Engineering is about trust. In all other and generally more formalized engineering disciplines, the actual job of an engineer is to provide confidence that something works. Software engineering may employ fewer people because the tools are better and make people much more productive, but until everyone else trusts the computer more, the job will exist.
If the world trusts AI over engineers then the fact that you don’t have a job will be moot.
People don’t have anywhere near enough knowledge of how things work to make their choices based on trust. People aren’t getting on the subway because they trust the engineers did a good job; they’re doing it because it’s what they can afford and they need to get to work.
Similarly, people aren’t using Reddit or Adobe or choosing their cars firmware based on trust. People choose what is affordable and convenient.
In civil engineering public works are certified by an engineer; its literally them saying if this fails i am at fault. The public is trusting the engineer to say its safe.
Yeah, people may not know that the subway is safe because of engineering practices, but if there was a major malfunction, potentially involving injuries or loss of life, every other day, they would know, and I’m sure they would think twice about using it.
ChatGPT is hilariously incompetent… but on a serious note, I still firmly reject tools like copilot outside demos and the like because they drastically reduce code quality for short term acceleration. That’s a terrible trade-off in terms of cost.
I enjoy using copilot, but it is not made to think for you. It’s a better autocomplete, but don’t ever let it do more than a line at once.
I predict that, within the year, AI will be doing 100% of the development work that isn’t total and utter bullshit pain-in-the-ass complexity, layered on obfuscations, composed of needlessly complex bullshit.
That’s right, within a year, AI will be doing .001% of programming tasks.
Can we just get it to attend meetings for us?
