In this TED talk, venture capitalist Vinod Khosla argues that radical progress comes from entrepreneurs, not established experts, and outlines twelve bold predictions for how technology will reshape society. He critiques experts for extrapolating the past and championing non‑linear, improbable ideas pursued by visionary founders. Khosla foresees AI delivering near‑free expertise—doctors, tutors, programmers, and engineers—while billions of bipedal robots replace much human labor. Computing will become an invisible utility, accessed through conversational agents that understand human intent. AI‑human collaboration will boost creativity in entertainment and design, and the internet will be navigated primarily by autonomous agents. Medicine will shift from reactive sick‑care to proactive health monitoring, preventing disease before it manifests. Food systems will be transformed by new, environmentally friendly proteins and greener fertilizers based on RuBisCO. Transportation will feature on‑demand, ultra‑fast transit and hypersonic flying vehicles, making inter‑continental travel a lunch‑break affair. Energy will move away from solar and wind toward fusion and ultra‑hot geothermal retrofits of existing plants. Deep‑earth prospecting will unlock abundant lithium, copper, and other resources. Carbon‑capture solutions will address each of the dozen major emitter categories, with entrepreneurs repurposing cement and other industrial processes to lock away CO₂. Throughout, Khosla stresses that a handful of passionate, “foolish” entrepreneurs can turn these improbable visions into an abundant, equitable future.
Chapters
Vinod Khosla. 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 gonna 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 fufu. 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, where 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 8 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'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. 5 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 healthcare 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. 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 anytime 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 4,000 miles per hour. 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 advocate 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 their boilers and their turbines. In fact, all those plants will probably be retrofitted with fusion, possibly with hot, super hot 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. The ma— there's only a dozen major emitter categories, and I wrote a blog on it about 2 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 and passionate entrepreneurs to make it happen. Thank you.
