{"id":393057,"date":"2026-09-07T18:52:24","date_gmt":"2026-09-07T18:52:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/393057\/"},"modified":"2026-09-07T18:52:24","modified_gmt":"2026-09-07T18:52:24","slug":"opinion-ai-didnt-take-my-job-it-just-showed-me-what-my-job-actually-is","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/393057\/","title":{"rendered":"OPINION: AI didn’t take my job. It just showed me what my job actually is"},"content":{"rendered":"

\t\t\t\t\"\"<\/a>A USF graduate researcher pushes back on the AI-jobs panic from inside the lab where the technology is being built. ORACLE GRAPHIC \/ AYRON ESPINO-NARDI<\/p>\n

We were testing our AI voice agent on a fake 911 call.<\/p>\n

Panic in the caller\u2019s voice, the kind of call our Emergency Command Center project was built to triage during a surge event.<\/p>\n

The model got the words right. It found the location, flagged the emergency, and routed the call.<\/p>\n

But what it couldn\u2019t do was make the person on the other end feel less alone.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s the part I keep thinking about when people ask if AI is coming for my job.<\/p>\n

Nearly 40% of enrolled students have thought about changing their major, field of study or coursework because of AI, according to a 2026 CNBC\/SurveyMonkey survey<\/a>.<\/p>\n

I get why.<\/p>\n

But I\u2019ve spent the last year building AI systems, in a USF lab and across four hackathons, and I think that fear is pointed in the wrong direction.<\/p>\n

AI isn\u2019t replacing people, it\u2019s replacing tasks. Those are not the same, and the difference is going to matter more than the panic does.<\/p>\n

Related: OPINION: $10 million says USF gets artificial intelligence right<\/a><\/p>\n

In USF\u2019s MAX Systems Lab<\/a>, I work with AI models that read images and text together,which are referred to as multimodal models.<\/p>\n

One piece of the system reads the images. It\u2019s called the vision encoder.<\/p>\n

I once spent a week trying to speed things up by duplicating that piece, since it seemed like a small, easy part to touch.<\/p>\n

Measured improvement: zero.<\/p>\n

When I actually measured where the model was spending its time, the piece I\u2019d duplicated barely mattered. It accounted for 0.16% of the work. The part I hadn\u2019t touched, the language piece, accounted for 99.84%.<\/p>\n

I\u2019d optimized the wrong component, and the system never told me. It just ran, same speed, indifferent to what I\u2019d changed.<\/p>\n

That is the part AI can\u2019t do for me. It will happily generate the code to duplicate an encoder in under a second. It won\u2019t tell me I\u2019m solving the wrong problem\u2014 I have to find that myself.<\/p>\n

I see the same pattern outside my own lab, too. I also work with Dr. John Templeton, in USF\u2019s Bellini College of Artificial Intelligence, Cybersecurity and Computing, on an AI model for a swallowing study.<\/p>\n

AI can spot patterns across huge amounts of clinical data faster than any person could, Templeton said, but it can\u2019t tell a real signal from bias or bad measurement on its own.<\/p>\n

\u201cAI should be viewed less as a replacement for clinical or scientific judgment and more as a tool for augmenting it,\u201d Templeton said.<\/p>\n

Same story, different field. The tool moves fast. The judgment is still ours.<\/p>\n

Rishil Shah, a USF graduate student in computer science interning as an AI architect at NMEDA<\/a>, put it a different way when I asked him about it.<\/p>\n

\u201cA job isn\u2019t fixed,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s a bundle of tasks that\u2019s been reassembling itself for as long as people have worked.\u201d<\/p>\n

AI is just lowering the cost of some of those tasks fast enough to be disorienting, which isn\u2019t the same as removing the role.<\/p>\n

\u201cProducing a first version is cheap now,\u201d Shah said. \u201cJudging whether it\u2019s right is the part that takes real training. That part got more important, not less.\u201d<\/p>\n

He sees the same pattern outside software. A model can draft a nurse\u2019s chart note or run an engineer\u2019s calculation, but somebody licensed still signs it.<\/p>\n

That responsibility hasn\u2019t moved. It was never a technical thing, it\u2019s a question of who\u2019s answerable.<\/p>\n

However, I won\u2019t pretend the fear is baseless.<\/p>\n

Research out of Stanford\u2019s Institute for Economic Policy Research<\/a> shows hiring for entry-level, AI-exposed roles has dropped since 2024, in fields like software development and customer service.<\/p>\n

A New Yorker analysis<\/a> found confidence in the job market among recent college graduates collapsed from 49% to 19% in a single year.<\/p>\n

Something real is happening to how companies hire junior people, and it\u2019s worth taking seriously.<\/p>\n

But switching your major because AI might eventually touch it isn\u2019t the move.<\/p>\n

Every field on that CNBC list is going to change. Medicine and law are next. Computer science already is. There\u2019s no AI-proof major.<\/p>\n

What actually helps is treating AI like a skill you\u2019re expected to have, not a threat you\u2019re trying to dodge.<\/p>\n

AI skill requirements already show up in 79% of U.S. tech job postings, according to Dice\u2019s tech hiring report<\/a>. It\u2019s baseline now, not a niche skill.<\/p>\n

USF\u2019s Bellini College built a free, self-paced microcourse called AI Whisperer<\/a>, open to anyone including students, three to four hours, that actually teaches you to work with these tools instead of fearing them.<\/p>\n

Get into one AI-adjacent project or class before you graduate, not to become an AI person, just to see where the model\u2019s judgment runs out and yours has to start.<\/p>\n

AI can process a panicked 911 call faster than any dispatcher alive, but it still can\u2019t make someone feel less alone while they wait for help.<\/p>\n

That gap isn\u2019t closing anytime soon. It\u2019s the reason my job still exists.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A USF graduate researcher pushes back on the AI-jobs panic from inside the lab where the technology is…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":393058,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[135,137,136],"class_list":["post-393057","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tampa","tag-tampa","tag-tampa-headlines","tag-tampa-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/393057","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=393057"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/393057\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/393058"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=393057"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=393057"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=393057"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}