AI Efficiency Could Cost Us the Next Generation of Experts
Protecting Engineers' Skills in the AI Era
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.