Vinod Khosla Predicting the Future | Ep. 15

We're gonna be in a era of abundance that's so large, it's very hard for people to imagine. The simplest way to say it is the need to work will go away. People will work on things because they wanna work on things, not because they need to work on things to pay their mortgage. [upbeat music]

All right. I am super excited to be here with Vinod. Thank you so much for doing this with me today. I really am looking forward to this conversation.

Look forward to it.

When you first walked in here, uh, before we got started, you were saying, "Wow, you know, the world's crazy," um, and you've invested through many periods of time. Obviously, you know, there have been a lot of ups and downs, but, um, you said the world's particularly crazy now. Can you share why you said that or why you're feeling that way?

I've been doing venture capital for forty years, so I've gone through every large innovation cycle. Uh, I've never seen a cycle like this. To put a order of magnitude on it, almost every job is being reinvented. Every material thing is being reinvented differently, with AI as a driver. Probably the best way to describe it, if you look fifteen years hence, and that's too far to look, we'd have to look back at least fifty years-

Hmm

... maybe in the 1960s, to see the delta in change. And so we're going to see this large change in, in sort of such a short time. Uh, it's almost hard to imagine how society adjusts. And if I go even further, almost certainly within the next five years, any economically valuable job humans can do, AI will be able to do eighty percent of it, with a few exceptions like heart surgery or brain surgery. But by and large, eighty percent of, eighty percent of all jobs can be done by an AI. And if that's happening in the next five years, the world is gonna be a very different place. So I see this sort of like invention happening at a frenetic pace that is so large compared to even the dot-com phase when the internet first came, and there was Netscape and TCIP and all that. It's almost hard to imagine. No matter where you look, everything's being reinvented in some fundamental way, using often, uh, the, the, the, the innovations from AI and the capability from AI, uh, but also a few other vectors, like stuff happening in biology, stuff happening in fusion and other areas. Uh, so-

Yeah

... everything's up for grabs.

So, so I guess that's then leading to a frenzied pace of investment, companies being created, you know, new ideas getting tried all at once. Is your overall read based on, you know, on one hand, it's crazy and frenetic, on the other hand, everything you just said about, yeah, about like maybe a billion jobs are gonna be, you know, done by an AI in the next couple years or several years, or something like that. Do you net out to being very optimistic about this moment in time for tech? Or do you think there's gonna be a lot of carnage, or how do, how do you think?