Thought Leader Interview: Vinod Khosla
In a 2017 essay (“AI: Scary For The Right Reasons”), you wrote that AI might improve metrics like GDP growth and productivity, but at the same time, it may worsen less visible metrics such as income disparity. Are you still concerned about that?
Even more so. Without a doubt, AI is the most important technology we have seen in a very long time. Some people even refer to it as ‘the last technology’, because it will likely be responsible for all of the technologies that follow. As such, it presents massive potential for contributing to society. Having said that, where we get to will depend on the path we take.
It’s great to talk about creative destruction if you’re the one doing the disrupting; but if you’re the one being destroyed, it isn’t much fun. Disruption is always unpleasant for someone, and in the coming years, it will take its toll on jobs. The core issue is that ‘efficiency’ in the business world generally means reducing costs, which results in replacing lower-wage, less-skilled workers with far fewer well-paid, highly skilled people. Because of this, I do worry that the machine learning revolution will lead to increasing income disparity — and that disparity beyond a certain point could lead to social unrest.
On the positive side, the jobs we all covet are jobs that we would do even if we didn’t get paid to do them, and that is the long-term potential of AI. It could eliminate the need for unsatisfying work. However, long before we get there, we will have to go through the dynamics of shifting from
