Everyone is telling you how AI will change your life. But hear this person out

A well-timed investment is a bit like modern-day soothsaying. You predict, and hope. And if you turn out to be right, you gain a set of believers for all you have to say.Indian-American billionaire entrepreneur Vinod Khosla was one of the earliest investors in OpenAI — putting $50mn into the startup in 2019, after AI alarmist Elon Musk left the board — and that bet paid off. Spectacularly. He has been named as one of the 100 most influential people in AI by TIME magazine, his older-than-a-decade articles asking if doctors could be replaced with AI or if teachers could be replaced with AI do not seem quite as controversial as they did back then, and AI is one in a series of predictions he did get right.Khosla had always been a hyper-optimist about what AI could do for humanity. And like most AI investors with an evangelical bent, he had said a lot about it for a really really long time. Now, he has put together a 10,400-word essay on how he sees the future of AI panning out — building on what have been his primary talking points over the past decade — with the characteristic deep-optimism he has always had for the sector.We thought it might help to annotate (what we see as) the 5 key predictions he makes for the not-so-long-anymore run.Doctors will lose jobs. But healthcare will get better medium113873960“Should we charge forward and embrace AI as a society, I imagine that if I were to visit a village in my birth country of India, the quality of my care would be greater than if I saw a local PCP at Stanford, since the village in India will have adopted AI faster, given potential incumbent friction stateside [...] AI forms of expertise (i.e., AI doctors, lawyers, accountants, financiers, administrators, teachers) can serve orders of magnitude more expert capacity, increasing not only access but also quality, while leading to job loss for those previously in such positions [...]If you take a million doctors and each makes $300,000, that’s a $300 billion expense just in the U.S. alone; probably 10 times that, globally. That’s trillions of dollars. Likely, the $300B spend will remain the same, but we will provide 10x the number of services in the next 10-20 years.”This has been Khosla’s rallying call for over a decade now. His Khosla Ventures has invested in at least 13 digital health companies — from one that promises the use of deep learning for cardiac care to an AI tool for radiology workflow automation and an AI tool for electronic health record management. His controversial 2012 article about replacing doctors with algorithms followed, as TIME magazine says, an injury for which doctors gave him contradictory opinions. Doctors are limited, he wrote, by the symptoms patients share but an algorithm could potentially make more logically grounded deductions based on medical history. Today, data shows that almost 60% of doctors in India agree that the volume of patient data is overwhelming. And while the size of AI in India’s healthcare market is $375mn, and is expected to reach $6.9bn in less than a decade. Not just doctors — 80% of the work in 80% of the jobs will be gone medium113873972“While productivity gains have historically led to higher wages and increased consumer spending by increasing demand for the higher productivity resource, be they engineers, salespeople, or farm workers, I grant that such may not be the case with AI technologies given their capacity to disintermediate humans from what I predict to be 80% of the work in 80% of jobs [...] We have seen large transitions before but never this quickly, making adjustment a much harder problem. In 1900, the majority of jobs in the U.S. were in agriculture. By 1970, it was 4%. But that took three generations. This AI cycle will be much faster. And hence more disruptive and uncomfortable.”Khosla started with the prediction that 80% of doctors would eventually be replaced by algorithms. By 2014, he was saying that more than 50% of all jobs that exist would get displaced within four to five decades. We are already a decade into that, and he believes that the 80%-displacement scenario is only 25 years away. Of course, he was not the only one saying that but the scale of his prediction is perhaps more dire than what anyone else has ventured to forecast so far. And he is right about the speed of change. Just think about the time between the point that most offices got their first computers (1980s) to the point that knowing how to use them counted as a job skill (2000s) and finally to the point that all work turned digital with the expectation that you know your way around your job-specific software. It could still cover the span of a working lifetime but with enough time to learn and adapt. Maybe that will be the case with AI, maybe not. Almost 60% of respondents in a 2023 global survey said it was unlikely that AI would replace their jobs in five years. For their sake, let’s hope they are right.Universal basic income will have to find place in government plans medium113873983“As AI reduces the need for human labor, UBI [universal basic income] could become crucial, with governments playing a key role in regulating AI’s impact and ensuring equitable wealth distribution. As AI reduces labor costs and increases productivity, the role of government regulation will be crucial in managing the distribution of wealth and maintaining social welfare [...] A deflationary economy makes current nominal dollars go much further. I believe there will be sufficient resources and abundance to afford UBI. Today, UBI might seem impractical due to economic constraints, and indeed, ignoring these constraints has led to disasters in countries like Argentina and Venezuela. But those constraints will gradually become less so.”This is also an idea that he has held for some time now. In 2018, he predicted that by 2050, some form of universal basic income would be “a more broadly accepted concept” but at a level lower than full income support. His point then, too, was that technology will create an abundance of resources more productively and those should be used to address the negative consequences of change. On the same page are the ‘godfather of AI’ Geoffrey Hinton, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, and owner of X and CEO of Tesla Elon Musk.We will live in an ‘economy of ideas’ medium113874003“In 25 years there could be a billion bipedal robots (a million in 10 years) doing a wide range of tasks including fine manipulation. We could free humans from the slavery of the bottom 50% of really undesirable jobs like assembly line & farm workers [...] Income or social mobility is an even harder goal to engineer into society’s ‘rules’. I suspect the situation will become even more complex as traditional economic arguments of labor versus capital are upended by a new factor many economists don't adequately credit—the economy of ideas driven by entrepreneurial energy and knowledge. This last factor may become a more important driver of the economy than either labor or capital.”This, too, has been one of Khosla’s core points about our future. He attributed the shift from an economy of land, labour and capital to an economy of ideas to technology a decade ago, saying that machine learning and big data will make more and more work replaceable — and only ideas “driven by entrepreneurial energy and knowledge” will survive. This has always been the promise of technology — spinning mills will free up time for women who used to do it at home, computers will free up time for office workers, smartphones will free up time for workers on the move. Time that could be used for creative or more productive pursuits. But when time is freed up, the benefits only accrue to whoever is in a more privileged position. Richer countries work fewer hours than poorer countries, and men have more leisure time than women. It's a race between the US and China — to keep AI up and running medium113874017“[T]hose who fear AI and its capacity to erode democracy and manipulate societies should be most fearful of this risk! It is why we can’t lose to China, and why we must step up and use AI for the benefit of all humanity. China is the fastest way the doomers’ nightmares come true. Are you ready to trust Xi and his Putin-like appendages for the equitable distribution of one of the world’s most powerful technologies? That would be dystopian [...] The country that wins this AI race and related races like fusion will project so much economic power, hence will project political power and likely anoint the world's political system. What influences Southeast Asia, Africa, Latin America, etc is at stake. Democratic values are at stake in this technology battle, and so we should do whatever we can to win this battle and beat China.”The reason “fusion” is a related race is that AI training is a massive power-guzzler — The Economist estimates that the energy used to train OpenAI’s GPT-4 could have powered 50 American homes for a century. Fusion is among the most environmentally friendly sources of energy — it could generate four times energy per kg of fuel than fission and four million times more energy than burning oil or coal. (Khosla has long been a clean tech advocate and investor.) China is putting something between $1bn and $1.5bn into fusion every year, against the US’s $800mn (even though the US has way more fusion power companies than China). And its 14th Five-Year Plan set a target of 7% annual growth for AI research expenditure. And China is becoming a source of top AI research papers, on a par with the US. China is still behind the US on AI text models, but it is surging ahead in video-related uses like text-to-video generation. As for democratic values, it is hard to say if the US’s planned use of AI for things like crime forecasting are likely to do much for justice.Illustrations generated with AI by Varun Vashishtha