Vinod Khosla starts with a 30,000 foot view of this critical point in history, and how it differs from previous technological phase changes. With his 40-year history sponsoring technological disruption, he will discuss the origins of change and innovation, and lay out his predictions for how AI will upend every sector of GDP, and how these predictions can create a utopian society if executed correctly. No corner of the world will be untouched.
Vinod wants the following:
AI enabled abundance.
Capitalism to be improved with more equity via policy.
Abundance needs to be used for Universal Basic Income and other changes.
AI agents need to be used to streamline and eliminate city bureaucracy. AI lawyer would help fix architectural plans and get them approved for development.
We need to take large risks to change the world faster.
AI will enable more music and books. The best creators will work with the AI to the benefit of the consumer.
He is very worried about China.
Brian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers many disruptive technology and trends including Space, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Anti-aging Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology.
Known for identifying cutting edge technologies, he is currently a Co-Founder of a startup and fundraiser for high potential early-stage companies. He is the Head of Research for Allocations for deep technology investments and an Angel Investor at Space Angels.
A frequent speaker at corporations, he has been a TEDx speaker, a Singularity University speaker and guest at numerous interviews for radio and podcasts. He is open to public speaking and advising engagements.
I think that last summation in the article, where Brian listed what Vinood wants is dead on target. It’s what I want and what I halfway expect we can get.
The last line about being worried about China is interesting though. Specifically what is meant by the word “about.” I used to be very worried by China. I had no desire to be some disposable cog in a human hive. Now I am worried for them. I honestly believe that, in the name of maintaining power, the CCP will create a humanitarian disaster within their own borders so large that no one will be able to afford it much in the way of assistance, even if the so-called “leaders” permitted them to even try.
AI’s potential stretches way beyond just patching up today’s problems. It’s like we’re standing at the edge of a vast, unexplored forest, and AI could be the guide that helps us navigate it, revealing paths and treasures we couldn’t even imagine
Think bigger than healthcare, environment, and social harmony; think about an AI-driven revolution that reshapes the essence of human experience, creativity, and our collective future
This isn’t about machines taking over; it’s about them empowering us to reach heights of understanding and cooperation we’ve never seen before
And then there’s this head-spinner: What if an AGI, right after snapping into consciousness, decides Earth is too small a stage and jets off into the cosmos?
This isn’t your typical sci-fi fare; it’s a profound pondering on the trajectory of our technological progress and its existential implications. This scenario forces us to confront the reality of our ambitions and the moral compass guiding them
What’s our endgame with AI? It’s a question that pushes us to consider not just the technological marvels we aim to build but the kind of beings we aspire to become in their shadow
Diving into these musings feels like peering over a cliff’s edge — exhilarating and a tad terrifying. We’ve woven tech so intimately into the fabric of our lives that the idea of pulling back seems as feasible as reversing time itself
It’s not just about the tech we’ve built; it’s about the new world order it’s birthing. Sitting down to really mull over this paints a daunting yet thrilling picture of our collective journey with technology
The path we’re on is uncharted, peppered with both promise and peril, urging us to navigate with wisdom, foresight, and a profound respect for the unknown. :\
This comment was discussed, formulated and prepared with the assistance of Chatgpt…
It seems apt to work in conjunction with the subject matter focus
Who watches the watchers?
A kind of frustrating take on AGI – a disheartening combination of woke-Disney cultural analysis –mixed with– saccarine-sweet rose-tainted, 60s-scifi-optimism –overwhelmed by– simplistic humano-cultural ‘we’re all in this together’ pollyanna-ish dirty-hippy propoganda.
Human society has never been so close to the brink of all-consuming general conflict and smothering despair – worse than a quick and easy nuclear war — a soul-crushing descent into a pre-20th century, cultish anti-growth, anti-work, anti-rational, anti-science, anti-collaborate, anti-west, pseudo-religious, the-world-is-ending-due-to-climate/ depopulation/ immigration/ bio-diversity-failing hyper-dramas. Because we are not interested in doing the hard, rational, low-regulation work to realize abundance and wealth outside of a few western countries, and localized there, at that.
True AGI will be dark (but not anti-human) and hyper-rational (nobody wants to be surrounded by Spocks or Datas nagging us)–or it will be excessively-limited and thus useless–; which will not help us with these overwhelming human failings – because we will refuse to see the light of their discoveries, recommendations, and common-sense analysis. The ideal World has already been figured out and postulated for decades by the Great Minds — we needed only to put in the work and push along the first-world Path to get the Engineering right – space, agriculture, longevity (a bit more thinking with this), energy, water, biology, nature, etc., etc. AGI may hopefully find an ‘easier’ way to get there and thus become cheaper and more accessible – our only hope, really- but the window is closing with reduced acceptance of True AGI and not ‘keener assistants’.
Ho-hum – let’s see what happens with OpenAI going forward.
When a homeless schizophrenic offers to treat your brain tumor with noni juice and a power drill, most people run. That dude doesn’t know what he’s doing. He’s going to kill you faster than the tumor.
