Question of the Month: How will AI affect your engineering career in the next 3 to 5 years?

The engineering office I work for is pretty small. AI wont be used to do anything substantial in the next 3-5 years for custom designed control panels on our team.

What I'd like AI to do is enable communication to customers and connecting the customers who best fit our talents to their needs - without a sneaker net of sales middle men.    

I'm not a hardware Engineer, but since AI is known to harvest the works of others, I would say that a heavy reliance on it will net heavy litigation.  Engineers will still be needed to cull what is proprietary, unique or patented from what is common.

AI will affect everything we do in much more radical ways than can be envisioned right now, but it won't eliminate engineering jobs or make them easier, because more will be expected of engineers as their tools get better.

I expect it will make them easier in the sense that what takes, e.g., 1 month today will take much less in the future, and tools will help, e.g., with timing closure or design to a power usage goal. However, that just means engineers will be loaded up with more projects so I agree with your point that "more will be expected". 

I selected other.  I find I am over the initial hype and excitement of something like ChatGPT.  I use it less now than I did a couple of months ago.  What I mainly use it for now is to get an overview of a topic I know little about.  Why don't I use Google for that, you might wonder?  Well, my observation is that Google isn't as good as it used to be for finding that type of information.  It's focused too much on the commercial end.  To its credit  though, if I want to find out the nearest restaurants in my area then 'nobody' does it better than Google.

My job is mostly "hands-on" work and "one-of-a-kind" work, I don't see AI helping me at all.

I think it's improved my productivity by 10% so far, maybe more.

It feels like the adoption of it has been so rapid (in contrast with other game-changers that took longer; for instance, WiFi was a slow-burner for consumers for years, I think.

People dragged their heels over cloud computing for ages (there were so many discussions back then that it was a security risk, that cloud was a joke, and then within a few years, every major business was using it). Same with IoT; to this day, many still think it can't be secured (yet plenty of the most secure orgs in the world have found ways to deploy it and are reaping the benefits). I dragged my heels and didn't adopt a smartphone for six years after the iPhone was released. AI tech still has a long way to go, it's still a baby.

I just hope I don't get a hernia from laughing so bloody hard at the coming wave of lemming-esque behavior.  There will be many productivity-pressured CTOs who will not see the hyperbole for what it is--i.e. the usual "so excited" dog-and-pony show to ATTRACT INVESTORS--and instead go whole hog on AI tools.  Thus it will boost my hourly rate to The Kármán Line as the urgent deadline-driven demand to UNDO the botched output of said "tools" makes the Y2K panic seem like a mild sneeze. The AI engines I've evaluated so far all suffer from The Oblivious Syndrome, i.e. they can't recognize their own (quite numerous) mistakes, otherwise they would not have made said mistakes in the first place, Q.E.D. 

Several CompSec heavies I know have already ID'd numerous "foreign" (cough Russian/ChiCom/NoKor) wealthy-via-ransomware groups who are "monkey-wrenching" AI feedback-learning data pathways... OMG, "game-changing" AI, it's going to be absolutely GLORIOUS!  For the first time in history, lawyers and bureaucrats will envy engineers for all the billable-hours we'll be lapping up for "make-work", err, I mean "tuning the AI engine". 

Don't know, but I hope it makes the tools much smarter, especially the FPGA synthesis/implementation engines :)

I can see potential for it to generate so much spammy activity that it affects existing systems such that it slows everyone down, whether they are actively choosing to use the technology themselves or not. Engineers seldom work in isolation, like others, they need to access other services which may soon rely on or be disrupted by AI processes.