Jeevan Kumar

Lets travel back to the time when a machine that can perform maths accurately and faster than any human was invented.

Yes, I am speaking about the calculator.

I'm gonna speak from POV of Engineers & Teachers.

1) Engineers:

Before calculators came, they used to do very long, tedious steps to calculate arithmetic results such as 18420402/1231 etc..

The role of engineers is to use maths to solve higher-level physics problems.

For example, to predict the distance a ball travels in a certain time, we just apply the formula s=ut + 1/2 at^2.

We input the values of u, t, and a and get the results. Now computing the multiplication and adding them, isnt really what makes an engineer, an engineer..

Knowing how to use the formulas to program a robotic hand to catch a ball is the kind of thing an engineer does.

So calculators didnt make engineers less intelligent, but they enabled them to compute the results of their thinking rapidly. This let them trial and error faster and easier.

How is this related to AI?

Here AI is the new calculator. But lemme be honest, the comparison is not fully accurate. Instead of giving the computational result as output, AI is giving "ideas" as output.

Now the role of engineer becomes to take this idea, and apply his own ideas and augment it, so as to build products that help change the world :)

Now for an engineer to augment the ideas with his own ideas, he needs to understand how to code, how to build circuits, how to do x without AI.

2) Teachers:

Teachers were really afraid at this time. They thought, if students use calculator to do things like finding the square root, long-division etc, students wouldn't learn these things and so.

Fortunately, the school curriculm was designed in such a way that students were given access to calculator only after they were taught how to do things like long division, taking square roots..etc manually.

But BUt BUtttttt, we are facing a serious problem right now.

Right now, what most students do is: they ask the AI to code something, and the ai codes it up.

The AI might do a good job of building the product..but the student probably wont be having any idea of how the code works. they wont be able to augment their own "ideas" to this ai-generated code because, they dont know the code works. All they will be able to see will be a foreign language doing God KNows what.

I don't think we can call ourself a coder, if we cant manually add changes to a code, without ai-assistance.

Even a 8 year old kid could type something like "build me a spotify clone" in gemini3 and it might build it. THAT doesnt make this kid a coder or an engineer. It is like, asking someone to do the work and u take the credits for that lol.

I think, we can call ourself an engineer, if only we can read the code and understand what it is doing. Only then will we be able to augument our ideas properly. Only then we truly become an "engineer"