12 predictions for the future of technology | Vinod Khosla

**Elise Hu** (0:03)
You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hu. Today, a tech optimist on possible tomorrows based on what we've seen so far.
But don't take my word for it. We'll let a TEDster give you the gist.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:19)
It's a summation of a guy who's been doing this for about 50 years and understands what it takes to build new things, particularly the hard things. And so I think he has some insights that many other people wouldn't have about why these things are possible.

**Elise Hu** (0:34)
The guy in question is investor Vinod Khosla. His talk is coming up.

**Vinod Khosla** (0:42)
I'm a techno-optimist, but techno-optimism should be practiced with both empathy and care. And I'm a believer in what is possible if you do it that way. First, I want to give you a word of warning. Experts extrapolate the past. They prevent radical progress because they don't think nonlinearly. They don't think of the improbable. I personally believe only the improbable is important. We just don't know which improbable is important.
Entrepreneurs, on the other hand, with a passion for a vision, they dream the dreams and then are foolish enough, and we need more foolishness, to try and make those implausible dreams come true. That's what entrepreneurship is about, something I've loved my whole life.
In the 40 years I've been doing innovation, and innovation only, this may surprise people. I can't think of a single large social impact change that was driven by an expert in the field, possibly with the exception of biotechnology, that's driven by an expert, by a large institution, a large, non-founder-led company. Think about it. In 40 years, not one example. Whether you look at SpaceX or electric cars or Uber, not one example. The earliest one I could think of was credit cards. In the early 70s, when Bank of America put credit on plastic.
So what is this plausible world? I'll go through a dozen scenarios that I believe most experts will foo-foo.
Most expertise enabled by AI will be free. I'm most excited that every human being on the planet can have 24-7 a free doctor, primary care, in a very expensive way, that every child can have a free tutor in a very available, accessible way, and these will be near free. It doesn't matter, other expertise, whether you're looking at structural engineers or oncologists, most expertise will be near free, the cost of computing. Most labor will also be free. I can imagine a billion bipedal robots doing more work than all of human labor does today, freeing humans from the servitude of some of the jobs, working at General Motors on an assembly line for eight hours a day, doing the same thing for 30 years. That's not a job. That's almost slavery. I do believe we will have enough abundance to take care of everybody who's displaced, and that's where the empathy part of techno-optimism comes in. We will have enough for redistribution to happen. Programming will be near free, also. And though we think of computers as pervasive today, I think we will be much more prevalent, much more pervasive and expansive. In fact, I think we will think of computers almost like a utility. How many of you think about electricity? That's how it will be in the background, not in our face. Computers will adapt to humans. We won't have to have humans learn computer. Five years ago, when I first spoke at a conference in Toronto on the role AI will play in music generation, I was met with skepticism, in fact, derision.
Whether it's AI alone or AI plus humans, the level of creativity in entertainment and design will dramatically go up. The level of diversity of these things will go up dramatically. I'm excited about that. Surprisingly, internet access will mostly be by agents. Billions of agents running around, doing things for us humans. Medicine is my other favorite. We have pretty good medicine today, but we have the practice of medicine, and it will change to the science of medicine. It will change from what is mostly sick care today, we apply medicine when people are sick, to health care to prevent sickness. It's a shame that in this day and age, most people who get a heart attack discover they have cardiac disease by having a heart attack, not 20 years earlier when that disease started. That won't happen. Food, we will have new types of proteins which we need, and new kinds of fertilizer essential to agriculture. Rubisco is the most prevalent protein on the planet. Every place you see green, there's Rubisco behind that chlorophyll. Almost everywhere. There's a few exceptions.