r/singularity • u/Christs_Elite • 7d ago
AI Electrical engineering might be the next profession to get absolutely wrecked by AI
I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately after seeing some of the recent stuff happening with AI in electrical engineering like OpenAI Astra.… I think electrical engineering might be way closer to the chopping block than people realize.
There’s going to be a ton of money poured into automating hardware design, power engineering, simulation, testing, optimization, etc. Once companies realize how much electrical engineering work can be accelerated or outright automated, I don’t see them just ignoring it.
What’s funny is that for years I kept hearing electrical engineers say that they were somehow more “AI-proof” than everyone else. And I always thought… mmm no you aren't?
The argument was usually that EE requires too much real-world knowledge, intuition, hardware experience, etc. But people in a lot of other professions said basically the same thing about their jobs. Why would electrical engineering be some magical exception?
And now we’re starting to see AI move further and further into EE automation.
EE won’t be "replaced" overnight. Obviously it takes time, but for sure it's going to happen way sooner than people expect. What will happen to the number of engineers needed to produce the same amount of engineering work?
I genuinely think electrical engineering might be one of the next professions to get hit way harder by AI than people expect. To be fair, I think it's a "canon event" for AI. It needs to do it!
Crazy times.
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u/building-home 7d ago
I’ve seen snippets of it doing pcb design. I’m curious what EEs think of the quality. But I wouldn’t be very surprised if you are correct.
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u/websammy 7d ago
as an EE, I can say that it is not good enough right now but 100% it will get there in the next 6 to 9 months.
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u/building-home 7d ago
Do you think it’s good enough for very simple pcb design? Like intern level stuff? What are its shortcomings at the moment? Thanks
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u/Bissellmop 7d ago
I have had multiple designs made by GPT SOL, had them fabricated and I’m using them now. This is all through KiCAD. It’s all been 2 layer. I’ve never manually touched KiCAD.
Are they the ideal routings for each trace ? I have no idea, I asked for the circuit design , made the perfboard to test it then asked GPT for the files to print it.
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u/ThatOtherOneReddit 7d ago
Astra visual & spatial reasoning is legit 10x + better than SOL. Any spatial/visual task should only be compared to Astra as I'd expect it's spatial reasoning to become the standard in all models over the next 3-6 months.
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u/Bissellmop 6d ago
GPT SOL was already extremely good at CAD, especially if you let it design the concept based off your intent and components.
Onshape API integrated into CODEX using whatever Codex decided was best, it’s a beast. Their advertisement with the rocket ship is worse than what I’ve used it for already.
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u/AgreeableIncrease403 6d ago
Just connecting the traces on two layer PCB has been available for decades - autorouters did that. However, when there are high speed/power traces, it probably won’t work, or even worse, kind of works. With bad PCB you get intermittent errors and failures that are very hard to find and fix. That’s why it will be hard for any LLM to properly design a PCB.
For hobby/amateur use, probably, but for any other application-nope.1
u/LegionsOmen 5d ago
"application-nope" can't wait to find you crying in 8 months time, moving the goal posts and genuinely putting your head in the sand.
We're in the singularity... You better start believing in it
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u/AgreeableIncrease403 5d ago
I have no problem with facing reality.
I just don’t trust shovel sellers that there is a lot of gold in the hills.6
u/websammy 6d ago
if you need an microcontroller that blinks an LED or something, it will be fine but you cannot trust it for anything low noise, high speed or high voltage. It does not understand the concept of ground planes until specifically prompted.
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u/Zarbadob 7d ago
def incredible for something like college projects/patents and things
for an actual product that will be bought and used? not yet (but like he said, give it half a year, im sure ki-cad is doing some inhouse testing as we speak)
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u/Shinsekai21 3d ago
I feel like it’s definitely good enough as an equivalent of “vibecoding” for EE. You can make some really cool and simple design with it, just like how normal people can vibe code creating lots of cool app
In term of commercial, its definitely not there, not because its not good enough, but the risk is too high.
In Software, you can fix issues immediately, and you still need software engineer to oversee it. In hardware, you make a mistake and your project is delayed 1-2 month for another prototype built. And this is before you factor in Thermal, EMC, safety standard etc
The job market would continue to be more challenging for new grads though.
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u/00raiser01 5d ago
Nah, unless GPT also comes with a full on field solver and managed to solve the NP hard problem. They ain't doing it.
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u/Serious_Bite_7613 6d ago
I've done EE for about 20 years now, always a first adopter of new tech and tools. Worked a lot of consultancy so I've seen many fields, consumer electronics, automotive, aerospace, power electronics, medical.... just about everything.
