2040s: A Lookback | Vinod Khosla

I hope all of you had a good day yesterday of course you won't say it was a bad day so hopefully I'll get some brutal honesty hopefully in the surveys so what I want to do today is look back at the early 2020s from 20 or 25 years in the future and I want to sort of add my perspective and why I might be optimistic but let's start with how the 2020 started of course the Corona virus big event pretty horrible event to be honest Ukraine and you know these were two and and they're on the Ukraine is ongoing really catastrophically bad events probably bigger than we might have imagined possible and it's very sad because a lot of people um got hurt by both the war and the Coronavirus but I'm an optimist those of you who know me I'm fundamentally an optimist so I look on the bright side and I'm going to argue that if we look back from the 2040s 20 years from now or 25 years from now as sad as these events were they may be the two most positive events that happened on the planet and let me argue that that's the case so what did Kobe do it focused us on China's control of the supply chains almost all the Steelers made there all the supply chain got disrupted there rare Earths all the manufacturing we were Hostage to a lot of Chinese policy globally and identifying a problem is the first step in solving it the status quo as all of you know this it is amazing how much we depended on this and didn't worry about it I do believe this creates brand new opportunities for entrepreneurs and it focuses us on the real long-term danger of concentrated Point sources we also proved we could do a set of things that weren't possible before or thought impossible how fast could vaccines or drugs like paxlove it could be developed nobody believed our health was possible I won't go through all of them but you get the idea so many areas where we innovated where we didn't think something was possible or a market didn't exist Ukraine did the same thing I couldn't have two years ago imagine Germany would say no dependence on Russian gas the world desperately needed an energy transition because of climate but we weren't anywhere near on the path to be serious about that transition we never realized how geopolitically and environmentally disastrous our dependence on fossil fuels were my view there's a Cascade towards energy Independence and more importantly an energy transition because our view climate is one of the larger dangers in a way we will never go back it was a bigger wake-up call than anybody could have imagined and now we are on this new path we are on this well Beyond in many many areas not just oil and gas beyond what uh we imagined a few years ago and it'll give us the next 20 years as a really great time for innovation we got policy passed that got us moving towards this transition lots of dollars and the Europeans have their own equivalent of this yes we the Ukraine led to Global repolarization but it was an important wake-up call again which creates an opportunity for all of you I wrote about this in July of 21 climate's a large problem but I believe it only takes a dozen or so people to affect that transition to be instigators of change you know frankly whether you like him or not Elon Musk caused us to believe in electric vehicles I have a slide I'll maybe get to Pat Brown coined the term plant proteins it wasn't really a word or a category and then of course Bob mumgard has really got the world interested in Fusion a few individuals in major areas cut the got the world to focus on the change that is possible and convince them that's possible I think there's only a dozen areas to solve the crime climate crisis and it takes people like this and some of you to solve these problems some transitions are already in process some this I think fairly good solutions for that are still being de-risked and then of course areas we don't have Solutions yet but these few areas of what are both necessary and mostly sufficient to solve the climate crisis it doesn't take thousands or tens of thousands of people and then we had this other uh game changer which is very recent but the progress has been going on exponentially for quite some time that explosion of innovation we are seeing now is hard to imagine nobody can predict where this is going but being optimistic is a good way to be or Panic if you're in the old business um and panic is a good thing if you can use it to transition your business lots of axes of innovation that help AI I won't go through them plenty of older innovations that are going to help in this that will all leverage the AI trend I'm very very optimistic yesterday you heard about physician AI that everybody on the world can have a personal physician a personal oncologist if they need it every kid can have a personal tutor if they need it no matter who you are you can have a personal financial advisor even if you make at the bottom of the economic rung so imagine all these things that are possible personal media personal songs I personally believe 80 percent of eighty percent of all jobs so that that's 64 percent of all jobs will transition and be capable of being done by an AI and I say capable of because we have the choice whether to let these ai's do those jobs or not and I believe some countries will others will be luggage for lots of other reasons the other thing I want to say because this is a rumor for entrepreneurs I've never seen large Innovation and I've been in the Innovation and Only The Innovation business for the last 40 some years I've never seen it come from a large entity an institution a policy and I can go through all the Innovations the law Generations small Innovations can come from bigger companies what I'm saying to you is the world's innovation is reliant on all of you it's you who will make this change or not make it happen and so there is a burden on this crowd as we talked about very briefly last night at dinner there is no example I've seen in 40 some years I've been doing this where the large Innovation came from somebody you had expected to GE or Siemens in energy for example or Pfizer in biotech of course I believe we will get to a place in the not too distant future I believe before 2050 if we are aggressive about leveraging these Technologies and leveraging them carefully and all of you aggressive about innovating in these areas the need to work in human society will actually disappear people will work