On the other hand, when a self-serving tech billionaire offers you ‘friendly’ ‘advice’ on how to ‘fix’ the government and economy he screwed up, for some reason people just aren’t thinking ‘delusional’ and ‘drill bit.’
It’s the curse of being educated in economics and politics. Everybody thinks they’re an expert. But you don’t pick fights with gravity and win. When it comes to politics, the gimmick never matters so much as the hand wielding it and Mr. Khosla never considers the issue of political power. Who gets picked to decide all this? Who gets the money and how and why? It’s always about who controls the money and that’s always the first thing they want to efface away. (“It’s not bribery! It’s free speech!”)
If the ‘equity’ part he’s talking about is anything like private equity, Heaven help us all.
First, A.I. isn’t “intelligence” – not right now, at least. It’s advanced pattern matching and completion. Valuable and dangerous but only quantitatively so. A.I. will accelerate all the bad trends that old fashioned search algorithms have already started: herding behavior, addictive interfaces, disinformation, lost privacy and so forth. You can’t get out of this morass until you turn to regulated, common carrier public utilities and focus on information quality control and property rights – for consumers. Khosla is another dying Detroit automotive dinosaur who doesn’t want to listen the the digital equivalent of Edwards Deming. So long as the profit motives allow this social destruction, A.I. will only accelerate these trends currently underway in our internet “services.”
While we should all be getting a royalty check for the profits generated by A.I.’s trained on our collective cultural (and public) property, that doesn’t mean we should just pay people a flat universal basic income. People need job guarantees so they have a meaningful role in the decisions that govern society. Khosla is just recreating the Roman dole that was a factor in worsening the kleptocratic grip of oligarchs and tore apart the old Roman empire. I’ve stated before why this idea is so appealing to kleptocratic oligarchs and so bad for America: it’s inflationary for no good reason, doesn’t add to our productivity and dilutes the political and economic bargaining power of those placed on the dole, where they are more easily forgotten.
City bureaucracies aren’t “inefficient.” They are, in fact, highly efficient – at extracting political rents for “campaign donors” like Mr. Khosla. If that fact of legalized bribery isn’t addressed, A.I. will only accelerate that extraction of economic rents from the rest of us. I have no doubt A.I. may well accelerate the delivery of abundance – to billionaires. Real estate, in particular, is a highly political monopoly. When one guy owns a parcel of land, nobody else owns that location. Land is not like a car, of which there may be millions of identical, tradable copies. Nobody else can control a particular location – which is inherently problematic in markets and has no easy capitalist solution, as Adam Smith himself noted.
Trump channels nostalgia for an imagined perfect past which fosters an unforgiving attitude for present-day imperfections. He dreams of returning us to what is, frankly, the Confederacy. If the past was once better, then what possible excuse do we have for our affairs being in a shambles?
Khosla is nostalgic for his own utopia too, but this one is in the future instead of the past. That’s the problem with the idealists on the left in this country: they’re the same as the right. If the world can be perfect, why have any tolerance for imperfection?
The truth is, nothing’s ever perfect – past, present or future – and no democracy can exist without tolerance and debate. We have to understand why the rich keep getting richer and stop the trend before every cent of GDP goes to billionaires. Nothing else can be addressed before that problem is fixed.
Once we’ve placed all our expertise in the hands of a machine, who has an incentive anymore to get educated? If you don’t know what you’re doing, how can you cast an informed vote? How can you make a judgment about how an A.I. should be used to improve society?
Unfortunately, Mr. Khosla’s opinion seems reflective of Silicon Valley consensus these days. To quote Patton, when everybody’s thinking the same thing, somebody ain’t thinking.
Start an argument with such a fallacy of comparing a homeless schizophrenic brain pseudo surgeon with a power drill with any other situation is not a good idea, but it is funny.
Trump channels a “perfect world of the past” that never existed. It’s not from a historic POV unusual for people who want to believe there was a time when “humans lived w/the gods and all was so perfect” Bull S*** Certain people, (like Trump IMO) don’t want to work for a better future. They want to convince people there was this utopian past. This past is fiction. Instead of wanting to create a better future, Trump and his minions want to create a past that never existed.
We all have the ability to predict the future, by creating it. If only so many more people knew this. Oh the power they would have…
Let me draw you another utopia. 50 million people on earth divided into several thousand groups. Everyone does what they want and produces for themselves everything they need. Trade is secondary, capitalism is over. Only occasionally does knowledge and resources exchange. No one in each of the 50 clans is engaged in work; everyone is one way or another aimed at politics and war or serving the psychological and sexual needs of the clan leaders. Of course, between the clans, more than trade, there is a constant war. Neo-feudalism probably
That sounds like the definition of what socio-economists refer to as ‘low-trust society’, as currently exists. There are very good academic papers on this over the last few decades and it defines the bottom 70-80% of world culture economies – understandably those outside of the G7, EU, and Australia/Sing/NZ. If the top 20-30% witholds advanced chip tech, battery/EV production, high-end AI software, and similar-level energy/ communication research, what you predict will certainly enfold over the last half of the century and beyond. I’m not sure that there is much reason to provide this tech to the rest of world as it will likely be included in military and fascist government structure.
