Investor Vinod Khosla predicts that free labor using artificial intelligence will lead to an era of fewer jobs and greater abundance

Raw Exclusives raw story March 4, 2026 0 Comments

Investor Vinod Khosla predicts that free labor using artificial intelligence will lead to an era of fewer jobs and greater abundance

Good morning. What will life be like in 2040? It’s pretty remarkable, according to famed Silicon Valley investor Vinod Khosla.

Khosla, one of the most successful venture capitalists and entrepreneurs in technology, put his first institutional money into OpenAI in 2019, investing $50 billion at a $1 billion valuation. (Last week, OpenAI raised $110 million at a valuation of $780 billion.) Before founding his company, Khosla Ventures, Khosla co-founded Sun Microsystems and Daisy Systems. He made early bets in companies like Square and… DoorDashAlso, it has invested in energy startups such as Commonwealth Fusion Systems.

Vinod-Khosla-thumb-1-final Investor Vinod Khosla predicts that free labor using artificial intelligence will lead to an era of fewer jobs and greater abundance

All of this means that Khosla’s record of accurately predicting the future was very good. So I flew to his office in Menlo Park to better understand Khosla’s tech-optimistic outlook for the latest episode of my podcast. Fortune 500 titans and industry disruptors.

Make no mistake, Khosla believes that AI will replace most jobs and even the need for colleges in the not-too-distant future. But he also believes that life will become more abundant and affordable in key areas, including education, health care and housing. See There’s no reason he’s 5 years old Today you must need to look for a job.

Of course, I had many questions for Khosla about this: How do he think people will afford to live without work, let alone be happy and find purpose? What government policies are needed to ensure that this utopian vision does not turn into a dystopia?

“Starting around 2030, four years from now, 80% of all jobs will be able to be done by artificial intelligence,” Khosla said. “What happens when all labor is free? $15 trillion of US GDP is work, and most of that $15 trillion will disappear. This is a highly deflationary economy. But the abundance of goods and services (thanks to AI and robots) will be very large. Prices will be very low. I suspect that by 2040, $30,000 — or maybe even $10,000 — will buy a lot more than you could buy if you had an income today of $100,000.”

We discussed all this and more in the episode. Subscribe (and if you like it, please leave a comment!) to Fortune 500 Titans on Spotify, YouTubeand apple.

Contact the CEO daily via Diane Brady at diane.brady@fortune.com

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