Photo credit: Apple
Whether or not you have thought about that voice in your smartphone as an AI product or not, Apple’s Siri, Google Assistant, and Amazon’s Alexa all use AI in order to help you complete tasks and answer questions on your tablets and mobile devices.
How Automation Engineers Create AI Products
It is worth noting that an automation engineer creates and builds various automated machines. These engineers design, program, develop, simulate, and test automated machinery as well as processes in order to complete tasks. With the increase in automation, organizations across most industries are looking for automation engineers in order to help facilitate, oversee, and manage enterprise automation.
You know that AI is a complex and sophisticated network of algorithms that can think like a human brain. Keep in mind that programming and training AI takes expertise and time, however, automation engineers do not only deploy the models. They also screen for problems, make improvements, and handle system maintenance.
While it is easy to find people to write algorithms, what you really want is somebody who can make critical decisions about the system itself. AI and automation engineers build and test AI models. They move between conventional software development and the unique and advanced needs of AI learning. Automation engineers also navigate the learning spaces of their neural networks as well as the business value or potential those networks provide.
AI Jobs and Software Automation Engineers
There is no doubt that everybody is talking about AI, with Gartner ranking it at the height of peak hype. Did you know that the consensus among many experts is that many professions will be automated in the next 5 to 10 years?
And a group of senior-level tech execs who also comprise the Forbes Technology Council named thirteen jobs including; warehouse and manufacturing jobs, insurance underwriting, customer service, research and data entry, and long haul trucking as the likely candidates.
With artificial intelligence and machine learning popping up almost everywhere, from water cooler talks to the nightly news, many people are becoming concerned about what this means for the future of their jobs. And this has gradually become so acute that almost 30% of developers rank being replaced by artificial intelligence as their primary professional fear.
The Hollywood fiction of artificial intelligence supplanting humans has not come true yet. So, we are far away from 2001: A Space Odyssey-like situations of rogue and dangerous AI turning against its human masters or killing space crews.
Artificial Intelligence, Engineering, and Automation
It is no secret that engineering has been powered by technology. And new technological advances create new possibilities for both projects and creations. The good news is that developments in automation and AI are clearly providing many benefits for the modern engineering industry as they support automation engineers and generate labor hours by unlocking new projects previously out of reach.
Automation Engineers: Is Your Job Safe from Automation?
So will AI replace automation engineers? No, it will not, at least, for now. A report from the World Economic Forum, states that 85 million jobs will be replaced by AI-powered machines by 2025. However, the same report indicates that 97 million jobs will be created due to AI by 2025.
While AI will replace some jobs in the future, other jobs will either stay or be created anew because of artificial intelligence. A few industry experts chimed in here in agreement with our assessment.
Mrudul Shah, CTO at Technostacks Infotech elaborates on the debate stating, “Jobs that require deep emotional intelligence are safe for now as AI is not good at emotional intelligence, understanding situational context, taking judgment calls, or rationalizing as humans do. Fields that require creativity like research, design, development, test automation, smart devices, and so on are comfortable in the safe zone in the immediate future. These professions require an out of box thinking approach or try something not done before and are not data-driven so AI can not easily penetrate this space.”
Eric McGee, Senior Network Engineer at TRGDatacenters adds, “AI is not developed enough to self-correct. A professional will still be required to figure out where the bugs are, and fix these issues. Even in the instances where AI can self-diagnose, it will still require human intervention to fix the error.”
Are QA jobs at risk?
Keep in mind that computers do not come up with ideas and innovations. And this is an important consideration when discussing the role of AI in the modern workplace. AI facilitates the idea and makes the idea possible. However, AI does not come up with the idea, to begin with. This is why automation engineers should not worry too much about AI replacing their jobs.
Daniela Sawyer, Founder at FindPeopleFast explains, “Automation engineers’ jobs are safe. They will always go hand in hand with AI systems. The same is true with QA testing jobs.” We can add automated testing to this assessment, too. Automated testing won’t be replaced by AI.
Daniela continues, “AI systems may be good at various tasks, especially fixed patterns and repetitive jobs. But, quality assessment is more than just that. Understanding customers’ changing needs and analyzing the factors that affect customer satisfaction is not a perfect science. It’s an art that has some guidelines but no rules that can be proved mathematically. Automation may assist both the automation engineers and quality testers, but it will not eliminate them. However, they will change the nature of their jobs. All the non-intellectual repetitive tasks will be shifted to automatic systems. Humans will be responsible for intellectual employment.”
Although AI may cause some job losses in more repetitive areas of the modern engineering sector, the design and maintenance of these AI solutions is a human endeavor. Furthermore, manual testing, especially for exploratory purposes is vital. There was a recent survey that showed that QA’s were concerned but ultimately confident AI and automation would not rid their jobs.
Conclusion
Olivia Tan, Founder of CocoFax concludes, “Engineering necessitates a great level of creativity, judgment, and the ability to deal with unique problems, all of which are areas where computers fall short.”
While AI may displace tasks performed by some workers, it will not replace entire jobs. And note that artificial intelligence can’t exist without the creativity and ingenuity of the individuals that developed it.