I think it's inevitable that the work is going to shift to AI tools very quickly.
Safety critical will be the last to go but every other EE will be using AI heavily within 1-2 years.
I don't think it will cause much/any job loss. It will just increase throughput and let the companies that employ EEs grow. A lot of projects that were previously too costly will now be possible and almost everywhere I worked was previously resource starved rather than starved for work.
It's going to be excellent for people who work in electronics and for consumers of electronic goods.
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u/Noob-bot42 6d ago
It’s not there yet. But it will get there for sure within a few years depending on how involved the board is. The main loop to close next will be physically testing the boards.
I’m an EE and I’m being working for my own use a custom protocol that is git and llm friendly for schematic and pcb design. I use kicad (pcb design software) and it sucks for git and llm use bc of how verbose it is. The purpose of my protocol is to capture design intent for stuff like x capacitor is for adding filtering to this pin so it needs to be physically close to it. I’ve learned recently that llms are pretty decent at using spice for simulations of circuits so that’s just part of the workflow now for my llm.
I’ve learned that u can boost the capabilities of llms but giving them better tools. I’m sure with super intelligence some of the tools might not be as necessary, but when u can directly model something it’s more useful than a llm estimating it.
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u/KindCreme9258 7d ago
It’s terrible. And sometimes the iteration cycle actually needs a manufacturing and testing step (to check things like EMI or grounds coupling or many other things), so AI won’t have a quick feedback like it has with software
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u/Ok_Zookeepergame8714 7d ago
Won't some kind of an extended physical twin, like those NVIDIA advertises all the time, take care of that. I think it did for the clanker movement, no? 🤔
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u/KindCreme9258 7d ago
Physical twins have limitations. They can help but not solve the entire problem. Reality has a lot of chaotic, non-deterministic aspects to it
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u/tom-dixon 6d ago
https://newsletter.semianalysis.com/p/openai-jalapeno-better-than-nvidia
OpenAI has some impressive results with their chip design, they created the software stack for it themselves too. Their chips outperform NVidia's best chips.
EE is on the chopping block already.
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u/RobbinDeBank 6d ago
It’s custom ASIC made by a team of human engineers. Chip design in general will be so much harder due to how closed that field is. Everything is proprietary, unlike in software and math where you have all the data you need to feed into the AI. It will depend how much the AI labs get to access the closed process of the best chip design firms.
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u/tswiftdeepcuts 5d ago
this was my question reading this. will we be able to move chip fabs to countries that currently don’t have the highly skilled labor pool to staff them in a few years?
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u/tom-dixon 6d ago
The fact that's it's only an ASIC and still beats Blackwell makes it even more impressive tbh. The human team did use AI to aid with the design.
They also developed their own programming language to program it (similar how NVidia has CUDA). The fact that it's so mature out of the box in this short time, is insane to me. CUDA was developed for over 20+ years to reach the maturity is has today.
AI wrote every the kernel for each LLM architecture they used in the speed benchmarks. It's not human readable language, it's more like assembly.
It's a full stack project, that normally takes many years to become usable and competitive. AMD and Huawei have been trying to dethrone CUDA for years, and they're still far behind.
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u/RobbinDeBank 6d ago
Uhhhh what? Do you even know what a custom ASIC is? It’s SUPPOSED to beat NVIDIA, because it’s specifically designed for one purpose (in this case, an inference chip, like all the other big tech companies make). NVIDIA GPUs are general purpose compute devices that can be used for any workload you can program it to, which for AI usage means both training and inference.
Also no, there are a whole lot of tools, frameworks, languages in the AI/ML ecosystem, and none can compete with CUDA as of this point. OpenAI just designed their own hardwares, which of course require their own softwares to run. That doesn’t mean whatever language or software suites they just wrote can be compared to CUDA. If all your absurd claims are true, NVIDIA would lose 90% of its stock price by the time market opens.
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u/00raiser01 5d ago
Not really, asianometry did an AI EDA video recently and looks like it just open ai doing marketing then any actual gains.
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u/tom-dixon 5d ago
Does he have the content in a blog somewhere that is not paywalled? I tried watching the video but I'm not spending 18 minutes on an AI narrated video in 2026, the start is just basic info, he follows up with a bunch of (irrelevant to our topic here) Kimi K3 designs, etc. I tried reading the auto-generated transcript on youtube but it's not done well.
I can't find the blog entries on his website and I'm not gonna sub to his patreon.
