Blitz Bureau
NEW DELHI: Tech billionaire and venture capitalist Vinod Khosla has predicted that within five years AI will be better than humans in most things. Speaking to Hindustan Times ahead of the India AI Summit, Khosla warned that AI would lead to crash in cost of most services.
Identifying robotics as the next wave of larger revolution, Khosla forecast a sharp dip in labour costs, reduced inflation and a huge deflationary global economy by 2035. Excerpts from the interview, given to Shashank Mattoo of HT.
Q: You’ve had a long journey in Silicon Valley over the last 50 years from founding Sun Microsystems to leading your own venture capital firm. Tell us a bit about it.
A: Well, my dream the day I graduated from IIT was to do a start-up of my own, because I heard about a Hungarian immigrant Andy Grove starting a company called Intel in Silicon Valley. I found my way to Silicon Valley and started my first company, which was also quite successful, but people don’t know about it.
It went public, and then I started Sun Microsystems right after that, and I’ve been in the business of enabling entrepreneurs, helping entrepreneurs, assisting entrepreneurs my whole life, helping create large impactful companies and social impact. So that’s sort of been my area of interest in how I got where I did. It’s always trying to make things happen that you want to happen.
Q: You first moved to America in the 1970s. You must have been one of the very few Indian entrepreneurs in tech and Silicon Valley, completely in contrast to what we see today. What was that like?
A: Well, the start-up ecosystem back then in 1980 when I started my first company was very, very different. It wasn’t a 20 year old starting a company. It was establishment people starting companies because only they could get large amounts of funding to start a company. So my approach was very simple. Just do it. Don’t worry about the rules, the regulations, the biases, all that. Just ignore it and just go start a company, which is what I did, and I mostly just ignored everything else.
Q: You’ve been writing about AI’s impact on the global economy for some time now. You’ve argued artificial intelligence is a revolution that is completely different to what we’ve seen in the past. Tell us about that.
A: Well, previous changes like the internet and the smartphone revolution were really massive changes in platform technology, and each enabled a class of applications and uses and companies. So the internet enabled the class of companies like Google and Amazon.
The mobile phone enabled the class of companies like Airbnb and DoorDash and Uber. AI is enabling a new class of companies.
What’s interesting about AI is that previous technologies helped do various jobs. AI is creating human intelligence, where it’s very likely in the next five years, AI will be better than most humans at most things.
There’s very little where humans will be substantially better. I’m not including areas like art and literature and song, and those will all be opportunity areas for humans. But in terms of economic functions, AI will be able to do that.
So it’s a massive transformation of the US economy, but also the global economy. I think AI could cause a lot of productivity gain in the next five years.
Q: What does the world economy, enabled by AI, look like in 10 to 15 years?
A: So very simply, the first step is almost all expertise will be an AI. And AI workers will be able to do accounting. They’ll do accounting better than accountants. An AI worker can be a physician, a doctor, an oncologist, a mental health therapist, a physical therapist.
AI will be chip designers, architects and sales people. Now, before then, there’ll be AI workers who can work as a junior assistant or an intern to a human architect or a human physician.
The next wave of larger revolution coming is robotics. So most labour – it doesn’t matter whether it’s cleaning the dishes in your kitchen or working on an assembly line or working as a farm worker – robots will be doing those jobs, and I think they will take five years to mature.
They’re about five years behind intellectual work or thinking work. The question is, what impact does it have for the economy? The biggest impact will be on jobs.
But things will also be so much easier to do and so much cheaper to do, you know robotic labour will cost $2 or $3 an hour, not $20 an hour. So my bet is you will see reduced inflation and then a huge deflationary economy by 2035 globally.
Q: Doesn’t that mean AI will lead to a massive concentration of wealth in the hands of the elite? Doesn’t mass loss of jobs also create space for political backlash and the rise of authoritarians?
A: It’s very clear that by the time somebody who’s 22 or 25 today is in their 40s, there will be a lot fewer jobs. And there’s no two ways about it in any comparative capitalist economy.
What’s interesting about AI is that previous technologies helped do various jobs. AI is creating human intelligence, where it’s very likely in the next five years, AI will be better than most humans at most things.
Now there is good news and bad news. AI can make a doctor available to every Indian for almost no cost. AI can make a tutor available to every Indian child and adult for almost no cost. AI can make a lawyer available to every Indian so they can have their legal rights asserted, have access to the law. So there’s a lot of good things.
AI can make entertainment almost free in a country like India, and these are all hugely deflationary kinds of efforts. Now the benefits of this need to be redistributed by the Government.
So redistribution is a bad word, but if there’s infinite production of goods and services, like medical care, like education, like transportation with self-driving cars, then there aren’t jobs, but these services become essentially free, and governments will be able to provide a much higher minimum standard of living.
Some of these services can be free if the Indian Government does it by 2030 and so I’m looking forward to the India AI Summit.