By Watson Scott Swail, President/CEO & Senior Research Scholar, Educational Policy Institute

Interesting piece on FinanceBuzz.com about Mark Cuban and the four job skills that are worthless today. On October 4, 2026, Cuban tweeted on X this:

“AI won’t take your job. Someone who knows how to use AI better than you, will take your job.”

He couldn’t be more correct. People are so worried about AI, and they aren’t without some grounding on this in terms of catastrophic outcomes. But when it comes to future workforce and education, the real question is how we prepare our youth for the future. Here is what he said in 2017:  

1. Routine coding and entry-level software development. This is the one we all thought we should push our kids into. Two of my children went into IT and one a coder/hacker. Now, his industry is utilizing AI to write the code that humans just can’t do efficiently. This is eliminating jobs as the AI simply does it better and faster.
2. Basic data analysis and reporting. True for sure. Even in our work at the Educational Policy Institute, we are getting better output via AI reporting than simply sitting down and writing it. AI helps us find better threads and trends and is much better of making comparisons among dozens or hundreds of data points and variables. We’ve seen it up close.
3. Generic finance and legal work. AI can keep the books, prepare updates and PnL files, and find investment trends better and faster than humans. It can search in milliseconds for legal precedents in every legal book or journal or statute ever written.
4. Generic “non-creative” work of any kind. Cuban says that creating the basic information is for machines; but people still need to be creative in finding out what it means in the bigger world. You can pump out the volume, so to speak, but then you need to make something. You need thinkers for that; not followers.

These are good insights that are worth considering in terms of what we want out of our education sectors. How do we prepare our youth and even mid-career people for the next gen occupations?

EPI’s Occupational Outlook 2035 (released yesterday) points to exactly this issue of the match of educational competency and certification with the jobs that are growing in the next 10 years, let alone beyond. The high pay areas? Thinking jobs where computers can’t do the work. Many of the new jobs are low-paying, low-education jobs (e.g., home healthcare; fast food), while the high paying areas include health care and other high-knowledge areas. These will be greatly influence by AI, but they need thoughtful/mindful people who have the ability to translate this information into practice.

See the Cuban article here: https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/general/mark-cuban-says-these-4-job-skills-will-be-completely-worthless/ar-AA2dBVvc?ocid=winp2fptaskbar&cvid=150efe1a95474f45b8bf4a79fc0f3045&ei=17