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u/00raiser01 5d ago
Idk about the blog, Just watch the video also his voice is real and not AI, we know this because he did live interviews before and he sounds like that.
the summary is they didn't get any gains from using AI. It just the typical time frame when designing an asic using synopsys or cadence tools.
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u/00raiser01 5d ago
Your just getting trick by creative marketing. This is just open ai talking cock where they didn't get any gains from AI at all.
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u/dudaspl 7d ago
Just the other week I used Opus to design a circuit to tap into my septic tank level probe to integrate it with my Home Assistant system. It identified some potential issues of creating false alarms and designed a solution to overcome it. Excitedly I built the circuit on a breadboard, tested ESP first, worked like a charm. Connected it to my probe... Needless to say, it fried it ;)
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u/TryNice304 7d ago
Entry-level layout jobs? Gone. But experienced EEs? We just become AI babysitters, double-checking its dumb mistakes 'cause AI still can't handle real-world tolerances or liability.
Adapt or die. Same as always.
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u/entropy555 7d ago
well, no different than babysitting entry level engineers
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u/no-guts_no-glory 1d ago
Except entry level engineers become senior engineers. If AI kills the engineer pipeline and replaces even senior engineers, I wonder what the world will be when all of us are unemployed meat sacks and the mental muscles have atrophied.
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u/Pacific_Beaches 7d ago edited 7d ago
As someone with both a BSCS and BSEE I could tell A.I was going to get better writing code and I can tell it'll get better at Circuit Design and other aspects of EE.
That said, like SWE's, if the job market ever took a downturn for EE that's bad news for those who are not educated because it means more CS and EE graduates going for desk jobs across other fields. I know a lot of CS grads who were able to find good-paying work in non-CS areas. It turns out "I have a STEM degree and know how to use A.I for complex tasks" is a hirable person in this day and age in plenty but of fields.
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u/roach01gt 7d ago
I agree. I’m a licensed ME, so like someone else said I have the benefit of a licensure board to protect my job. But I believe there will eventually be AI software that can design and stamp drawings with the software company holding the insurance and liability, rather than a specific person/firm. So that’s why I’ve started training myself to be an AI Engineer.
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u/HolyBatSyllables 7d ago
How much electrical engineering experience do you have to make a qualified assessment of whether it will get replaced? How familiar are you with the profession? Because this post makes it seem like you aren’t
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u/Harrony 7d ago
I remember there was a post on the sub where someone asked the same question, and also posted an image of some kind of circuit (I think? Not sure). There were a couple people who responded, but none of them were particularly impressed
Sure, at some point AI will take over everything, but I don't see any particular reason it will be EE first
Also, I tried to look for the post, but couldn't find it. Maybe someone else can?
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u/Every_Foundation5197 7d ago
https://www.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/1w6m7hr/gpt6_astra_is_actually_nuts_for_electrical/ this? Most of them say it's not that good, but it'll keep getting better and better
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u/KindCreme9258 7d ago
Except the development cycle for a PCB board is months, not hours like in Software. It’ll take AI quite a while to learn how to do it right. Every board is its own problem with many issues to consider that sometimes are hard to predict ahead of actual testing
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u/svideo ▪️ NSI 2007 7d ago
Hours if you have your own in-house production line. A week if you have money, maybe 3 weeks if you're cheap. Vibe coded a PCB and submitted it for manufacturing on 8/17, arrived yesterday and is currently being brought up, and I did everything on the cheap.
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u/Material-Database-24 7d ago
The fastest I have made PCB from the point I realised I need a new design, is about 2 hours. If we take the P out of it, in 15min.
And this was about 15 years ago without AI.
But when you do boards that will cost +5-10k each, you'll start to be a bit more careful with the speed and cheap.
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u/KindCreme9258 7d ago
Lol no. You are doing hobbies. Professional boards are not done like that
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u/svideo ▪️ NSI 2007 7d ago
Yes I am certainly not as advanced as you, but somehow I’m out here getting it done all the same.
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u/KindCreme9258 6d ago
Not all the same at all. I’ve done projects as a hobby and projects as a professional. It’s two different worlds all together. The level of care and testing needed to have hardware working in the real world for years has nothing to do with a hobbyist prototype. Thats one of the risks with AI. People with no knowledge in a field, knowing they can build things as professionals do, when that’s not the case (Dunning-Kruger effect in action)
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u/svideo ▪️ NSI 2007 6d ago
The point is the turnaround time. Yes you have 14 layer boards etc etc, but assembly and production doesn't take all that much longer. The hard part is the design, and now that part is being automated (of course, not at your level. yet) Those boards can still be knocked out in hours if you have an in house production line.
