Anthropic’s top economist says AI isn’t replacing workers yet because it works better with humans than without them. Mark Cuban says that may never change.
Peter McCrory wrote in an X essay on Wednesday that by all accounts, “AI has caused no material increase in the unemployment rate to date,” even among workers most at risk of having their jobs automated by the nascent technology.
The head of economics at Anthropic — the AI company behind Claude Fable 5, one of the top large language models — said that AI so far appears to be “both skill-biased and labor augmenting,” meaning expert users get more out of it, and it helps people do their jobs better.
AI simply isn’t up to the job in some areas. McCrory said the “tasks that Claude can’t handle may depend on interpersonal coordination, in-person interactions, or engagement with the physical world that, so far, only humans can do.”
He cautioned that human expertise could decline in importance as AI models improve, but AI shouldn’t materially increase unemployment for at least the next year, he said.
Cuban, a tech billionaire and former “Shark Tank” investor, highlighted two areas where humans trump AI in an X post responding to commentary on McCrory’s essay by Box CEO Aaron Levie.
“Models don’t know the consequences of their actions,” he wrote. “People know what will get them fired. Models suffer from information latency. People understand what they see right in front of them.”
Cuban said those are two skills that “AI won’t have for a long, long, long time. If ever.” He added that they’re “invaluable to every business decision,” noting how often it’s helpful to “read the room.”
“Add AI productivity to the real-time capacity and judgment of humans, and you will get the greatest return on both investments,” Cuban wrote.
He added that managers need to figure out how to squeeze the most value out of that combination, as doing so can be a “business propellant and competitive advantage.”
Cuban — who sold his internet-radio startup to Yahoo for nearly $6 billion during the dot-com bubble — recently warned the mad rush to build AI infrastructure could result in excess capacity as power efficiency increases. He joked that obsolete data centers could wind up being converted into “pickleball courts.”
Even so, Cuban has repeatedly emphasized that businesses must embrace AI or they’ll fail.
“There’s going to be two types of companies in this world: those who are great at AI, and everybody else that they put out of business,” he said at a university event in February last year.
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