“By 2050, it'll be clear that no one will need jobs,” says Mr. Vinod Khosla. Here's why that's total BS.

“By 2050, it'll be clear that no one will need jobs,” says Mr. Vinod Khosla. Here's why that's total BS.

First of all, this view is built on the thesis that says AI will bring marginal cost of cognitive labour towards zero. If that goes to zero (says the thesis), the cost of buying knowledge goods/services would also approach zero. And if the cost of buying enough stuff is down to zilch, there comes the "age of abundance" and nobody needing to work. La-Dee-Daa.

For example: A lawyer/doctor costs you some bucks/visit right now. But since legal/medical advice by AI is free, your life gets significantly better without having to pay. And if that deflationary pressure happens to most things in life and at scale, why would you need to work? Hence, the "golden age".

This thesis is flawed at many levels. Let's get the basics first.

Firstly, zero marginal cost =! zero market price. Just because a product or service can be reproduced without any incremental cost, doesn't mean it'll just be given away. Especially in the face of tech oligopolies.

Price differentiation in businesses is not just decided by (AI) inference, it's also dependent on regulation, trust, brand, risk, and other constraints. Nothing goes free. Just that fewer and fewer people make more and more money.

Also, even if knowledge goods and services meet that theoretical point of zero market price, what happens to physical stuff? They don't abide by the tech growth curves. Consider land. It's still as contrained as ever. Even if robots make some stuff entirely, some costs don't move at all. So what's with the age of abundance? How did he come at the insight of "nobody needing to work"?

Furthermore, money moves in circles. If you took a doctor's business away, how does he feed to the society now that the market price of his services is down to zero? He won't obviously be able to consume things like before. How does the engine work when that happens at scale?

That was Macroeconomics101. Now here's the slightly complicated, philosophical part.

A lot of goods and services are exclusionary by design. They're priced at a premium, not because of physical constraints, but because their value lies in their scarcity (which in many cases is artifical, and intentionally so). Like La Tache. Or The French Laundry, where Mr. Khosla and the likes go for a $1000/head dinner. Now it's not just that the guys at The French Laundry go and catch some special kind of fish. That may or may not be true. But The French Laundry is expensive because a dinner there “means something". It’s a privilege. And this artificial scarcity is exactly what people work for. They want to move to the "other side" of the table.

What happens to that strife? Does Mr. Khosla think everyone with UBI will be (and should be) happy and satisfied, with some premium services and experiences reserved for the ultra rich (like him)?

No. Mr. Vinod Khosla is smart enough to know better. The truth is that this intellectual dishonesty is being deliberately peddled, because as jobs dry out, the tech olgarchs will be antagonised like never before. And so they've found this "nobody will need to work" spin. To seem like the "good guys" and avoid all that antagonism.

Pathetic.

Mr. Vinod Khosla.

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