ChatGPT, Bard, and MidJourney seem like all anyone in the IT world can talk about these days, but how does it affect the hardware engineering community? How do you think AI will affect the careers of Electrical Engineers? Take the poll and in the Comments section, let us know how you think the future of hardware engineering will look.
I think impact will come soon, in the area of productivity enhancement for preparing class notes or presentations etc. Here's what's already possible today:
Example: I want a block diagram to illustrate some engineering system at a high level.
In the screenshot, you can see some graphics code (SVG). I only typed the first two lines. The rest was done by AI. As you can see, I wanted a diagram with circles, triangle and squares, in a particular sequence. This is primitive for now, but it can only improve over time.
And here's the result, using that file in PowerPoint:
After that, it was easy to drag things where I wanted them, modify etc.
Was there any time saved? I'd say it took identical time compared to if I'd drawn it all manually. It's not going to take much more to save my time, if the diagram needed to be more complex, had more blocks and so on. That's what is possible today, so it's not a stretch to think it will vastly improve, and with a better front-end than manually typing SVG. Imagine if it could be done straight from a Word document, by highlighting the description of the block diagram, right-clicking, and selecting "Build Diagram with AI" or whatever.