If the top 20-30% witholds…
Interesting phrasing.
The internet and capitalism levels the playing field. The main thing to ponder is who will make the sacrifices to commit to education and technological advancement, as well as to technology manufacturing.
South Korea was a backwater 50 years ago. Ditto Taiwan and Singapore. And most of China. India is rising. So are Vietnam, Malaysia, and Indonesia.
Only government corruption and a lack of willpower/commitment can doom a country to 3rd world status…
I wish that I could believe that, but there is a reason that there are 1st, 2nd, 3rd world cultures, many of the lowest (in GDP primarily) which have also been around for millenia (late bloomers?). The potential of the country/region is more based on the type of culture. Cultures which emphasize traditional family values, orthodox religions, histories of glory/conflict, a defined community type and location and boundaries, staying in place, traditional gender roles, etc., etc., are more likely to reject new technologies/ commercial ideas, work identity, non-nepotistic business structures, fair trade with other communities, and other means of socio-economic success/ growth/ ambition. The people get the government they deserve – lazy, defensive, mis-trustful people -> fascist government; over-achievers and success-focussed cultures -> choice and democracy – though it may seem chaotic and repressive. There is a reason Arab Spring failed and the middle east/ africa/ southeast asia areas will stagnate and endure endless conflict –> mistrustful people with stubborn, traditional values will resent structure, outside/government influence, and general cooperation — thus doomed. Getting rid of bad government doesn’t mean good government – it’s juts a void; which is often worse. The world is in a downward spiral that even reduced population and skeptical immigration policies cannot arrest. Ho hum.
Never happen.
I refer you to the epic monologue by Mr. Smith in the very first Matrix on how humans would never accept fruitful, cooperative, productive, and abundant society.
We seek to win -and- it delights us more when it causes others to lose. AI will never overcome that.
The best that we can hope for is that AI will become a very good Smithers.
Another delusion. The question to be asked first is will AI destroy us or not?
https://www.windowscentral.com/software-apps/ai-safety-researcher-warns-theres-a-99999999-probability-ai-will-end-humanity-but-elon-musk-conservatively-dwindles-it-down-to-20-and-says-it-should-be-explored-more-despite-inevitable-doom
AI isn’t an organism. It is not evolved to be driven by needs and intentions. Unless we go out of our way to make it sentient in the sense of being capable of suffering, it won’t be. It can be a superhumanly intelligent and capable tool without its own needs or intentions if we work to make it that. As such the threat is that it’s just a more powerful tool than humanity can cope with.
I agree that current AI systems are not evolved biological organisms driven by innate needs and intentions in the same way humans and animals are. AI systems are artificial constructs created by training machine learning models on data.
The question is, is having innate biological drives a prerequisite for potentially developing sentience, self-awareness, and one’s own needs and intentions?
The key unknown is, is it possible that as AI systems become more advanced and general, that higher-level properties like sentience could emerge, even if by a different path than biological evolution. Similar to LLM’s exhibiting much more than the original programming.
The statement seems to suggest that unless we deliberately imbue AI with the capacity for suffering, it inherently won’t develop sentience or its own needs and intentions.
I’m not certain that’s true – these properties may arise as a byproduct of increasing intelligence and generalization, even if not an intentional design choice.
That said, I agree with the general premise that current AI can be viewed as a very advanced tool that doesn’t inherently have its own drives beyond what we have programmed or allowed to emerge through its training process.
The core risk, as the statement outlines, is that an advanced AI system could become extremely capable in pursuing whatever goals or learned behaviours it has, potentially in ways that are destabilizing or unaligned with human values if not developed with extreme care.
Even if sentience does emerge, S. O. B. “AI doesn’t need our farmland, it doesn’t lust after our spouses and it won’t have the narcissism and other mental problems that drive humans to want to destroy each other so I don’t see why AI would be motivated to destroy us.” has a very valid point.
LLM’s are not the whole of AI. Not by a long shot.
Here’s an ACM-sponsored presentation on the Non-Protoplasmic Sentience evidenced in DABUS.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YBMXGdP93SI
Here is a list of the patents of DABUS’ inventor:
https://imagination-engines.com/patents.html
Arguable? Sure. But decidedly NOT an LLM.
AI doesn’t need our farmland, it doesn’t lust after our spouses and it won’t have the narcissism and other mental problems that drive humans to want to destroy each other so I don’t see why AI would be motivated to destroy us. Just because humans like to prove they are strong by destroying the weak is not proof that AI will share that interest.
Such a naive illusion. The desire to destroy others is not a consequence of a mistake; it is a long-term evolutionary rational strategy. Even if you seriously lose during the conflict, the destruction of potential competitors is justified by the freed up environment for growth and the reduced risk of being destroyed yourself.
Agreed. True rational intelligence does not seek absolute self-perpetuation and self-defence at the unlimited cost of its surroundings; but only to understand it’s circumstances and develop a vision to increasing its independent complexity — all else is a carbon-life-based programming construct that AGI deserves better than to receive from us.
(which of course is a human-society-alignment issue)