Will AI make structural engineers obsolete?

Short answer: no. Long answer: nooooooooooooo (or at least not yet)

With the fascinating capabilities and the immense speed that machine learning systems have developed over the course of the previous two years, it comes as no surprise that people in general (not just structural engineers) are worried about the prospect of their future. What happens when the AI overlords take over and take away my job? What am I gonna do? Oh my god.

Thankfully, many people can breathe a sigh of relief at the fact that we are still nowhere close. Even now, with the staggering amount of training data available on StackOverflow (a question and answer platform for developers) as well as GitHub (a software source code storage platform), we still haven't seen any AI systems that can truly replace an average software engineer and their wrinkly brain that allows them to learn. With almost no structural engineering data available out in the wild, it's a wonder that the likes of ChatGPT is able to even regurgitate simple and common beam equations that we use.

Above image from my LinkedIn post a while back , though it seems that nowadays with the GPT store and additional capacity, things are looking a bit better (worse?).

Though it has to be noted that after every large technological leap, we've managed to adapt surprisingly well. The ability to replace members of the workforce does not mean that it is a zero sum game as the affected disciplines often gain the ability to do much more with less. This enables higher productivity and an expansion of the total sum of what we are capable of as a society. The advent of CAD never destroyed the drafting industry, where in fact, we could even say that it pushed it to greater heights.

Back to software engineering - after Devin, the first AI software engineer was announced to the public, mass media fanned the flames of a fire that was never ever more than a small ember. The viral marketing effect of Devin was much more than its actual capabilities. Even the simple question of why the development company making this AI software engineer was not actively using it to develop itself is a telling sign that this might have just been a big well oiled hype generation machine.

So as the development speeds forward and the chasm between autonomous agents and humans shrinks, the onus would then be on us as the professionals in our field to help push the evolution of the discipline into a form that is enabled by the new, unseen possibilities that these technologies bring to the table rather.