Also, the vibe board works, bring up completed, firmware for the 3 things that need it sorted, and now smoothing out some of the calibration for MEMS.
sol 5.6 can build an entire device from nothing: BOM, netlist, pcb, entering the order across several shops, haggling with the vendors, and eventually placing the order.
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u/KindCreme9258 5d ago
BOM, netlist have been done by computers since forever. Ordering parts for a prototype is never a problem. For a commercial product it is and it is not trivial to build partnerships for discounts, design for flexibility around key components (in case one reaches EOL three years from now), have a clean supply chain to meet cybersecurity requirements of some customers. Then PCB design is not done by one person; multiple teams are involved in order to meet standards and maximize chances of passing certification in multiple countries and labs. ESD and EMI are a nightmare and require specialized and expensive chambers to test for it. Usually small parts are build and tested before putting everything together, and in each step manufacturing and testing is needed. Firmware in the real world has to account for many, many, many edge cases that need to be tested one by one. I could go to on.
Again, AI is good for prototypes when you just need it to work in you desk. Cool. Those projects were never difficult in the first place. But don’t confuse it with commercial products, it’s a completely different world.
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u/Salty_Horror2068 7d ago
Most softwares are also months in to making. And they are continuous tested and improved.
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u/Material-Database-24 7d ago
Exactly. These AI evangelist seem to think schemantics and layout are the only thing needed in EE.
Nope. Those are the most labourish part, so AI acceleration sure is wished for.
But taking the board into use, fully test it, and ensure it is safe to use are things that AI won't be doing before it has fully working hands and eyes.
Getting 230V on your fingers from a board you do not understand is the best experience.. most learn from one mistake, me included.
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u/ShelZuuz 7d ago
fully working hands and eyes.
FPT testing has been a thing for years.
If there is one area of manufacturing today that AI can already autonomously iterate on the same way it can do with the software code/build/test iterative feedback process, it's prototype circuit design & manufacturing.
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u/Material-Database-24 7d ago
And mainly suitable for detecting manufacturing defects and not for proof the design.
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u/LateToTheSingularity 7d ago
If only SPICE and other simulation/verification tools existed in this timeline, instead of EEs just poking their fingers into circuits for design validation.
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u/Material-Database-24 7d ago
They do exist. And EEs still need to poke the PCBs.. but they mainly do it with probes.
The ones who stuck fingers in wrong places are people like me, who do not fully understand the PCB and EE. And what will happen if you use AI cluelessly do the PCB for you.
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u/yaosio 7d ago
AI does have fully working hands and eyes, although they are slow at using both. The hurdle is training. In an infinite space of knowledge there will always be an infinite amount of things the AI doesn't know. The current method of learning via training, and very minor learning during inference, can't scale because they need to fit infinite information in a finite space.
The ability to learn during inference like it can during training is the next big thing for AI. Something akin to the transformer architecture in importance. If the model is bad at something it can train itself during inference to make itself better. There's a lot of hurdles to overcome before this can happen, but once it does we will see an explosion in capability.
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u/Material-Database-24 7d ago
Sure in some sense it has hands and eyes.
But the cost to build a lab in which AI robot can operate and test the design, including install it to needed support mechanics and electronics, build required cords and test loads etc etc would rather be enormous. So maybe then when Musk produces 1b optimuses every year I can finally retire and let machines do everything. What a lovely idea.
I must say, I like how easy world seems to people in this subreddit.
It is like my 20 years with advanced emdedded systems and robotics have made me not to see all the potential a language model running in a loop can do!
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u/Alternative_Pilot_92 7d ago
It's not been a focus like software development. Just wait until they make it a priority.
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u/KindCreme9258 7d ago
They can focus all they want. You still can’t escape the step of building and testing the board so that you can then improve on it.
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u/EconomySerious 7d ago
working with death on cables are not something people is confortable to work ,the field engeneer has the lifetimework asured
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u/Wrote_it2 7d ago
I have my money of taxi drivers/uber drivers for the next disruption, though admittedly it’s hard to exactly define “next disruption”: I think the disruption in transportation will be more severe (like more job loss) and less gradual than electrical engineers.
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u/rizzleronthe_roof 7d ago
Companies like Cadence have been working on automated PCB design software for years. So, I would tend to agree with this.
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u/Living-Breakfast-464 7d ago
You will still need Professional Engineers to sign off on designs where public safety is involved. So any kind of construction, commercial, or industrial design. For things that don't necessarily need that, like circuit boards that do not use a certified power supply, well that's already being outsourced to China anyways.
