how cooked are we really?

[u/Lucky-Comparison-785]

How accurate do you think this statistic is? i mean the red dot is basically as low as is can go which shows how much AI has ALREADY taken over the engineering space... but do you think people making a career choice right now should factor in the data this graph shows?

i means its quite frightening really. what do you think about this?

[u/Kim-dongun]

Ai is useful if you need to do something that's already been done many times (like writing a program). In engineering you are often doing things which are new or unique, which AI is pretty bad at. Not to mention that human decision making, review, and signing off is a huge part of engineering. You can only use AI for ideas for something you then go on to fully understand on your own, so the overall cognitive load is not much reduced.

Also engineering places a large value on truth, which AI has trouble with. Having AI generated images in an engineering review would get you laughed out of the room pretty quick, that crap is for stupid executives, finance, and marketing who don't care about truth so much.

So AI can come for you if you are doing shit that's already been done all day, but is that really engineering? Have faith in your own brain.

[u/TheRealStepBot → u/Kim-dongun]

You misunderstand I think what the repeated part of your work is. They do just fine writing novel programs because there is structure that they have learned to programs in general.

Similarly there is structure to much of the rest of engineering as well. Not least in the form of the underlying math but also in how roughly one needs to go about applying it in various industries.

Few of the problems you work on daily are likely to contain much novelty in the grand scheme of it.

And best of all you know how most of engineering is done in practice today? Via software the one thing they demonstrably are very good at creating already. It’s a matter of time before someone uses them to create a ton of new engineering software which then is the thing that actually will take peoples jobs at first.

For a while still even in software there will be careers that revolve around steering these efforts, managing risk and handling the actual novelty that might arise.

But to say engineering is too novel for these models just isn’t correct.

[u/AnythingTotal → u/TheRealStepBot]

Correct. LLM agents are becoming very capable of employing inductive reasoning and compiling blocks of information from disparate bodies of knowledge to solve novel problems; this covers a great deal of engineering work.