It feels like every few months there’s a new tech “revolution” being hyped up as the future. Besides AI, what’s the most overhyped trend in tech right now? For me, it’s the constant buzz around the metaverse.
It feels like every few months there’s a new tech “revolution” being hyped up as the future. Besides AI, what’s the most overhyped trend in tech right now? For me, it’s the constant buzz around the metaverse.
Other than AI, it’s automation. It’s pretty good when it works but has the same overall intent as AI (in reducing the human labor force), just on a smaller level. At least automation isn’t consistently delivering inaccurate information.
I was at my company’s booth at a career fair earlier this week and it felt like every other student was looking for an internship in “machine learning”. When I asked follow up questions about what sort of experience they’d had or projects done or what they wanted to do with it in their career, crickets.
To be fair, 2nd most popular was “CAD” which is also not a job.
mechanical engineers: Record scratch
Do you just do CAD though? Our Mech Es do a lot in CAD but not solely. Even our drafters do a lot of things not in CAD. If anyone ever asked me what I do for work, “CAD” would not be my answer.
I categorize it as a tool, not a job. And personally, I would find a job that is, say, 75% or more CAD to be boring as hell.
What sort of automation specifically are you referring to? I work in commercial building automation, which is basically tying various systems like fire/burg alarms, access control, energy/lighting management, intercoms, and everything else together using TCP/IP networking, RS-232/485, and dry-contact relay triggers everywhere. For instance, unlocking all doors and stopping elevator access when the fire alarm goes off. Or automatically disarming a burglar alarm and turning on the lights when the first person in the morning scans their badge. In that sense, it works great and has been working for decades.
If you mean robots taking all our jobs, yeah that’s about 100 years out.
That’s super interesting. How do you get started at something like that? Or where would a newcomer start to learn more about it?
With me, I started applying at electronic security companies 20 years ago as a helper to pull cable and hang cameras, the simpler, more labor intensive stuff. They are always looking for people like that as the older folks like me go more into the head end set up and programming because our bodies hurt too much 😁. I learned 90% of what I know from on the job training, the rest I already had sort of a background in electronics because of my personal hobbies.
Take a look at any factory floor and robots (machines) already have taken 80% of jobs.
I literally worked on a factory line in the summer of 2015 right next to the robot they built over the course of that summer to replace us. Felt like John Henry.
That doesn’t sound overhyped. Sounds like it is effective