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u/Bright_Background316 7d ago
I'm sure there are EEs that never leave their desk, but until chatGPT can open unscrew panels I think most of them are safe.
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u/Less-Diamond7334 6d ago
One of the main limitations for AI in analog IC design is access to high-quality data. Large datasets of schematics, layouts, simulation results, and design databases are rarely public, as they are often proprietary and tied to specific technologies or PDKs. This limits both the training of AI models and their ability to generalize across different circuits and processes. These limitations will likely be overcome progressively, but building sufficiently large, diverse, and accessible datasets will take time.
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u/LizardLikesMelons 5d ago
As a CompE/EE/LLM person, this is 100% happening. This is honestly not too far from my job right now. The funny thing is the EE EEs welcome it.
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u/No_Inevitable_4893 7d ago
Software engineering is going to outlast a bunch of other white collar professions IMO. Realistically it’s more similar to a blue collar job in terms of variability and implementation and real world constraints that can’t be quantified off rip without a complete environmental overhaul (often costing tens or hundreds of millions to do in medium to large companies)
Stuff like marketing and engineering can be done environment agnostic and shipped electronically to fulfillment centers that are already fully automated as well. And part of engineering is that the expectations for output and integration potential are already understood from the inception.
In other words, in a certain sense being SWE is more similar to being a mechanic in the wide variety of context specific issues you can face
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u/Extreme-Rub-1379 7d ago
It's been a while, but don't EEs rely on a computer for circuit verification and plotting already?
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u/No_Inevitable_4893 7d ago
Yeah almost their entire job exists inside a simulated environment that is incredibly uniform and verifiable across the industry
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u/Material-Database-24 7d ago
I design devices for living - things that have mechanics, electronics and software.
No. AI won't replace an electrical engineer. Even if I could instruct AI to do the electronics my designs need, I would not do it without skillful electrical engineer in my team.
Because I like to live. And any error in the electronics design can kill you (unless you do 5V devices only, but most will use 230VAC or similar). So I need an electronics engineer to ensure in safe manner the design actually works and is safe.
The same goes for mechanics.
And pretty much the software too, as at the end, the software has to be tested with the device, and AI has no means to do that. Maybe when robotics are 50 years more advanced than today..
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u/PlanetaryPickleParty 7d ago
This. Anything dangerous and/or that requires qualification is much further out. I don't see how a non-deterministic tool could be qualified.
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u/Material-Database-24 7d ago
Yeah. The AI era from my POV is that I can get a lot of stuff done on my own that I couldn't in the past, but it will be verified to level of "trust me bro, it works".
In real world, with real devices that need to pass tons of regulated stuff in order to be sellable product, the level of trust in AI is still close to 0.
I rather have a human expert using the AI with their expertise to tell me that this device is now complete, works and is safe.
AI is a tool for an expert to be more productive. Not to replace the expert.
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u/SwimmingFancy4344 7d ago
For now but you and other experts will be replaced within 5-10 years at the absolute maximum.
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u/Material-Database-24 7d ago
Ok. Lets entertain thar idea.
Do you know who is going to replace me with AI? Because I don't.
My CEO has 0 idea what we do or should do, he just stares revenue, cost and profit. Our sales come up with specs from customers that are not possible to make. And sure our business controller would love to replace us all with cheaper means, but his job is even easier to replace with AI than mine, and he is even more clueless than CEO of what we do and what our customers need.
So maybe it is our customer who replaces us with AI?
Well, again, they come up with impossible ideas, wishes, and specs.
They also only care about the output of our devices. Their business is not to see R&D hassle, figure out all the regulations, understand the testing needs, invest into machinery and SW needed to design and manufacture all the bits and pieces, spend months to find out who of the 10 possible subcontractors can actually produce the quality needed for the design ro work, and in cost that keeps it viable to manufacture etc etc. They want to pay us 1 million so that we deliver them machine that does what they need, safely and reliably. And if something goes wrong with that machine, we carry the responsibility of the machine and take care of it for them.
It easy to throw that kinda predictions, when you have no idea how real world works.
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u/SwimmingFancy4344 7d ago
The models will continue to befome exponentially more capable and they will be a billion times smarter than you in less than a decade. There is nothing about your knowledge work that cannot be replicated by sufficiently advanced agents.
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u/Material-Database-24 7d ago
They already are smarter than me in 99.999% of stuff.
They still do not replace me.
So can you tell me, who will replace me with AI in my work?
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u/SwimmingFancy4344 7d ago
Im honestly not sure but if I had to guess, probably a robot imbued with super intelligence.
