AI Efficiency Could Cost Us the Next Generation of Experts

Protecting Engineers' Skills in the AI Era

AI Efficiency Could Cost Us the Next Generation of Experts

Richard Mitchell, a systems engineer and CEO of AuraSpark Technologies, warns that AI's efficiency gains are eroding the apprenticeship model that builds engineering expertise. Drawing on lessons from aviation and nuclear power, he advocates for 'manual gates'—deliberate points where humans perform tasks without AI to preserve critical skills. With junior employment dropping after AI adoption, he argues that protecting formative work is essential for future expertise.

A perfectly optimized system that produces incompetent operators is not optimized at all. It has simply moved its failure mode somewhere the spreadsheet can’t see it.
  1. matherial

    This appears to be a completely AI-generated article, in which AI is telling us how to protect ourselves against AI. I don't know what's going over at IEEE, but every article from them that I've seen in the past year is like that and I really don't understand what's the long game.

  2. sashank_1509

    https://www.pangram.com/history/6b2e2a19-02b0-416b-aabf-e450...

    This article reads like complete AI, this is sad because it raises a point but I wish the author actually wrote the f**ing article. Just share us the prompt next time

  3. rawgabbit

    Quote:

    A perfectly optimized system that produces incompetent operators is not optimized at all. It has simply moved its failure mode somewhere the spreadsheet can’t see it.

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2026-09-04