Engineers Must Prepare for an AI-Driven Future

No one knows exactly how to define the impact artificial intelligence (AI) will have on the work of mechanical engineers today—or how long it will take before certain roles and responsibilities become obsolete. 

But what experts in the field can do is take an educated guess as to how young engineers can make themselves as indispensable as possible in the meantime.

“Any solution that requires a kind of nuanced compromise between codes, standards, budget, time, efficiency, performance, weight—all of those factors—is a really hard optimization problem that needs guidance in decision-making,” said Brendan Englot, professor of mechanical engineering at Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, N.J. “AI can still help us by churning out designs, but doing that at a level of complexity in a new application is going to require human expertise and judgment for a long time ahead.”

AI fluency is a core skill

That said, what’s already happening now, and will become even more prevalent in the coming months, is AI-aided code generation to help with modeling, simulation, or design, according to Englot. He believes MEs will still need to critically think about and evaluate the outputs AI provides, but that attention will shift to focus on prompting AI to generate code for desired outcomes.