Engineering Education at the Intersection of Knowledge, Work, and Power: Generative AI and Epistemic Authority

Abstract

Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) is rapidly reshaping engineering education, yet prevailing debates frame its impact narrowly as either pedagogical innovation or epistemic threat. In this article, we argue that such framings misdiagnose the problem by treating GenAI as a tool rather than as a sociotechnical reorganization of epistemic authority, agency, and professional formation. Drawing on sociological theory, philosophy of science, labor economics, and recent empirical studies, we show that GenAI lowers epistemic floors by expanding access to competent performance while leaving epistemic ceilings, those associated with judgment, authority, and problem framing, largely intact. This asymmetry produces new forms of stratification, redistributes responsibility without redistributing control, and stabilizes plausibility‐based forms of knowledge in place of warrant‐based engineering reasoning. We advance three central contributions. First, we conceptualize a shift from warrant to plausibility in engineering knowledge, in which fluent, algorithmically generated outputs increasingly circulate as legitimate despite bypassing core practices of verification, critique, and accountability. Second, we extend the concept of the AI wall beyond productivity to describe a ceiling of epistemic development, where further learning and judgment are not institutionally rewarded without deeper expertise, authority, or complementary organizational resources. Third, we theorize how engineering education participates in stabilizing these dynamics through what we term the social campus, the institutional space in which curricular norms, assessment regimes, professional signaling, and peer comparison converge to normalize AI‐mediated epistemic authority. Together, these dynamics position engineering education at a critical juncture. We argue for a reorientation toward epistemic stewardship, in which engineering programs deliberately cultivate the capacities needed to interrogate, govern, and responsibly deploy AI systems rather than merely operate within them. The question we want to highlight is not whether engineering education will adapt to AI, but whether it will do so as a steward of epistemic responsibility or as an accelerator of epistemic stratification.