Jeff D’Alessio has created a feature series in The Illini Insider (a section of the local News Gazette) focusing on Artificial intelligence. Most people read or hear about AI every day and it’s only going to become more prevalent in the years to come, say those “in the know”. Whether that’s a welcome development or a worrisome one depends on the field, the form it takes and the forecaster. In the first installment Editor Jeff D’Alessio asked University of Illinois faculty, alums and other special guests to predict the future impact of AI in their area of expertise.
By JEFF D’ALESSIO jdalessio@news-gazette.com
The series is featured on The News Gazette website:
CAII’s director, Volodymyr Kindratenko, is featured in the first part of the series, speaking on “The Job Market”.
The job market
VOLODYMYR KINDRATENKO, director of the UI’s Center for Artificial Intelligence Innovation: “There are a lot of misconceptions about what AI can do or will do — perhaps the biggest one is that it will displace many people from many jobs.
“After all, AI can recognize objects in images, answer questions, write computer code and more. But these are narrowly defined tasks and each one requires a dedicated model trained to do just that — and nothing else. Even the most advanced foundation models, like large language models (LLMs), have a limited range of ‘abilities.’
“At their core, LLMs simply predict sequences of words that make sense in a given context. Yes, they’ve been trained on vast amounts of human knowledge, but they’re still just tools. That’s how we should think about AI today: as a toolbox for doing small things faster — the next level of automation for tasks we didn’t know how to automate just a few years ago.
“This shift won’t replace us. It will make us more productive, freeing us from mundane work and giving us more time to focus on what really matters. We’ll still be in control — deciding what to keep, what to discard and how to shape the outcomes. We will have the final say, and we will be responsible for the decisions made even with the help of AI.
“We’ve been here many times before. Every time we invent something that improves our ability to get things done, we move on to the next, bigger, more important thing.
“Some professions change, some fade away — when was the last time you spoke to a telephone switchboard operator, an essential job for over half a century? — and new professions and new jobs emerge.”
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