I see what your saying. It’s a broad concept but the process for professional recognition can accommodate that. The topic at question is how do we ensure engineers are ethical in how they operate and professional registration and protection of the role along with the assurances that go with that are a good way to achieve it. I know in law in Australia you must be registered with the local law regulator to practice and members must adhere to strict ethical standards. If you are reported and found to be breach those standards you will not be able to practice any more. Meanwhile engineers are polluting and building weapons ad nauseum with limited repercussions. Engineers are held accountable in most regions legally but laws usually apply to safety, not building/designing unethical things.

So I find the UK a good example of how professional registration can be done well. Each discipline has an organisation that handles chartership specific to that discipline. The IET does a lot of lifting for all things electrical, including communications/telecoms, but I believe they would cover some software engineering depending on what your focus was. BCS, CISec or IfSE would likely cover most software engineering.

My experience tends to be with the IET. They are internationally recognised and have branches in a lot of countries. If you have no local support within your company they will connect you with an existing chartered member in your field who can help with advice and chartership application review. I know with Engineers Australia you can migrate your chartership from the IET to Engineers Australia without too much difficulty. Engineers Australia is a single organisation for all disciplines which is then open to the issues you mention. The UK orgs are all regulated by the engineering council which manages a consistent specification for all orgs to hold their members to, the orgs then review applications specific to the discipline against the requirements of the spec.

Unrelated discipline? Why would you claim to be an engineer if your work was not related to engineering?

I switched to obsidian and haven’t looked back. It doesn’t appear to have stylus input in the core application (I don’t need that), but it does look like there are a couple of community plugins that enable the support. Not sure how good they are though.

A professional engineer would be someone who’s chartered with a recognised engineering institution (Engineers Europe and it’s related Orgs in Europe, Engineering Council and related orgs in the UK, Engineers Australia in Australia etc) and the title would depend on the what the institution want to call them. The professional instution outlines ethical and behavioural requirements to maintain membership.

An Engineer usually refers to someone who does a job related to design and planning for a technical discipline (civil, mechanical, structural, electrical, software etc). The job role usually requires a degree in he engineering disciple, but if you were a particularly fantastic and experienced technical person you might be able to fill the role without one. There will likely be areas of knowledge where you’d be lacking in that case though.

I’m saying the job role could be made to require the chartership to help enforce adherence to the ethical requirements of those governing institutions.

Yeah I agree with this

You’d have to make engineer a protected title for that and enforce membership and chartership with your locally recognised engineering institutions to allow working under the title. They do that in Queensland Australia. It’s not enforced in our other states, which is odd given Queensland is Australia’s Florida …

Getting a job as an engineer in the UK was hard work because every ridiculous job and it’s dog was claiming to be an engineering role. The guy terminating a wall socket for your internet connection: telecoms engineer apparently. Rough gig for having burnt 5 years at university …

They could be the All Cocks instead?

They gotta stop vibe coding windows, it’s wild. My work machine was fine about a year ago, not great but fine. It had updates maybe fortnightly and worked fine. Now it gets a random office or system update like 3 times a week and has a constant onslaught of random bugs.

That’s wild.

TiVo still exists?!

Lol, your skills at picking out AI are shithouse. You might as well go get yourself an AI girlfriend now and be done with it.

Hur Hur sick burn dickhead

That’d be a good start, they are pretty shitty pieces of infrastructure.

You most certainly can vibe a piece of wood into a cabinet but it’ll be a shit cabinet and you’ll probably hurt yourself. You’ll need more tools than just a saw though.

Do you use auto correct on your phone? Well then hold onto your hat because an LLM is a glorified version of that, and that is a tool for speeding up typing. Can you just autocorrect your way to a complete sentence? Maybe but you need review process or your going to be typing gibberish. Sure it makes your typing worse but at the benefit of improving speed and minimising the errors associated with a screen based keyboard.

Look you’re committed to your cause and it’s pretty clear what sub we’re in, so good luck with that, but AI exists so we either ban it outright which is a fool’s errand (you might as well try banning math) or you can ensure people are educated about how best to use it. I think relegating it to entertainment rather than using it as a tool to minimise the time it takes to shit admin tasks is worse by far when you consider the social and mental health implications.

Arguably you have to know what you’re doing to get useful results out of an AI without becoming a gibbering idiot. Kind of like how you need to know what you’re doing with a circular saw so you don’t lose a hand. A computer is a tool just like AI is tool, obviously they are not the same.

Most tools are like that. Is a hammer like any other tool? No, there are a range of hammer types, but a hammer is a hammer and there are no other tools that do that job. Could you use the back of an axe or the side of a wrench? Maybe. Should you? No.

I agree with that and I think there are a significant number of use cases where it’s either a waste of time or completely inappropriate to use an LLM to generate the text you are looking for.

You could say the same thing about a computer … why aren’t we drafting technical drawings by hand, why do Draftees need a crutch like CAD packages?

Like I said, there are appropriate use cases and teaching kids about those and the pitfalls is pretty critical. It’s worse to just let them work it out under their own steam …

Yeah but it does simple but time intensive tasks quickly. Like if you need to generate a document structure it can take a long time but the AI can review existing similar docs and generate something appropriate quickly. The fluff a technical document requires is in a similar boat. A those things would need a review prior to utilisation, but you could save yourself an hour or two getting to the review.

Ensuring kids know how to appropriately use the tools available to them is the goal of education. Yes they need to know the manual methods and should be well trained in those before they start learning what’s appropriate to offload. Banning AI is like banning kids from using computers. Yes it’s screen time and mindless screen time consuming videos can be detrimental, but how they use the screen is critical and they learn skills when they use the screens for appropriate things.

The other glaring question should be is the environmental cost of using a large cloud based corporate model worth it for a few hours savings per week for each employee? The answer to that is a pretty clear no, but you can achieve similar savings with local models that don’t consume vast quantities of energy and water.