How Machine Learning and AI Will Impact Engineering
As engineers, we face a time of rapid technological advancement of the tools available to us. While we spend our days innovating our designs, our tools are being innovated beyond what we ever imagined. With the drive for practical artificial intelligence embedded in our workflows, how we work may look quite different even just a few years from now.
While many professionals are wary of AI as it may steal their job, a report fromthe University of Oxfordplaces Engineering and Science professions as the least threatened industries by AI. In fact, most studies point to engineers experiencing great benefits from the rise of AI tools.
AI and machine learning will replace jobs that we know about today, but because it brings new capabilities, it will open up new industries and new jobs that aren’t even on the modern engineer’s radar. Low value and meaningless jobs currently in place will get automated away. It will allow you to spend more time on better decisions.
No matter whether you have adopted machine learning technologies and in the grander picture, artificial intelligence, most engineers recognize that a change is coming. It would seem a natural fit to incorporate artificial intelligence into CAD, into our workflows, into our engineering. This not only facilitates our forward growth as engineers, but it gives us the ability to design with complexities never before possible.
Remaining at the top of our engineering game is no easy task when the game is constantly innovating with new technologies. To remain relevant as engineers, we must understand – even predict – how machine learning and AI will change the game and adapt before we are left in the dust.
AI is the next platform. The world’s top minds affirm it. Engineering innovation directs it. Now it’s the time to get on board. All of this can be scary to face as an engineer. How we engineer has shifted over the years as CAD evolved from 2D into 3D and now into a 3D design hub. In essence, CAD has shifted from a supplementary tool to engineers into now a fundamental tool of how we work. If we examine the trend of AI close enough, we can begin to see how the solidification of CAD into our daily workflow isn’t too different from what might happen with AI implementation.
Much like additive manufacturing in the past, AI implementation has been surrounded by a decent amount of hype. As engineers, we’re naturally skeptical when one innovation or technology is broadcasted as the “cure-all” to the future. Even with the hype around AI in the past, current trends place practical AI and machine learning tools right in the laps of engineers and technology leaders.
Generative design, simulation improvements, sensors, and big data design optimization – all of these areas of engineering are at the forefront of being significantly impacted by AI technologies. All of these advanced engineering technologies have the ability to impact us as engineers and our profession as a whole in 3 main ways.
Job Evolution- Every innovation in the past has created a new sector of work and research. Our modern model of technological and often, digital innovation has AI at the leading edge. This means that as engineers, the way we do our jobs and even the areas we work in may shift as the needs of the industry adapt to coming tools. Our workflows will evolve in a micro-perspective as artificial intelligence infiltrates how we design. In the macro-perspective, new industries will be created that existing engineers will need to flow into.
Capability Improvement – AI and machine learning tools bring drastic capabilities to the engineer relative to what we are capable of on our own. Through organic latticing tools, we have weight-saving capabilities like never before possible. With generative design, we can explore design options that never would have been an option.
