but you only convince yourself that you think critically when you’re instructing an AI, it’s not the same and it actively makes you a worse engineer every time you decide to use it instead of thinking.
So, if you're a lumberjack and you used hand tools to chop down trees, and due to the amount of time and effort required to chop down a tree with hand tools you traditionally thought carefully about how you're cutting the tree before and while you were cutting it (not guaranteed - some lumberjacks still made stupid / unthinking cuts) - then along come gas powered chainsaws. Now you have options: you can spend more time thinking about the cuts before you make them and make even better - more careful cuts which make the process safer and easier to extract the logs after you fell them, or you can just go out and chop down 10x as many trees in the same time as before - thinking less than you did before because it's just so damn amazing how many trees you can cut down in a day now.
Software development carries less immediate risk to the software developers than arborists experience in their field work. Software development also manifests many of its risks on a longer time horizon, more difficult to predict or even link to the development work. But the choices with AI development are very much the same: are you going to take the time to understand what your powerful new tool is doing, or are you just going to fire it up and show off how fast it does what it does?
Management comes into play in both fields, and bad management pushing either kind of field workers to cut staff and "increase productivity" by arbitrary (bad) metrics has been demonstrated over and over to produce bad results.
There are no such things as "AI experts" at this time - it's far too new for that, much like "expert software systems developers" in the 1980s, the methods are just barely beginning to be developed. Applied judiciously, with proper care, it is already a powerful tool - but like they used to say even back in the early 1970s: "To Err is Human; To Really Foul Things Up Requires a Computer"