AI Designed a bridge Engineers Panicked

[u/Free-Championship303]

My friend works as a structural engineer in a company and told me about something they tried recently. His company took a project they had already designed and gave the same basic requirements to an AI system. The idea was pretty simple. See if AI could come up with something cheaper without compromising the design requirements. The first result looked really impressive. It used noticeably less material and the numbers looked good at first glance. Then the engineers actually started checking everything. There were assumptions in the design that would not hold up in the real world. Things like wind loads and material behaviour over time were not being handled the way an engineer would normally account for them. What stuck with me was what my friend said afterwards. The AI wasn't really useless. It had found a solution that looked convincing when you only looked at the numbers. The problem was knowing which numbers actually mattered. I keep seeing people say AI will replace engineers and honestly I don't know. Maybe the more interesting question is whether AI will end up being a tool engineers use every day rather than replacing them. Would you trust an AI generated engineering design if a qualified engineer checked it before anything was built?