Two of my favorite quotes about the future are: “The future is like the past until it isn’t”…and a comment by an older scientist to a younger one: “Your idea is crazy; but it’s not crazy enough to work.”
Based on his recent TED Talk, I think that venture capitalist and entrepreneur Vinod Khosla would agree. He warns that “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 (emphasis mine) …. I can’t think of a single large social impact change that was driven by an expert in the field.”
Mr. Khosla was a founder of Sun Microsystems, Juniper Network and founder of Khosla Ventures which backed Door Dash and Instacart. In a short TED Talk this past April, he brought 40 years of successful technology experience to bear on the future of AI. I think you’ll find his 12 predictions for the future of technology to be worth the 9 minutes it will take to watch it.
I’ll close this section with another favorite quote about the future by Roy Amara, a past president of the Institute for the Future, that has become known as Amara’s Law: “We tend to overestimate the impact of a new technology in the short run, but we underestimate it in the long run.”
Given the nearly upward vertical path of AI in the past 18 months, those long runs may be getting shorter and shorter. Mr. Khosla’s dozen technology futures may be quite close by.
