• Question: When would you use AI in your job and do you think it will replace your job in the future?

    Asked by cobs532odah24 on 17 Dec 2025.
    • Photo: CIARA HURLEY

      CIARA HURLEY answered on 17 Dec 2025:

      Great question! Most companies are now incorporating some form of AI-based technology to help us – it’s not possible to replace an engineer for so many reasons. Firstly, if we stopped engineering then AI wouldn’t have any information to search up for their answers! Another huge reason is that human judgement cannot be programmed – for example, when dealing with risk analysis. You can give it all the numbers you want but a computer couldn’t perceive the difference between “highly likely, improbable, large impact, etc…” – let alone when we combine them all together! Another big reason is simply that companies need to hold us accountable and liable so we always have 2-3 people repeating the work to check through for mistakes. I have a lot of practical, hands-on site experience which cannot be taught in University, so a bot could never replace this knowledge (think about trying to teach yourself to ride a bike through books – impossible!).
      To summarise, AI is super helpful to me in my everyday job as an engineer but will never be able to replace the human brain!

    • Photo: Joel Goldstein

      Joel Goldstein answered on 17 Dec 2025:

      AI is an essential tool for data analysis in particle physics these days as AI algorithms can be very good at interpreting and finding patterns in large data sets. However, it takes a lot of effort to set them up, optimise them, train them and (most importantly) validate them.

      Large Language Models (e.g. ChatGPT) are quite commonly used for nicely parsed web searches, first drafts of documents, grammar checking etc.

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