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Billionaire investor Vinod Khosla sees an AI-powered labor transformation so massive it will eliminate the need for today\u2019s five year olds to have jobs.<\/p>\n
In an interview with Fortune<\/em> Editor in Chief Alyson Shontell on the Titans and Disruptors of Industry <\/em>podcast, Khosla said AI will be capable of performing 80% of all jobs\u2014from physicians to radiologists, accountants to salespeople. This massive AI displacement would essentially narrow labor costs to zero, also making goods and services much less expensive. Ultimately, Khosla said, today\u2019s youngest generation would not need to acquire a college degree to find a job\u2014or even need to find a job at all.<\/p>\n Khosla bet early on AI, and his venture capital firm Khosla Ventures was one of OpenAI\u2019s first institutional investors in 2019.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s pretty unlikely a five year old today will be looking for a job,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n \u201cThe need to work will go away,\u201d Khosla added. \u201cPeople will still work on the things they want to work on, not because they need to work.\u201d<\/p>\n The shift is a massive one, but Khosla appeared excited and optimistic about these economic and societal changes. Over the next decade, Khosla predicted an overhaul in how the economy works as a result of AI, beginning with the technology practically eliminating labor costs.<\/p>\n \u201cWhat happens when all labor is free?\u201d Khosla asked, adding that $15 trillion of U.S. GDP would mostly \u201cgo away.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n In Khosla\u2019s eyes, GDP will become a less meaningful metric to measure economic success. While plummeting employment would reflect a deflationary economy, that isn\u2019t such a bad thing, he suggested. Cheap automated labor, in part thanks to a billion bipedal robots he thinks will arrive in the next decade, would drive down production costs, meaning goods and services would be far cheaper and require far less spending\u2014good news for a hypothetically large slice of the population no longer working.<\/p>\n \u201cThe abundance of goods and services will be very, very large. Prices will be very, very low,\u201d he continued. \u201cSo I would suspect by 2040, $30,000 will buy\u2014and maybe $10,000 will buy\u2014much more than you can buy if you have $100,000 income today. So the level of income you need in a deflationary economy will be very different.\u201d<\/p>\n Khosla\u2019s vision for an AI-powered future adds to two conflicting narratives that have emerged from the AI race. On one hand, bullish tech CEOs envision AI taking the majority of jobs within the decade. But outside of tech, executives and economists are more skeptical. In a recent study analyzing survey results of thousands of C-suite executives on AI use in the workplace, 90% said the tech had no impact on employment or productivity in the last three years. They modestly predicted AI will increase productivity by 1.4% and output by 0.8% through 2029.<\/p>\n \u201cAI is everywhere except in the incoming macroeconomic data,\u201d Apollo chief economist Torsten Slok wrote in a blog post reflecting on the lack of scientific consensus on AI\u2019s economic impact. \u201cToday, you don\u2019t see AI in the employment data, productivity data, or inflation data.\u201d<\/p>\n That scrutiny is in stark contrast to the predictions of Khosla or SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who similarly envisions a world a decade or two from now where work is optional and money is less relevant. Musk imagined specialized robots outnumbering human physicians and surgeons, with a universal high income supporting a population that no longer needs to have jobs.\u00a0<\/p>\n These changes may already be taking hold. Last week, Block CEO Jack Dorsey cut 40% of the staff for his financial technology company, citing an opportunity to capitalize on AI.<\/p>\n \u201cThe core thesis is simple. Intelligence tools have changed what it means to build and run a company,\u201d Dorsey said in a letter to shareholders.\u201d<\/p>\n Khosla similarly sees a future aligned with Musk\u2019s forecasts of AI specialists that will remove the requirement to hold a job.\u00a0<\/p>\n Before AI displaces the majority of jobs, there will be an interim period of human professionals having AI interns they are training to one day complete their specialized work, Khosla said. Meanwhile, while educational institutions may still exist because people like them, they will no longer be necessary to attain job-qualifying degrees like engineering. Instead, education, except for very specialized fields like heart surgery, will be free, and labor will become free as a result of AI\u2019s ubiquity in workplaces.<\/p>\n \u201cYou won\u2019t even need the engineering degree, except if your passion is learning,\u201d Khosla said. \u201cWhether you\u2019re talking about farm workers or assembly line workers or retail workers or accountants, that\u2019ll be all free in a competitive economy. That means declining prices.\u201d<\/p>\n This new era of option work will be transformative for the future for today\u2019s young people, Khosla said. It will mark a departure of older generations\u2019 attitudes toward work as something that must be done to make ends meet, instead of something existentially fulfilling. He says a five year old today will likely not need to find a job when they are an adult.<\/p>\n \u201cIn 15 years from now, you will say, what is bad advice today or used to be\u2026.follow your passion,\u201d Khosla said. \u201cFollow your passion comes second to surviving. I think that surviving part will go away and you\u2019ll tell every five year old kid \u2018follow your passion.’\u201d<\/p>\n Khosla indicated this transition would be much easier for the younger generation than older people. Older generations who have had to work to earn a living have felt limited by jobs taking away time to spend with their kids or aging parents, Khosla said. Without the need to work, the coming generations will not only have more time to focus on what matters to them, but also more expansive ideas of what their passions could be.<\/p>\n \u201cThe room for creativity is very, very large, but we are drilled into a narrow vision of what we are supposed to do, and I think that\u2019s the fundamental thing that will change about humanity,\u201d Khosla said. \u201cAI will free us to be more human, in my view.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n #OpenAI #investor #Vinod #Khosla #predicts #todays #year #olds #wont #jobs<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Billionaire investor Vinod Kho… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":26469,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2],"tags":[2985,366,52,522,15055,555,827,15056,703,1425,954,7974,15054,2307,85],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26468"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=26468"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26468\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/26469"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=26468"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=26468"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=26468"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Mixed messages on the future of AI<\/strong><\/h2>\n
Khosla\u2019s imagined future<\/strong><\/h2>\n