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Canseco warns of 'robot threat' bringing human race to 'economic ruin'

Gabe Ginsberg / Getty Images Entertainment / Getty

Jose Canseco, the former American League MVP and steroid whistleblower, took to social media Monday afternoon in the interest of public service, issuing a warning to his Twitter followers about a "robot threat" to the global economy that the human race has been underestimating.

This threat, Canseco explained, isn't a mortal one, but will bring about "economic ruin."

(Note: Completed in February 1946, the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer, or ENIAC, is widely considered the world's first general-use electronic computer).

Canseco's claims about robots "starving us to death" is obviously hyperbolic, but the increase in automation of labor does have empirical backing. In a 2013 study produced at Oxford University, Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael A. Osborne estimated 47 percent of total employment in the United States could be characterized as high risk, "meaning that associated occupations are potentially automatable over some unspecified number of years, perhaps a decade or two."

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