Commencement speech given at Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago, Illinois, May 17 2025
AI and the Future of Jobs
By Gerald Chan
I am honored that you have invited me to share this day with you. By your kindness of conferring an honorary degree on me, I will join all the graduates in leaving this ceremony a proud alumnus of IIT.
Today is the second time I attend a commencement exercise of IIT. The first time was six years ago when my son graduated with his Master of Design degree from the Institute of Design. In that ceremony, he spoke on behalf of his fellow graduates. I am therefore delighted to be following in his footsteps today.
My second connection with IIT, one that dates much farther back in time than my son’s schooling here, is through my uncle Y.C. Wong. Having done his undergraduate degree in architecture in China, he was offered a scholarship to study with Frank Lloyd Wright in 1947. With the offer letter in hand signed by Frank Lloyd Wright himself, he went to the American embassy in Nanjing to apply for a student visa. The embassy staff searched her files and said there was no school named Frank Lloyd Wright and the application was denied. Uncle Y.C. then applied and was accepted to the University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign. After one semester, it was clear to him that the classical beaux-arts system taught there was just more of the same of what he had already learned in China.
In February 1949, he transferred to IIT with the view of studying under Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Through the work of Mies van der Rohe, Uncle Y.C. had caught a glimpse of a totally new architecture that was in the making. His transfer to IIT was more than just any school transfer. It was the beginning of his own journey in breaking with classical architecture. It was his casting his lot with the burgeoning movement of modernism, however nascent and tenuous at the time, rather than stagnating in the comfort of a well-worn past.
Uncle Y.C. flourished at IIT. After one semester, Mies van der Rohe who never gave scholarships offered him both a scholarship and a part-time job in Mies’ architectural firm to help pay for school. It was in that period that he worked on the construction details of the Edith Farnsworth House. In 1951, the managing partner of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill came to an open house at IIT to review the students’ projects. When he saw Y.C.’s work, he offered him a job on the spot. Y.C. did work at SOM for a year before returning to working with Mies van der Rohe on his projects such as the Esplanade Apartments on Lakeshore Drive and the Carr Memorial Chapel on IIT’s campus. In 1959 he set up his own architectural practice in Chicago and achieved fame for designing the Atrium Houses in Hyde Park which turned the focus of the house inward. He remained a protégé, a collaborator and a close friend of Mies van der Rohr until Mies’ death in 1969.
For students of design, IIT in mid-twentieth century must have been the most exciting school in the world. Mies van der Rohe was the third and final Director of Bauhaus in Germany. After Bauhaus was closed by the Nazis, he was offered in 1937 to be the chair of architecture at the Armour Institute of Technology, one of the two institutes that merged in 1940 to form IIT. Separately, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy who was a Master Teacher at Bauhaus came to IIT in 1941 and established the New Bauhaus. In post-WWII America, the nascent and fringe esthetics conceived in Germany blossomed into modernism in its prosperous and optimistic new home of Chicago. From the outset, modernism was forward looking, bold and unfettered by the past. It was of its times, embracing new technologies and new materials that emerged from America’s roaring industrialization in mid-twentieth century.
IIT was undoubtedly the most important cradle to modernism in architecture. The IIT campus, master planned by Mies van der Rohe, stands as a historical landmark that celebrates the end to more than twenty centuries of Greco Roman esthetics as the hegemonic esthetics in Western civilization. Modernism was a clean break, a step change, a breakout event.
I refer to this chapter of the history of IIT to show that human history is punctuated with step changes which come along once in a long while. In biology, we call it punctuated evolution, or punctuated equilibrium. Today, we find ourselves in another moment of punctuation, one that may well be the largest step change in human history, and that is the advent of generative AI. In merely three years after the launch of ChatGPT in 2022, a billion people worldwide are using it. The impact of this technological breakthrough on society will be more profound than anything we have seen before.
Many jobs currently done by humans will be displaced by AI agents. The techno-utopianists of Silicon Valley hail this as progress. The techno-dystopianists hail this as the coming chapter of American carnage. Harking back to the decades of globalization when the offshoring of jobs turned manufacturing hubs of America into the rust belt, the fear is that AI will deliver devastation of even greater magnitude.
I am neither a techno-utopianist nor a techno-dystopianist. I consider myself a techno-realist. We cannot wish AI away. GenAI is here to stay. Embrace it and let it work for you or ignore it and let it marginalize you. Surveying the world into which you graduates will enter, I can think of no message of greater exigency than to encourage you to embrace AI and be empowered by it.
