Billionaire investor Mark Cuban is pushing back against growing fears that artificial intelligence will wipe out millions of white-collar jobs.
In a recent post, he reminded people that job displacement has happened before, and he believes AI won’t be any different; in fact, it could result in more jobs overall.
Cuban made his comments on Bluesky after Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei warned that AI could eliminate up to half of white-collar jobs.
In an interview with Axios, Amodei said, “We, as the producers of this technology, have a duty and an obligation to be honest about what is coming.”
He added, “You should be worried about where the technology we’re building is going.”
While Amodei did highlight AI’s potential to help cure diseases and grow the economy, he also warned of possible double-digit unemployment.
Cuban took a different view.
“Someone needs to remind the CEO that at one point there were more than 2 million secretaries. There were also separate employees to do in-office dictation. They were the original white collar displacements,” he wrote.
“New companies with new jobs will come from AI and increase TOTAL employment.”
He argued that secretaries and dictation workers were phased out by earlier technologies like typewriters, word processors, and personal computers, yet the job market still evolved. Cuban sees AI as part of that same pattern.
Public Skepticism and Pushback
Cuban’s post got a lot of replies, with the majority expressing criticism and doubt. Many people said they simply don’t trust CEOs to use AI for job creation.
“By and large they see it as a cost-cutting measure to increase shareholder value,” one person said.
Others noted that it’s easier to be optimistic about future job growth when you’re already a billionaire.
Another person wrote, “In the meantime the C-suite will cut jobs and make the remaining workers do more because ‘well we have AI now,’ while never really understanding what that means.”
Some highlighted the speed and scope of AI disruption as a unique challenge.
“You can’t displace what will be upwards of millions of jobs in just one to five years and have nothing for those people to fall back on,” one person warned.
Several called for stronger policy responses, including universal basic income and national retraining programs.
“Any company replacing people with AI should pay a UBI tax to fund it,” one person said.
The Divide Over AI’s Impact
Cuban’s belief clashes directly with Amodei’s outlook, which is focused more on disruption than reinvention.
His comments have gotten attention not only for their bluntness but also because it’s rare to hear AI executives publicly admit how destabilizing the technology might be.
Former Trump adviser Steve Bannon also weighed in, saying AI will be a key issue in the 2028 election and predicting that “entry-level jobs that are so important in your 20s are going to be eviscerated.”
There’s a real divide here. On one side, people like Amodei are ringing alarm bells, warning that AI might wipe out huge swaths of the job market.
As one person put it: “This sounds like what the coal miners were told after the mines closed. There were supposed to be computer jobs, but no one hired them.”
On the other hand, Cuban is pointing to history and saying: this isn’t the end of work, it’s just another shift.
Of course, both can be right to some degree. There will be pain for some workers, especially those in roles that are easily automated.
But it’s also true that technological progress tends to create opportunities we can’t fully imagine ahead of time.
What Cuban is saying boils down to this: fear is understandable, but don’t forget that change often results in growth.
If history repeats itself, AI might not just take jobs, it might also open doors.
IMAGE CREDIT: “Mark Cuban” by Gage Skidmore, via Flickr. Licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0. Image adjusted for layout.