welcome
Thank you for purchasing the MEAP of Engineer's Pocket Guide to Surviving AI. The book is written for aspiring, novice, and seasoned software engineers who want to understand the impact of AI on their careers and prepare for it. There are no prerequisites, although it will be helpful to understand the basics of coding and some high-school-level math to fully understand all the examples.
I’m a software engineer specialized in AI. I did my PhD in AI and have been involved in the field for over a decade. At one point, I became really frustrated by the amount of hype around it—even before ChatGPT was a thing. I kept stumbling upon failed AI projects that were swept under the rug, and I thought someone had to tell a more balanced story of what was going on in the field. In 2023, I published a book on the subject, called Smart Until It’s Dumb. As opposed to other books on AI, which were very positive or negative about it, I wanted to share a more nuanced view. As the title implies, I think AI can be really cool sometimes. But other times it’s not that cool (think of a “hallucination”), and this has serious implications.