because they want to work I wrote about this about six seven years ago uh article in Forbes where I said all the economic metrics will be great productivity will go up GDP growth will go up abundance will go up but I tagline that with increasing income inequality and I'll come back to that in just a minute because we need and those are harder problems but I believe technology is being used to find better Metals minerals sources of force better refining techniques my dream is all the lithium comes from the ocean that's entirely possible and we've started to see plans to do that we've started to see biomining instead of mining much cleaner and in this kind of time frame all that will be realizable if some one entrepreneur takes it on them to change this world and I said this six or seven years ago in this article in Forbes that Ubi will be affordable and I briefly referred to this last night the world is on trajectory for two percent GDP growth you project it at least in the U.S for the next 50 years GDP will grow from 65 000 per capita or sorry not GDP per capita income will grow from 65 000 to 175 000 dollars if this room does its job we can accelerate GDP growth to four percent with all that productivity again if we do average per capita income in this country would be 475 thousand dollars such a substantial increase in per capita income that Ubi or Universal basic income will become affordable and I refer to this about the in this article seven years ago but there are some caveats there's scare mongering around AI we've all seen that personally when people ask me about sentient AI or AI killing us I find it such a silly debate I'm way more worried with strong AI in China's hands doing in Bad actors and I believe we are in the techno-economic war with China I've spoken a lot about it this year and whoever wins that Ward and I call it a war because it's a war for economic dominance for this abundance I've talked about and if we win it we will win Global political influence and I believe what is at stake is what values rule the world I do honestly believe that China believes they have a superior political system dominated by the Chinese Communist party they believe that and I can't argue it's not but I much prefer Western values and I think we are in a race for with whether Western values dominate Africa Latin America Southeast Asia and so the scaremongering around AI worries me there will be job displacement and that can slow down all this technology deployment you know truck has not a job Physicians are the jobs all of that will happen but there's a much bigger price than the other end of course politics can derail all this and we have to be very very cautious we can miss this opportunity and the worst would be if we miss it and our adversaries in this techno economic War which is mostly China or wins it or deploys it and I've referred to this inequality question I think there's Solutions especially if GDP growth and per capita growth happens as I've projected and I don't think two percent to four percent is that big a change especially with the technology at our disposal with the kind of innovation engine we have in the western world and I refer to the Western world not just the US there was a article my son sent me uh that I'd done an interview with Laura holson in the New York Times about 20 years ago and I talked about what it means to be human in the age of AI this was around 2000. we will still have tribalism racism American versus German we will have income inequality and I do believe one of the larger problems will be the source of human motivation I actually believe it's wrong that that motivation comes from working an assembly line job that's the wrong kind of job to get your motivation from it doesn't lead to happiness so I do believe these are real issues we will have to address all addressable so I do think we have a very good Time ahead of us especially as innovators but really as a society imagine some of this almost anything that we think humans can do AI will be able to do it for us and we will do it if we want to do it because we are passionate about doing it not because we need to do it the other question I get uh challenged with this change doesn't happen very fast I disagree this is New York City Fifth Avenue in the year 1900. there's one car in this picture Rajesh found this set of pictures and I just love them this was New York City only 13 years later one horse all cars Fifth Avenue I can't imagine at the beginning of the 20th century change can happen that fast this is my favorite this was a department of energy projection in the year 2010 they actually made this in 2011 for the number of cars electric cars in the U.S in 2035 and this tells us an important story they talk to all the experts and extra experts only extrapolate the past so if you ask General Motors or Volkswagen a Ford how many cars there would be the doe came up with a projection of 2300 cars in 2014 Tesla shipped about 80 000 cars alone in four years they were wrong by 20 years that's how fast change can happen and why is the case if he had relied on General Motors in Volkswagen we would be on trajectory in 2035 to have 2300 electric cars fewer than there are in Palo Alto alone today but it takes this instigator I talked about do not let the change happen to make the change happen to make fusion happen to make plant proteins happen of course I could go on I won't spend too much time on this can employment change by 90 in a short period in 1900 40 percent of U.S employment was in agriculture by 1970 it was four percent a 90 shift in employment in 70 years back a long time ago and remember this involved people moving from cities from rural areas into cities very large changes in today's age this is a third of that time what can we achieve in 20 25 years scared mongering I talked about it this is a cartoon from 1989. they talked electricity would kill people very much like AI will kill people this is one of my favorites uh this is a phrase I first adapted in early 1980s this is all of you this is why experts say it's not possible Lord Calvin who was the president of the Royal Society maybe the most informed person in science in the early 1900s said in about 1906 heavier than air flying machines were impossible just before the right broad Brothers threw their plane of course Time Magazine was the expert on e-commerce don't rely on Experts don't reply on on what the world tells