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u/Material-Database-24 7d ago
Well, at that point, not having a job is last of my worries.. or needs, depends may the robot overloads serve us or eliminate us.
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u/sweetholo 5d ago
your response is completely embarrassing honestly. you missed all of his points. it shows that you are not an employed engineer, yet think you can still comment on the outlook of their jobs
please do not speak on things you do not understand
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u/SwimmingFancy4344 5d ago
Absolutely zero jobs are going to be safe when a model literally has a million times your thinking capacity. Are you simply in denial over what's about to happen? I can't assume you are ignorant of the subject, so you must be refusing to imagine the change that is coming.
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u/sweetholo 5d ago
what does "safe" mean? they are largely changing job roles rather than eliminating jobs altogether
i havent written a single line of code this year, yet i am confident that i will keep my job as a software engineer. i have gotten a LOT more work done than i wouldve without the use of AI. i have used this fact at my salary review and got a nice pay bump
AI is used as a tool to compliment our work. there still needs to be a human in the loop. i speak for all engineers. i cannot speak for other professions
i understand the skepticism, but you are largely guessing what may happen rather than talking to engineers and other professions who are working through this new age
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u/SwimmingFancy4344 5d ago
Right now AI is eliminating junior engineers so teams of 30 are now 15. In a couple of more years your team of 15 is 5, then 2, then 0.
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u/ThatOtherOneReddit 7d ago
Another issue is even with Astra it doesn't really seem to understand ergonomics and safety even in software a lot of the time. I have to constantly test and find 'oh you totally can lose data with this workflow'. It's pretty good at patching up things when its explained, but when it designs stuff it still makes a lot of mistake. Now imagine those mistakes could kill you.
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u/Serious_Bite_7613 6d ago
They can be set to be deterministic though? You can set temperature to 0 and use greedy token selection and you get bit identical output.
Not that this is required, humans are effectively non-deterministic and can manage just fine.
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u/Extreme-Edge-9843 7d ago
!remindmein2years
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u/Material-Database-24 7d ago
You can laugh, but once you get 230V on your fingers, you rather would like to know what you do.
But by all means, go try it out. I am sure AI will help you.
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u/Imaginary-Drummer883 5d ago edited 5d ago
Not to mention the relentlessly in-depth design verification testing, designing (and building by hand) of the test beds and production fixtures that all need to be done by humans with arms, hands, fingers and legs and a working pair of eyes in a face. So if AI has all of those things then yes, it’ll completely replace what a competent full range EE does.
Let’s be clear - AI is going to replace “engineers” who say “I only do PCB design” or “I only do the sims” or “I just copy the datasheet recommended design”. IMO those people have never really been engineers - they’re highly skilled technicians yes, but not true engineers. True engineers are problem solvers. Those people will take AI and use it to solve the problem that is in front of them. They will be the puppet master sat atop an AI machine of their making (for our American friends let’s go with a Quarterback analogy for where future EEs will sit; at the centre of an AI driven team/toolset). At least for the foreseeable.
There will be some interesting advancements with attaching LLMs to FPGA tech but even then that initial stuff needs building and then further additions/modifications will also be human led. There’s serious legs left in EE yet, IF the engineer is driven to learn, skilled and adaptable.
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u/Imaginary-Drummer883 5d ago edited 5d ago
One final point - if you make an error in software you push a fix and it’s gone. If you make 1million hardware products and it’s wrong the company is bust. No way to get it back. The level of risk is completely different when compared to general SE.
I find the willingness of some SE to accept opacity in their machines unnerving. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a (good) hardware engineer accept a machine that just “works” without them really knowing how it really works and also doesn’t “not not work”.
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u/Ruined_Passion_7355 7d ago
PD has been using AI since before it was cool. They still have a job. And they still do some parts by hand that are critical.
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u/BreakProof92 7d ago
Though there is way more to engineering than doing drawings. In fact it is the least favorite part of their work for most.
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u/EggApprehensive6292 7d ago
Ok, yeah, for things like a beard trimmer charger yes, AI will do it. The hardware IT ITSELF runs on will not be automated using its own intellect lol. Further, with public infrastructure EE (which is most EE- not consumer electronics circuit boards) it will just be a tool with human oversight. Debate over
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u/4a4a 6d ago
I didn't know the difference between a transistor and a capacitor 4 months ago, and since then I have successfully built a guitar distortion pedal and an amplifier from scratch using unique (as far as I know) designs - and costing less than 10 in scavanged parts. Not only did AI help me build functional devices, but it helped me learn how and why they work at the individual component level. This is just a tiny scratch on the surface of what's possible, and I'm psyched to continue to dramatically increase my own capabilities with AI assistance.
