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Are we preparing engineers well enough for the age of AI?

Gaurav Mishra

Over the last few months, while attending the Executive Programme in Business Management at ISB, I have had more exposure to AI and generative AI. It has made me think seriously about how engineering work may change over the next few years.

AI can certainly help us review information, prepare documents, compare requirements and explore possible solutions faster. But engineering is not only about producing an answer. It also involves understanding the actual process conditions, questioning assumptions, assessing risk and taking responsibility for the final decision.

This becomes even more important in safety-critical areas, where a technically convincing answer may still be wrong or incomplete.

So, I have been reflecting on a broader question:

How should engineers prepare for the growing use of AI without losing the technical judgement, practical understanding and professional accountability that define engineering?

I would be interested to hear how other engineers are approaching this in their own fields.

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  • In a way this isn't a new problem. If you think of AI as having human-like qualities, then it becomes rather like having human assistants. Very enthusiastic and perhaps generally well-read assistants, but ultimately ones that know little about your specific problem or situation and lacking in a lot of "common sense". Perhaps like a teenage work experience person who'd rather ask Google things on their phone rather than put in the wok to understand the fundamentals themselves, but still desperate to give a good impression and put a glossy spin on things to try and make themselves look good.

    So why don't engineers have droves of human assistants? Generally it's down to costs - costs of employment of course, but costs of managing them as well - in some situations it's quite easy to reach the point where time spent managing an underling would have been more profitably spent just getting on and doing it yourself. AI seems cheap at the moment (the equivalent of "employment costs"), but mostly that's down to the providers 'loss leading' while they try to build a market - in the mean time they're spending literally billions on data centres. Once the real costs of using AI start to be passed onto the consumer, I suspect we'll be a lot more careful about the applications we put it to.- and as for the "management costs" they'll have to be taken into account as well.

       - Andy.

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  • In a way this isn't a new problem. If you think of AI as having human-like qualities, then it becomes rather like having human assistants. Very enthusiastic and perhaps generally well-read assistants, but ultimately ones that know little about your specific problem or situation and lacking in a lot of "common sense". Perhaps like a teenage work experience person who'd rather ask Google things on their phone rather than put in the wok to understand the fundamentals themselves, but still desperate to give a good impression and put a glossy spin on things to try and make themselves look good.

    So why don't engineers have droves of human assistants? Generally it's down to costs - costs of employment of course, but costs of managing them as well - in some situations it's quite easy to reach the point where time spent managing an underling would have been more profitably spent just getting on and doing it yourself. AI seems cheap at the moment (the equivalent of "employment costs"), but mostly that's down to the providers 'loss leading' while they try to build a market - in the mean time they're spending literally billions on data centres. Once the real costs of using AI start to be passed onto the consumer, I suspect we'll be a lot more careful about the applications we put it to.- and as for the "management costs" they'll have to be taken into account as well.

       - Andy.

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  • in reply to AJJewsbury
    AJJewsbury said:
    So why don't engineers have droves of human assistants?

    Worth a quote from the Software folks: Brook's Law (Mythical Man Month - great book) 

    "Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later."

    There was an article in one of the IEE journals predicting how much extra communication time that adding extra people took. (If I find it I'll add the reference..)

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