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

AI is not going to replace engineers anytime soon. It's completely incapable of doing basic things, it only looks smart on the surface. It's a great tool for assisting an already knowledgeable person, but it's useless on its own. For example, GitHub Copilot is great for writing lots of boilerplate code and simple, commonly done things, but no AI tool that I've tried has been capable of writing code on its own.

The best analogy I have for AI in its current state is going from Notepad to using a really nice IDE. It's not going to enable people who can't program to program. It just helps and simplifies the job of those who already can.

Agree that it won't replace engineers for now, but instead can help engineers as you say.

I definitely feel it will simplify and make certain tasks easier (it already has), provided expectations are in check (i.e., it would be a leap for such a new technology to replace people overnight  [although many of the signs are there in certain vocations, not engineering]).

Furthermore, in many scenarios, errors are completely fine, provided there is an engineer examining the result. This is no abnormal thing since for decades, computers have been set to iterate, i.e., to make as many errors as it takes, until some condition is reached, and no one bats an eyelid that the computer is effectively making millions of mistakes in the hope of reaching a result.. and there's no guarantee that the human programming the condition didn't make an error either.

I have an engineer colleague whose first language isn't English, and AI is saving him time by assisting him with e-mail writing; he's still in control, of course, to check the output before he hits send! : ) AI isn't always right, but it gives him a good start.

I'm finding AI helps me understand and use APIs quicker and to quickly manipulate data into different formats; these are tasks that I could do myself, but it sure saves a lot of time getting the assistance.

Agree that it won't replace engineers for now, but instead can help engineers as you say.

I definitely feel it will simplify and make certain tasks easier (it already has), provided expectations are in check (i.e., it would be a leap for such a new technology to replace people overnight  [although many of the signs are there in certain vocations, not engineering]).

Furthermore, in many scenarios, errors are completely fine, provided there is an engineer examining the result. This is no abnormal thing since for decades, computers have been set to iterate, i.e., to make as many errors as it takes, until some condition is reached, and no one bats an eyelid that the computer is effectively making millions of mistakes in the hope of reaching a result.. and there's no guarantee that the human programming the condition didn't make an error either.

I have an engineer colleague whose first language isn't English, and AI is saving him time by assisting him with e-mail writing; he's still in control, of course, to check the output before he hits send! : ) AI isn't always right, but it gives him a good start.

I'm finding AI helps me understand and use APIs quicker and to quickly manipulate data into different formats; these are tasks that I could do myself, but it sure saves a lot of time getting the assistance.