Protecting Engineers' Skills in the AI Era
The author argues that over-reliance on AI in engineering risks eroding the apprenticeship model necessary for junior workers to develop deep expertise. By automating away the 'formative' struggles of early-career roles, companies may inadvertently create a generation of engineers who lack the intuition to identify when AI systems fail.
Why it matters
This highlights a critical long-term risk to industrial safety and innovation, suggesting that 'inefficient' manual training is essential to maintaining human oversight in an increasingly automated workforce.
A little over a decade ago, I led the controls design for a first-of-its-kind full digital-control system for a U.S. nuclear plant. It was, on paper, a beautiful machine—engineered to run itself the way a modern airliner does, with operators watching over a system that rarely needed them. And we made a decision that, to an efficiency-minded observer, looked backward: We deliberately left manual steps inside sequences the system could execute on its own.
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