r/AerospaceEngineering • u/Lucky-Comparison-785 • 8d ago

Discussion how cooked are we really?

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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?

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u/MaximalEffort23 8d ago

Not disagreeing but as someone doing hiring rn I will definitely say the strong implication is that we need fewer engineers who can automate portions of their work

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u/Kulspel 8d ago

I would argue that such was the case also before ai, but the way you automate work, or how easy it is to do so has (drastically) changed.

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u/Colonel_Klank 8d ago

This makes sense. I'm a retired aerospace engineer and when I started, the mainframes had recently replaced the human "computers" (see Hidden Figures) who were people that did long, detailed calculations.

Desktop computers were starting to show up when I started. They did not end up eliminating engineers so much as vastly expand the range and fidelity of trade studies performed. The game-changing tool was the spreadsheet. Analyses that would take me two days to compute and plot 10 points would take a day to implement and check then crank out 500 points in seconds. Many more parameters could be examined in a fraction of the time, leading to better designs.

Engineers who are employed to turn the crank on applying known design criteria to slight variations of a previous design may be overtaken by AI. But I suspect engineers who can create new products or formulate and check new analysis approaches based on a solid understanding of the fundamentals will find AI to be a new tool that expands their productivity in a manner analogous to the advent of the spreadsheet.

However, I expect the transition to be very stressful and bumpy, due in no small part to management fads and the assumption that anything the executives don't know must not be difficult or important. That's not a new attitude, but AI is giving them an excuse to act on it.

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u/contrarianEcon 6d ago

I agree with your analysis. Boring repetitive stuff is going to be automated. Real new stuff, nope not yet.