The Calculator Transition

There's a scene in Apollo 13 where Jim Lovell, played by Tom Hanks, asks Houston control to check his calculations, which they do using a slide rule. 

My father told me that when he was in college (1950s) that engineers measured their technical prowess in how many digits of accuracy they could get off a slide rule.

The actual Apollo 13 incident took place in 1970. A year later Bowmar/Ali released the 901B, nicknamed the Bowmar Brain, for about $240. 

The following year came the HP-35, the first successful handheld scientific calculator that put slide rules out to pasture.

A couple of years later I asked for a calculator for my birthday (the math nerd I was). I insisted on it having a memory button that could remember one number so I could do more complex calculations. The one I got even had a square root button!

By the time I got to high school at the end of the decade, we all had handheld calculators. My AP chemistry teacher still insisted on teaching us how to use a slide rule. For fun, I decided to use my father's slide rule on a chemistry exam. That was a mistake for two reasons.

1. I did not have the "technical prowess" to get many digits of accuracy. So especially after a few calculations, my numbers were way off. The teacher took pity on me and gave me credit because I had the formulas right.
2. I spent too much time doing the calculations where everyone else just punched numbers into their calculator and didn't finish all the problems. 

Maybe with more experience I could have handled both issues better, but that was the last time I used the slide rule for any important calculations. School children still learned how to add and multiply, but I'm not sure my kids can do long division. Certainly I was the last generation to learn how to do square roots by hand.

Is there an AI lesson in all this? We went from slide rules in mission control to calculators in high school in under a decade. No one suggests we go back to slide rules, and using a slide rule is now a lost art. Civilization survived.

But there's a bigger story. The slide rule and calculator took care of the routine math, but the teacher graded me on my knowing the Chemistry. AI Can now do the chemistry. And what's left after that?