AI and me. Artificial Intelligence, not a guy named Alfred.

Let's think up bigger problems.

Here's a cartoon I found today on X. It features skeptics who complain about the invention of the wheel. That seemed pertinent today.

I have been thinking about AI and how it affects my work life. I realized that the skills I have learned and the methods I use have changed continuously, starting with the slide rule course I took as a freshman in engineering college. Calculators which did trig functions had been invented and the price was dropping fast.

It turned out I was in the last freshman class who studied slide rules. My skills were obsolete by the time I was a sophomore.

Computers, test instruments, and communications to support them have improved constantly.

What that has meant is that we can solve bigger problems.

Here is a meandering story illustrating my point if you read to the end.

I recently talked to a solar PV salesman who came to my door, I will call him salesman 2. He had an infrared photo of the neighborhood taken from a drone, and he showed me that my roof was a good candidate. I could tell him that I had a good idea of what kW and kWh my roof could gather since I had spent more time with the solar salesman who came before him a couple of weeks ago. I will call him salesman 1.

Salesman 1 offered to run a computer model of my house and come back with the results a few hours later. I said OK. My part of the agreement was to meet him with 12 monthly bills when he arrived. I logged into my electricity providers website and printed 12 bills. I also downloaded a year's worth of 15-minute data I could get from smartmetertexas.com. I could get 15-minute data because my meter is a smart meter (as are all meters in Texas now as far as I know)

When Salesman 1 came back he had with him the model of my house loaded on his laptop computer. I had the total kWh for the year, and the winter and summer kWh numbers to compare to the kWh his proposed panels would produce. I also had my peak, average, and minimum kW to compare with his battery sizing. We tried a few combinations of PV panel area and battery sizes. (I didn't make a purchase but I now know a lot more about what is possible.)

My point of this rambling tale is that Salesman 1 and I were discussing information that in years gone by would have taken weeks to develop if it could be developed at all. We had tools that were making these calculations in a couple of hours.

So as I think about AI, what I am pondering is what bigger problems could I solve with this new tool.

Source:

https://x.com/NeilChristense6/status/1905702896521613815