I’m an engineering type, and I used to work in a corporation. In the spirit of tearing us away from our computers and making us think about people instead of inanimate materials we once attended a training session on shipping, filled with terms like free-on-board, freight-forwarding, and other fascinating jargon from another walk of life.
At one point we were told about an employee who stacked pallets with various boxes. Being engineers, we suggested that a computer program might be able to derive the optimal stacking patterns on any given day. The presenter said that they’d tried that, but that the machine didn’t really do so much better to make things worthwhile. With hindsight, someone would have had to measure the boxes and put all the dimensions into the computer.
Just walking and breathing and picking our noses, we make incredibly complex calculations without conscious effort. We have a computer in our skulls that is much more effective than we often realize.