Treasury Secretary Mnuchin says job-stealing AI is 'so far in the future' that it's 'not even on my radar screen' -- here's why he's wrong

Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin says artificial intelligence is "so far in the future" that it's "not even on my radar screen." He says we won't have to worry about how it affects the workforce for "50 or 100 more years." Steve Mnuchin is not concerned one bit with AI and automation. In fairness to Mnuchin, the question was specifically about artificial intelligence, not robots. It's a fine distinction, but an important one -- while robots that can perform repetitive tasks have been in wide industrial use for decades now, artificial intelligence is a class of software that can "learn" and let machines do more sophisticated jobs.