The world may be some years away from seeing the first trillionaire, but billionaire Mark Cuban has an idea about the kind of work from which they, whoever they are, will make their trillions.
“I am telling you, the world’s first trillionaires are going to come from somebody who masters AI and all its derivatives,” the Shark Tank investor said, according to CNBC, “and applies it in ways we never thought of.”
Cuban made his prediction Sunday night in front of a full house at the SXSW Conference in Austin, Texas. The Dallas Mavericks owner presented a sink-or-swim scenario, where knowledge of artificial intelligence is the determining factor, and where critical thinking matters more than ever.
“Whatever you are studying right now, if you are not getting up to speed on deep learning, neural networks, etc., you lose,” he told the audience. “We are going through the process where software will automate software, automation will automate automation.”
The future according to Cuban would be a world where the mind becomes more important, as technical skills gradually get picked up by automation and computers. “I would rather be a philosophy major,” he said.
“Knowing how to critically think and assess them from a global perspective I think is going to be more valuable than what we see as exciting careers today,” he continued.
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Cuban also encouraged attendees of the conference to come up with solutions to mitigate job losses from automation—something he warned about last month on Twitter—while throwing more shade at the current federal government.
“That’s what people in this room can help think of, because our current administration is not going to solve that problem by thinking they are bringing back factories,” he said.