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Billionaire Mark Cuban doesn't believe artificial intelligence will devastate white-collar work.
In an interview published Thursday on "The Weekly Show with John Stewart," Cuban said he believes the fast-advancing technology will not impact jobs that require workers to think.
"So if your job is answering the question, 'yes or no,' all the time — AI is going to have an impact," he said. "If your job requires you to think — AI won't have much of an impact."
Cuban, the CEO of Cost Plus Drugs, an online prescription service, said workers must supervise AI and ensure that the data the models are being trained on and the resulting output are correct.
"It takes intellectual capacity. So somebody who understands what the goal is, somebody who's been doing this for years, has got to be able to input feedback on everything that the models collect and are trained on," he said. "You don't just assume the model knows everything. You want somebody to check — to grade their responses — and make corrections."
AI's recent advancement has raised existential questions on the future of work.
The World Economic Forum reported in 2023 that employers expected 44% of workers' skills to be "disrupted" within five years, requiring a massive effort on worker retraining.
A McKinsey study, however, found that AI won't decimate white-collar roles such as those in legal or finance. Instead, AI can potentially enhance those jobs in the long term by automating about 30% of overall hours worked in the US.
Cuban told Business Insider in an email that AI's impact on any company's workforce numbers will be on a case-by-case basis.
"Every company is different," he said. "But the biggest determinant is how well the company can implement AI."
