Tech entrepreneur and investor Vinod Khosla’s prediction of AI automating 80% of high-value jobs by 2030 coincides with a reckoning for Fortune 500 companies.
Khosla shared his predictions for the future in a wide-ranging interview on the Uncapped With Jack Altmanpodcast. As a venture capitalist and early investor in companies like Square and Instacart, Khosla offered advice for business leaders on navigating unprecedented changes ahead. Companies like Sears and Toys “R” Us collapsed under digital pressure, but Khosla warns the 2030s will see a “faster demise” of giants as AI rewrites industry rules.
See below for an overview of Khosla’s major predictions for AI, the economy, and more.
Key takeaways
- Era of unprecedented disruption: Khosla describes the current technology cycle as “crazy and frenetic,” stating, “I’ve never seen a cycle like this…almost every job is being reinvented, every material thing is being reinvented differently with AI as a driver.” He compares the scale of change to the 1960s, noting, “We’re going to see this large change in such a short time, it’s almost hard to imagine how society adjusts.”
- AI and the end of work: Khosla predicts, “Within the next five years, any economically valuable job humans can do, AI will be able to do 80% of it…80% of all jobs can be done by an AI.” He believes by 2040, “the need to work will go away. People will work on things because they want to, not because they need to pay their mortgage.”
- Disruption of the Fortune 500: He forecasts a dramatic acceleration in the demise of large incumbent companies: “One of my predictions is the 2030s will see a faster rate of demise of Fortune 500 companies than we’ve ever seen…that transition won’t happen from existing companies. Somebody new will reinvent this.”
Predictions by sector
- Health care: “If all medical expertise is free…you have an unlimited number of primary care doctors, oncologists, gastroenterologists, mental health therapists…how would you redesign the health care system?” Khosla argues that entrenched interests and regulatory barriers will slow—but not stop—AI-driven transformation.
- Robotics: He predicts that “almost everybody in the 2030s will have a humanoid robot at home…probably starting with something narrow like doing your cooking for you.” The main bottleneck is not hardware, but intelligence.
- Energy: Khosla is “very bullish about energy,” especially fusion and super-hot geothermal, which he believes could make power “cheaper than natural gas.”
Advice for entrepreneurs
- Societal and geopolitical implications: Khosla warns of the risks of authoritarian regimes using AI for both hard and soft power: “By 2040 the biggest risk we might face…is China using [types of] AI—cyber AI, warfare AI—but also socially good AI, like free doctors to everybody on the planet…to embed their political philosophy.”
- Philosophy on venture and innovation: Khosla emphasizes founder-driven innovation: “Innovation only—I can’t think of very many large examples where large innovation came from somebody who was large or in the business…experts are terrible at predicting the future; they extrapolate the past. Entrepreneurs invent the future they want.”
- On risk and impact: “Most people reduce risk to increase the probability of success. I do the opposite: Start with [the] high consequences of success. I don’t care about the probability of failure.”
For this story, Fortune used generative AI to help with an initial draft. An editor verified the accuracy of the information before publishing. Given the nature of AI tools, mistakes may occur.
