Mark Cuban Thinks Robots Are Coming for Your Job Faster Than You Think
Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban hasn't been shy about predicting the earlier-than-expected robot revolution -- a time when people will lose their manufacturing jobs to robots. And he's not alone.
On Sunday, Cuban tweeted, "Automation is going to cause unemployment and we need to prepare for it." He linked to a Medium article highlighting similar takes from Tesla (TSLA) CEO Elon Musk, legendary physicist Stephen Hawking and Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) co-founder Bill Gates. Among other information, the article cites statements from these leaders in an effort to alert readers about the future of automation.
Automation is going to cause unemployment and we need to prepare for it. https://t.co/YEp5txG9aP
-- Mark Cuban (@mcuban)
Bill Gates suggested that governments could tax robot workers just like human workers. "You cross the threshold of job-replacement of certain activities all sort of at once," he recently told Quartz. "So, you know, warehouse work, driving, room cleanup, there's quite a few things that are meaningful job categories that, certainly in the next 20 years [will go away]."
The Medium post cites the 2013 claims of two Oxford economists who predicted that 45 percent of U.S. jobs might face automation in the coming two decades.
Musk recently even went so far as to say at the World Government Summit in Dubai that humans and machines have to merge or face irrelevance when the artificial intelligence (AI) age hits.
Fortune notes Cuban previously wrote a blog post in December on this subject, imploring then President-elect Donald Trump to spearhead America as a global leader for robotics. He wrote, "if nothing in the States changes, we will find ourselves dependent on other countries for almost everything that can and will be manufactured in a quickly approaching future."
"We have to face the fact that countries are going to lose jobs to robotics," he added. The only question that needs to be answered is which country will create and own the best robotic technology and have the infrastructure necessary to enable it."
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