Is the transition from Software Engineer to ML / AI engineer necessary to sustain in the industry in the near future? Will it become mandatory for engineers to learn ML/AI for getting higher pay.
I don't see this to be important, definitely there is a growing demand for researchers and engineers but that doesn't change the fact that there is way to much hype that's shadowing a lot of the good things with software engineering in general! I myself was very much surrounded by the hype untill I stopped looking through a key hole. There are amazing things coming up, serverless applications exploiting services like Lambda, Progressive Web Apps with the availability of frameworks like React and Vue (My personal favourite), Decentralised applications.
AI won't be able to replace most engineers until general AI is on the horizon, probably a long time from now