigs
- 0002 gilliss casing services0002 gilliss casing services
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