Tech Talk: Leading Where Equity Meets Engineering

27 Jun 2025 · 1 min

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A civil engineer pushes the field to define concrete uses for AI and LLMs in engineering work, then raises a harder question: training these models consumes massive amounts of water and electricity. He argues that protecting the environment and public safety must come first when deciding whether to deploy them.

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Or we were the first ones using CAD to do the drawing. You have to tell us the use case for AI. I said, not to say people don't use that. We've used all the technology more than you guys. Y'all don't know how to do it without the tech. We do. So you got to give me a good use case for doing it. And so just having those conversations in civil, because everything we do impacts everybody and we have to be conscious. And so my question was, as a— my point was, as a civil engineer, we know some of the large language models use a hell of a lot of water and electricity. How do you as a civil engineer making sure you're using a large language model or LLM that doesn't negatively impact us long term? Tell me that. Wow. And left it because that should be your first thought is how to protect the environment, how to protect people.