Time: 1:35-2:25pm
Location: Room 3
Speaker:
Dr. John Robb
Lockheed Martin (retired)
Abstract:
This presentation examines whether AI will replace software engineers or transform their role, focusing on quantitative usage data from industry experience. Current findings reveal a paradox: widespread AI adoption with reported productivity gains, yet declining trust as developers encounter the “almost right but not quite” problem. AI excels at statistical pattern matching for routine tasks but struggles with abstraction, causal reasoning, and novel problem-solving—core engineering competencies.
This presentation focuses on the specifics of where current AI models demonstrate strength versus weakness, and presents a roadmap for the software engineer of today and tomorrow. By examining AI’s fundamental limitations in conceptual understanding and its effectiveness in pattern-based tasks, we chart the evolution from code writer to AI orchestrator, system architect, and innovation leader. The Cro-Magnon analogy suggests not species extinction, but evolutionary advancement into a more sophisticated role.
Speaker Bio:
Dr John H. Robb has 36 years of Safety Critical Software development experience at Lockheed Martin. He obtained his PhD in Software Engineering from SMU and became full-time faculty at the UTA Department of Computer Science and Engineering where he taught thousands of students in Software Engineering, Software Testing, and Advanced Software Testing. For the last 5 years he was a contract software engineer at Lockheed Martin working on safety critical coding and unit testing using the skills that he developed in his previous industry experience and taught in his classes.