If history serves as a guide, my conjecture is that even though some jobs will be eliminated by AI, its impact on the economy will be a net positive. One may find an analogy, albeit not a perfect one, with nineteenth century Britain. When the steam engine became more efficient such that the same amount of work could be done with less coal, there was scaremongering that the coal industry would collapse. In a contrarian manner, the English economist William Jevons predicted that the more efficient steam engine would greatly expand the economy and that the demand for coal would rise. Instead of worrying about the collapse of the coal industry, he worried about the exhaustion of coal reserves. History came down on Jevon’s side. While AI will eliminate some jobs, the expansion of demand from a more efficient economy will create new jobs. However, with any change of this scale will come inevitably a reshuffling of the deck in society which will create new winners and new losers.
In a more static world as in the past, you compete with your peers to see who can do the same job better. In the future, you will be competing with new technology that can do your job better. Being best at doing your job may no longer guarantee job security. The future workers will have to be vigilant that their skills remain competitive in a rapidly changing environment. I am often reminded of a book written by the former CEO of Intel which he entitled Only the Paranoid will Survive. By paranoia, he meant that companies must be vigilant and proactive in responding to changes in their business environment in order to remain competitive. I submit that any person in the job market today must be aware of the changes happening around him and adapt to remain competitive.
Take as a case in point my work in digital health technologies. One concern is that AI will displace radiologists as their work of rendering clinical diagnoses from reading radiographic images is heavily based on pattern recognition, something that AI is very good at. The empirical data are by no means clear that this will happen. What is clear, though, is that used properly, AI can augment both the quantity and quality of a radiologist’s output. Rather than AI displacing radiologists, the case will more likely be radiologists who use AI displacing radiologists who do not use AI. I think this will be true for many workers regardless of what field they work in. Those workers who can engage AI as a colleague or as a collaborator will have an edge over those who cannot.
Adaptation will be the key to survival in the job market, and to adapt, one must continuously learn and evolve. Graduation used to mark the end of learning and the beginning of working. Today, that demarcation no longer holds. To survive and to thrive, one must be a lifelong learner. Learning cannot stop at graduation because the world is changing too fast. Speaking of corporations, Jack Welch, the former chairman of General Electric, said that if the rate of change on the outside exceeds the rate of change on the inside, the end is near. The same is true for anyone in the job market.
For leaders in higher education, we must think about how do we prepare young people who can remain competitive in the job market in the long run. A good education used to mean teaching what is state of the art. Today, accessibility to what is state of the art is no longer a limiting factor. Rather, the shelf life of what is state of the art is getting shorter and shorter as the speed of technological change accelerates. What we must do is to help students develop both the appetite and the capacity to keep on learning. I recently read this profound statement in a 1955 manifesto of the faculty members of IIT’s Institute of Design, “not knowledge, but the power to acquire knowledge is the goal of education.”
To meet the learning needs of lifelong learners, AI will be the indispensable lifelong tutor. Access to good teaching used to be a prerogative of the privileged; AI has democratized that. The offerings are virtually unlimited, and AI can teach according to each learner’s learning style. The office hour of the AI tutor is 24/7. I say again, what is limiting is only the learner’s appetite and capacity to learn. In this lifelong learning scenario, there is no graduation. There is only the pleasure of more learning, the excitement of more intellectual stimulation, the gratification of more mastery.
I want to make one more point concerning the relationship between education and work. The rigid demarcation between learning and working needs to be broken down. The academy as an ivory tower is no longer a tenable operating model. Academia must be more integrated with the workplace and be in sync with the economy. For graduates, the transition from school to the workplace should not be a shock. The relative weighting of learning and working may vary at different stages of one’s life, but it is a matter of degree and not a matter of distinction.
It turns out that this view of learning and working being interactive with each other was very much there in the inception of both institutions that merged to form IIT. As early as 1909, the Lewis Institute of Technology had initiated work-study co-op programs. Employers throughout Chicago participated enthusiastically to give the students work experience. In harmony with this approach to education, Dr. Frank Gunsaulus, the founder and the first president of Armour Institute of Technology, stated at the school’s founding in 1893 that students should learn by doing and so become prepared to work in Chicago’s new industrial age. Then as now, technology was changing faster than society could cope with. The answer, then as now, is still to offer a relevant and practical education to prepare the young people to succeed in a workplace that will always be driven to change by new technology.
Dr. Gunsaulus was an influential preacher in Chicago who believed in social mobility. At his memorial meeting in 1921, one of the eulogists said this, “No citizen has ever had a broader or clearer vision of the higher possibilities of Chicago in human development, or have done more to shape the forces to realize that vision. Truly it has been said, ‘He was the first citizen of his city — the incarnation of its genius and the prophecy of its future.’” Considering Dr. Gunsaulus as a distal founder of IIT, it is now incumbent upon this institution to realize the higher possibilities of Chicago in human development and to shape the forces to realize that vision.
To the graduates, I send my congratulations for your reaching today’s milestone in your education. But even more, I send best wishes for you all to become prodigious lifelong learners and that you will always contribute at the forefront of knowledge and practice and at the forefront of society.