In the future, I hope to be active in the field of civil engineering. I plan on doing this job either within some western government, or under the employ of either a foreign government or some institution like the U.N.. My dream is to provide practical means of civilian infrastructure to peoples within the poorer regions of the world who are living in abject poverty, utilizing practically available materials. With pretty much no knowledge of how this field has been affected by computers in the last 10 years, I will rely here on some guesses to address this issue. I guess that computers have served merely to facilitate rather than replace this field, in that the rote and repetitive tasks involved were taken over by computers, along with an increased efficiency added towards this career’s other aspects (such as data sharing). Yet fundamentally, computers have not eliminated the essential functions of creative thinking & design essential for this career, nor do I believe they shall (till sentient AI becomes commonly present.)

So for this reason, computers will act as aids, not as replacers, for civil engineers in the future. To be sure, there would likely be the replacement of some of a civil engineer’s tasks that are lacking in creativity (such as in programs that have an optimum placement/design of a bridge utilizing current parameters), while other aspects involving creativity (design correction for a newly discovered fault(s), or invention of new designs) would be securely in the hands of the sentient engineer, for these are features impossible for modern conventional computers. Therefore, jobs that utilize creativity wouldn’t be replaced by computers. An example I can think of (notwithstanding the novel generation machines in Orwell’s “1984”) is a novelist, or better yet, poet.

-Democritus