In our continued “Thought Leader” webinar series, Sebastian Thrun sat down with Vinod Khosla, the founder of Khosla Ventures, a firm focused on impactful technology investments in software, AI, robotics, 3D printing, healthcare and more. Previously Khosla was the founding CEO of Sun Microsystems, where he pioneered open systems and commercial RISC processors. Khosla is widely regarded as a leading thinker in Silicon Valley and this conversation provides a glimpse of why he’s so deserving of that label.
The conversation centered on key aspects including:
- The next wave of tech breakthroughs
- Key industries ripe for tech disruption
- How the biggest risk is not taking any risk at all
Technology and new inventions have always shaped the human world, and have disrupted the way we live and work, and yet we are only at the beginning summed up Khosla. Innovation in the areas of food, digitization, robotics, artificial intelligence, as a few examples, have the potential to achieve food abundance, reshape cities, knit humanity, and enhance human capability exponentially.
The big needs in society, food, health, housing, transportation, financial services, entertainment and more are being and will even more so be reinvented by technology in an “increasingly more accessible to all” way. “We need to turbocharge our efforts to utilize technology to accelerate accessibility. Many of society’s GDP and business-related needs are being reinvented everyday in a truly innovative and non-institutional way,” discussed Vinod Khosla.
“You heavily invest in media technology and human health services. Give us your vision for what is going to happen there?” asked Sebastain Thrun. “What’s not clear are timelines. But what is very clear is that any notion of medical expertise will be embodied in AI systems,” decalred Khosla.
Receiving medical advice from the comfort of your own home will be the norm in a world where leaving your house will be less necessary in general, as a result of robotic delivery of groceries, and robotic kitchens that reduce the need for going out to grab takeout. That means taking more cars off the road, presenting an opportunity to redesign cities.
In addition, for Khosla, medical schools should focus on recruiting future doctors with high Emotional Intelligence (EQ) because their future will be managing patients rather than determining medical interventions. He lamented that the current model of symptom-based diagnosis is the practice of medicine, not the science of medicine.
Be sure to tune in to learn more about what Vinod Khosla states about Silicon Valley, other industries ripe for disruption and how the future belongs to those who aren’t afraid of the high probability of failure, and who take, bold and radical risks.
Listen now.