you is possible create the world you want I say there's two types of people people who extrapolate the past lots of those and people who invent the world they want that's all of you thank you very much I'm gonna I'm gonna just show you a Smither of what's possible so last weekend was my daughter's wedding and I did my little speech and I wrote it as a human being no chat GPT she would have hated it but then I asked my AI friend to first turn it into lyrics and then actually rap the whole speech and so can we give that up I just want to illustrate how broad a range this is entirely generic we can stop it you get the idea that was a clone my voice trained only on 20 minutes of my speaking since I don't sing imagine what could be done with much better systems I think all of this and this is courtesy of Splash AI Steph Stefan is here Stefan here in the room no I guess he's sleeping um let me open it up to questions hopefully but you I just want to give you a flavor of what's possible you heard about physician Ai and later today you'll hear about other kinds of Innovations non-ai-based Innovations how we can do a number of things but let me not spoil that session any questions yes let's go there first that was an awesome presentation um yesterday Neil's uh overview of cure AI we talked about how you have to sort of disclaim medical recommendations AI make why are we willing to accept errors and misdiagnoses and poor treatment from actual humans in the medical space but it is unacceptable to have a poor recommendation from AI you know this is an interesting question Neil and I have debated extensively and I have said to him the most important system because diagnosis is often ambiguous he has to develop as a triage system when you in doubt when there's a possibility of error pass it on to a triage to a human being to make that mistake much more acceptable to society and and I'll come back to this issue this is really really important and I think if humans make mistakes we find them more acceptable than if systems do we will get past that Elon Musk has now convinced the world his self-driving causes less pure accidents and less debt but he has hundreds of millions of miles driven now in Tesla cars with their clunky well deeply criticized self-driving but it's still not okay in fact kaifuli who's won The prominent AI researchers in China said to me a couple of years ago your disadvantage is if a self-driving car kills a human being you're gonna delay self-driving cars by a few years in China the government will say that's the cost of winning a Race So we do have a disadvantage um so systems will make that mistake and we have to learn how to triage them that's why the term co-pilot is such a beautiful term um you know most people don't recognize just drug interactions the same person given two drugs that don't work well together causes more deaths than breast cancer in this country every year misdiagnosis cause cause more deaths than breast cancer than uh than breast cancer but we accept it from humans we just have to live with social phenomena and ease our way into it cabbage I wanted to ask you more about the geopolitical crisis that's going on internationally having lived in many countries growing up I think about it a lot and when I'm reading news of China taking over airports in different parts of Africa what's happening in Taiwan as an instigator and very focused and passionate about the work I'm doing I'm I you know I draw a lot of motivation to do my work better but nobody's taking care of those things and it's very concerning there are different degrees of actionability of these large problems I would say that's why covet was so great the world is now sensitized to China's designs and they're real and of course they've invested heavily in Africa other parts of the world and locked up resources like mines and other things if you invent much better ways of doing those things that's up to all of us to do so it's not everything's actionable you know the world isn't always Rosy it was in 1986 I did a presentation called the entrepreneurial roller coaster the piece that people Miss is the tagline where the highs are high and the lows are low and all of you know the laws of Entrepreneurship that's life but more is possible than not is sort of my optimistic View yes I was hoping that 2040 is looking back you would talk about what happened to the world after China invaded Taiwan do you have a point of view on what happens um look China's in Taiwan is an important tactical question uh it is complex and I don't fully understand all the Dynamics around Taiwan I do know China is extremely focused on the chip industry in Taiwan that's the whole reason in this country we got the chips app Act this is the wake-up call that I think was good how we handle it depends on who gets elected who's president Western policy what happens in Europe what are the major current issues it's very hard to predict those Dynamics but I'm sort of optimistic well last question I can't hear you free okay thank you for an excellent presentation um so you were referring to UPI as a sort of a positive end goal one of the historical facts of currency and economics was that his predictions on what's going to happen with increased productivity really didn't turn out the same way right kin said that people are going to use the free time to grow spiritually engage in the Arts and I think it's enough to see what happened during covet to see if that's not necessarily what happens when people have more free time so I guess my question is to what extent your optimism hinges on the idea of Ubi and if not right if that's not necessarily the best outcome what is now I do believe U.S political process and mostly Europe is a complex messy process but we in the end migrate towards the right trade-offs and so I do I'm optimistic politics Will migrate there and um you know if if we are wrong for one four-year cycle we fix it in the next so we have a way in Western democracy to reboot systems that go wrong to fix things so I'm optimistic I'm I'm pretty sure it won't be a straight line it'll be three steps forward two steps back it'll be messy but I do think we will get to the right place thank you all very much [Applause]

Channel: Khosla Ventures

Views: 16,909

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Id: biLNOTqMT_U

Length: 31min 9sec (1869 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 28 2023