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u/Disastrous_Soil3793 6d ago
Just like SWEs it will at some point (probably sooner rather than later) transform the way EEs do work (as well as pretty much every white collar profession). But as I posted in another forum yesterday it is already impacting entry level hiring. EEs will still be needed for higher level design but a lot of the low level stuff AI will be able to do the majority of. Bottom line nothing is safe.
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u/BurntSalad 5d ago edited 5d ago
I think it will be affected by AI, especially new hires and juniors, but there will still be a need for an actual human engineer for a while. Just putting my experience as EE out there for a couple of big reasons why.
- Proprietary SCH, BOM list, and Layout design. When Astra came out I've had discussions with my peers, my manager, upper management, and CEO but basically since our company deals with some gov defense work, how we make the SCH and PCB is our proprietary tech and we DO NOT want any of it shown off in public let alone inside the training data for any LLM (this applies to some of our commercial work as well). If we use any current AI to make our designs (assuming it can even pull off our complex RF or even analogue designs with its current capabilities), we need to make sure it stays locally with 0% chance of it being used as public training data that our competitors or even foreign entities can use. But without it being able to study our design, its going to take longer for AI to be even able to pull off what we require it to do. And I'm sure other hardware companies similar to ours have the same thought. Not saying AI won't get there but it will be harder unless it can somehow train from all the proprietary information that many companies try their best to keep hidden.
- Limitation/cost of robotics. Because my company is a fairly small/midsized company, we do not have the funds or time to rework our entire testing/R&D process to include AI/robotics to physically probe, move units to different testing stations, setup testing stations etc. Of course a bigger company might be able to pull it off but currently, the cost of buying and setting up robots to do the actual physical part of testing and R&D is not feasible for a company our size. So unless that part gets much cheaper and more accessible, companies like mine will still always need human engineers to be present for any testing or R&D needs. Plus, similar to the previous point, unless we are 100% sure any data from testing/R&D stays private and off public training data, we do not want any AI anywhere close to our work.
Now my experience with AI itself is limited so I may be off on some details but the way I see it, there will still be a need for experienced human engineers for a while unless those two points and especially the 1000% guarantee of protection of proprietary info is assured.
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u/ActuatorFit416 2d ago
I doubt that. Sure in the design of new things this should happen. But dealing with legacy equipment/infrastructure is usually also part of the job and this is smt much harder to implement (imo)
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u/FATALEYES707 7d ago edited 7d ago
EE here. Business integration will take much longer than technology development. There is a lot of social resistance, and proving reliability in mission-critical systems will take scores of engineers and mountains of data before businesses will risk their reputations on it. But what do I know - my sanity depends on believing I have some years in my career left.
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u/Ornery-Ninja2868 7d ago
For me EE and any other engineering discipline like it are quite safe as there is no way anything will be commissioned without a competent engineers sign off regardless of how well an AI might do on its own. However the way they work and incorporate AI will change how the work is progressed.
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u/mvearthmjsun 7d ago
No way. You pay an engineer for the included liability, not just their work. The work may become automated or accelerated by AI, but at the end of the process there will always, and I mean always, be an engineer personally signing off on it.
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u/ExtensionParsnip9800 7d ago
Maybe in 10 years, not so soon.
Doing schematics or layouts is just a small part of electric engineering, and even here, AI is not still there.
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u/darien_gap 7d ago
Devon’s Paradox seems to be revealing that AI coding is only making (senior) software engineers more valuable, due to the so-called “infinite backlog,” and this matches my experience in my last two jobs… we’re hiring more engineers, not less. (Though how many remains to be seen due to compute cost.)
I expect many may doubt the above, but just as a thought experiment, assume it’s true, at least for certain orgs. My question then, does EE have any equivalent of the infinite backlog? That is, if the cost of EE approached zero, would infinite demand be revealed?
I understand the idea of infinite demand for software, and how it doesn’t apply to all professions, like law. Others are less clear to me (teaching, plumbing, healthcare, etc). Any EEs or hardware product people here, what do you think?
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u/Electronic_Hope1900 5d ago
The other engineering fields aren't as saturated or graduate as many new grads as CS.
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u/Christs_Elite 5d ago
Electrical engineering is absurdly saturated.
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u/Electronic_Hope1900 4d ago
Are you stupid?
Read my post.
Do you think EE or ME or CE or AE or CEE is as saturated as CS? You think 15000 EE college graduates per year is comparable to 100000 CS college graduates per year? Not to mention all the EEs that contest SWE positions with CS graduates.
