12 Predictions for the Future of Technology | Vinod Khosla | TED

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'm going 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 improbables are 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 pooh-pooh.

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 expansive 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 is 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 they'll 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.

And like this little Rabbit device I have in my hand, we'll just talk to it.

It'll understand human instruction.

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 is RuBisCO behind that chlorophyll,

or almost everywhere.

There's a few exceptions.

And we will have much more environmentally better proteins

than either plant proteins,

and possibly better than corn and soy.

So I'm excited about that, and greener fertilizer.

Oh, my favorite.

Experts completely disagree with me when I say this.

We can, in the next 25 years,

replace most cars in most cities.

Why? By making transit faster than a chauffeured car,

cheaper than a public transit system

and pervasive, any time on demand.

And yes, we can do it.

In fact, we are building the first one of these public transit systems

in San Jose today.

Another one of these, flying at almost 4000 mph.

We will be able to fly from New York to London for lunch.

It will make the world a much closer place.

And we fret a lot about power,

and we think solar and wind are the solution.

They're great solutions

I've been advocating for the last 20 years.

But fusion power will replace most coal and natural gas power plants today.

Again, people say we can't build that many.

We can if we are smart, if we just replace their boilers,

or maybe the boilers and their turbines.

In fact, all those plants will probably be retrofitted with fusion,

possibly with superhot geothermal,

not the kind of geothermal you've heard about,

even heard about at TED.

But much hotter, better, more efficient geothermal.

Doomers say we don't have enough resources like lithium and copper.

In fact, I say we haven't started to look.

In fact, we haven't started to develop the technologies

that will let us look a kilometer below the surface.

We are well on our way, though.

There will be carbon solutions for everything.

Entrepreneurs are working on this.

There's only a dozen major emitter categories,

and I wrote a blog on it about two years ago.

And it only takes one entrepreneur to tackle each of these categories,

so a dozen instigators can change the world of climate.

In fact, we inaugurated last week

the first cement plant in California

which from the same amount of limestone produces twice the amount of cement

by capturing the carbon dioxide and putting it into product.

You repurpose existing plants,

upgrade them like you would coal plants and natural gas plants,

and you increase the level of product

while decreasing the cost per ton.

That's what makes these things scalable.

All we need is a few entrepreneurs

who will imagine the impossible, dream the dreams,

and then be foolish enough to make them come true.

There's lots of reasons this won't happen, but I won't delve into them.

But I do think a really abundant world is possible.

It only takes a few motivated,

impassioned entrepreneurs to make it happen.

Thank you.

(Applause)