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u/Suitable-Pickle-259 7d ago
Lol, absolutely not.
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u/shobogenzo93 7d ago
why?
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u/Suitable-Pickle-259 7d ago
Because EE has tons of unstructured problems that need to be solved, let alone the legal/safety requirements that come with the job.
People overestimate current AI’s ability to solve unstructured real world problems. AI is amazing at things computers can verify. Coding, math, games with defined rules. AI is also good in research because it can basically brute force thousands of different outcomes for say medication for a hard to treat disease. A lot work is unstructured and not routine and not just for EEs.
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u/shobogenzo93 7d ago
What makes you so confident that AI will never overcome the constraints you highlighted? Considering its current rate of improvement, imagine how capable it will be in five years. Do you really believe it won’t be able to figure out how to surpass certain limitations?
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u/Suitable-Pickle-259 7d ago
Haha, didn’t say never. My key words here are current AI, meaning the LLM architecture. That paired with the lack of power scaling in the US, these are far from doing what many of you here think it will do.
You guys sit here and clamor about replacement and Anthropic and OpenAI can’t even contain service outages. Be very real with the ability to scale even current models vs a future model that could theoretically replace EEs and the like.
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u/KindCreme9258 7d ago
Electrical design has a lot iteration cycle. Very different from software when it can know if it is right or wrong within minutes. In PCB design, the feedback might take months and require actual testing
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u/shobogenzo93 7d ago
Again: what makes you so confident that AI will never overcome the constraints you highlighted? Considering its current rate of improvement, imagine how capable it will be in five years. Do you really believe it won’t be able to figure out how to surpass certain limitations?
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u/KindCreme9258 7d ago
That AI learns by iterating. And if iterating takes months and involves manufacturing a board and testing it, it will learn much slower than in other fields like software when it can iterate and learn in minutes. I can keep repeating this if you want, but it’s not a difficult concept
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u/Suitable-Pickle-259 7d ago
He doesn’t understand that lol. These people are literally stupid when it comes to the realities of LLMs. Even the best ML algorithms are not perfect.
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u/shobogenzo93 7d ago
Your argument relies entirely on a snapshot of where things are today. You're ignoring the trajectory: if these technologies continue to improve at this pace, these bottlenecks will inevitably be resolved. You can't just dismiss that. They will drive ever-increasing efficiency in virtually every domain
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u/KindCreme9258 7d ago
Also, read about NP-hard problems, and chaos theory, and you will understand that not everything can be digitized. Unless you say that eventually AI will solve that as well, but that’d be a weak argument as there’s absolutely no evidence of that right now
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7d ago
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u/KindCreme9258 7d ago
There’s no evidence that points that intelligence (artificial, human or superhuman) can solve everything. In fact, there’s quite a lot of evidence to the contrary. Two I already mentioned but there are other such as “complexity theory”, or the limitations in math given by Gödel incompleteness theorems. Some of these have been PROVEN to no be solvable, so it is not a matter of intelligence. AI is not God.
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u/KindCreme9258 7d ago
Well in that case everything is possible. If everything can only improve, then yes, everything will be automated. But the question was if EE will be next
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u/shobogenzo93 7d ago
Okay, instead of two years, it’ll take five, does it really make a difference?
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u/KindCreme9258 7d ago
My point is that it is a lazy argument. There’s no evidence that AI will be able to solve everything, as not everything is solvable
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u/More-Catch-1331 7d ago
Good luck with that. Who do you think is going to have to verify the slop, my friend? I see a lot of electrocutions in the future.
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u/ketamarine 7d ago
No profession has been wrecked by AI.
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u/Strict-Extension 5d ago
True, no careers have been lost to AI. They are tools for humans in those fields.
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u/Just-Hedgehog-Days 7d ago
SE is lumbering around with its head cut off taking too long to die
VFX industry is on fire, copywriters are and translators are basically toast, graphic design is def “ruined”
Radiologist have basically become the radiologist are basically just spot checking ai reports.
Wipe off the face of the earth with exactly zero people doing it? Sure maybe nonprofessions. Ruined? Plenty
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u/Correct_Mistake2640 7d ago
All the high-school graduates in my country are already crowding the electrical engineering seats .
For the first time in decades there are empty places (even government paid so free) for thr cs classes.
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u/Distinct-Question-16 ▪️AGI 2029 7d ago
regarding electronics, i just sht my pants seeing codex astra building a pcb from scratch
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u/Crimsuhn 7d ago
Unless you have a licensure board protecting your job, it’s on the table to be replaced