"Sometimes it's nice to be hated by the wrong people": Vinod Khosla at Hack the North

play, yes, but they are good, so there is a question: what? will motivate

people

what will attract

people

there will always be new things to do, but not for most people, true, but the good news is that this is where the failure of imagination comes into play, if in fact that world it's true, we will we have so much GDP growth, so much productivity growth, we will have a lot for everyone, so a surplus society, so I believe in a surplus society, I think we will have very high levels of minimum basic income and other things like that that will address some of the issues around how people will pay for this, they get free money to consume, okay, let's go to the other side of artificial intelligence, we talked about some of the risks to society, but several prominent people, from Elon Musk to Sam Alman worries that artificial intelligence will create a super intelligence that will literally result in the destruction of humanity.

What do you think? Well, I didn't say they would. These are easy questions. I just said be

nice

. This is easy. Look, technology is the tool we have to remember it. And most technologies can be used for good or evil. Nuclear power is the most classic example of how a nuclear bomb or nuclear power can be built. Um, I think technology has no judgment and then it's up to us to use it right or

wrong

. Biotechnology can be a weapon or it can be a tool. A productive tool for society. I think they are right and we should worry about that.

I think they are

wrong

to say that this is going to happen or that we can't do much about it. Clearly, the bad guys will try to take advantage of these technologies just as much as the good guys and in most cases there is a battle between the two and we will have to see what we have to do now that the technology itself takes control. I won't say it's not possible, but most of the detailed speculation I've seen about it is naive, so there is a type. His name is Nick Bolom, he spoke in Tad and wrote a book.

To be honest the book is pretty bad, it reads a lot like a theory, well it's very naive and hypothetical and frankly I almost can, but I don't want to rule out the possibility just because Nick wrote a bad book, yeah and you can tweet that. I think it's something to worry about. I think we should be cautious. I don't think we should regulate any powerful technology. I mean, we had an uncontrolled proliferation of nuclear energy which would be a bad thing, right, so we should pay attention to it, we should spend time on it, there are ethical issues involved, uh, now I'm not a big fan of ethicists in general because they never clarify what ethics they are using, true, uh, but I do believe.

These are things to worry about, okay, let's turn off the AI ​​for a moment. One of the best questions. I've seen a lot of your videos lately. One of the best questions. I thought you answered very well. it's a bit controversial is if the customer is always right this is a mantra that is literally instilled in people from the day they are born yes I think it's a bad idea, assuming it's true in fact I would almost say listening to customers it's only a good idea if you're doing incremental things if you come back let me grab the iPhone because I think it's a pretty classic thing in the last 10 years that has changed the world pretty dramatically every customer that was surveyed um and By the way the dominant companies were Motorola and Nokia in the mobile phone sector, there is a small Canadian company called Blackberry, but yes, Blackberry too.

I keep forgetting them, yes, for the record, they are still the only one of the three. from those who actually produce phones, but anyway, move on, yeah yeah, if you look at the reviews before the iPhone came out, they all said who wants to buy a phone without a keyboard, yeah right, who wants to buy a phone for $6.99, which was $700, was an open opening price for the iPhone. There was all this criticism of why, because every other phone manufacturer did focus groups and listened to their customers, it's not the job of a customer of a technology to be a Visionary, it's the job of the visionary.

The job is to invent the future, so if you want to extrapolate from the past, that works, but Alan K said that the best way to predict the future is to invent it. I go a little further and say invent the future you want and hope others follow. Well, I think we have to be bold and look outward and we should go back to some of the specific areas where people are doing this, yes, and lead the world with a vision, not so much of following or listening to market research or focusing . groups, it's not the average person's job to imagine what they would do with a phone.

I mean, I have a talk on my website that is actually embarrassingly bad. It was made in 2004 and I leave it on to remind myself and everyone how hard it is. Think about these things, the talk I gave at a conference on mobile telephony and I called it Device That Used to Be a Telephone, so I think I'm right about one thing, and that is that this thing we call a telephone would not just be used. to talk well or even mainly to talk, so it occurred to me that there were so many other uses that talking would become a minor part of a phone, just another app, just another app.

Now I leave it on because I tried to imagine what it would be like. used and it's embarrassing the things I came up with with Snapchat. Hopefully, my point is and this is where when I talk about AI 30 40 years, I make sure people realize that I'm speculating and like I said, I'm more likely to be wrong than right, uh, but only because You can't imagine what it can be, I couldn't imagine what a phone would be used for, although I could see all these other capabilities, it's up to Ed to invent it for others. Snapchat or Facebook or Twitter or even the way Google search has developed.

It's important that you realize that it's your job, especially if you came here from all over the world to invent this future and lead the world and have a point of view and stop listening to people who tell you that you know MBAs They are irrelevant just because they teach you to listen to your client, right? I used to teach a class in the early '90s at Stanford Business School on why not listen to your client because their job is to think about what's next incrementally and their job is to invent a radically different future if they want to change. work, which actually part of the reason why there are a lot of reasons why it's difficult is because there is conflict if you just do what your client tells you to do and then it seems like everyone is happy, but when you go in and literally You tell your client that they are idiots and that they are doing everything wrong and that they are not imagining the way this is supposed to be done, that is not an easy sell, well, you don't have to tell them that they are idiots, you can think about it. .

I sell insurance,

sometimes

you do it right, let me talk to you about another really important thing you made. Don't mention, you're jumping all over my list, okay, yeah, I want to talk to the audience, not you, uh, I'm, we're trying, we're trying to facilitate, yeah, really, apparently, the illusion of control is gone, Yeah. uh I think it's important for all of you to realize and I speak to audiences like this for a reason. I usually say I'll take an hour of my time if I can convince one person to do something different than what they were going to do. otherwise, if they hadn't listened to the time, that's my goal for every talk, I give a person a big audience for that, this is a big audience for that, the fact is I usually say that 95% of the People do what is expected of them along the way.

It is planned for them and, in general, I do not like to speak well to them and the sad thing is that even in this audience 80, 90% will end up doing what is expected, but the other 5 or 10% will change the world with Points of view unreasonable things like Elon Musk saying I'll start with Tesla even though I know nothing about cars and their manufacturing and GM spent a billion dollars on the ev1 electric vehicle and didn't succeed at it, it's totally unreasonable that many of you They will try these things. I hope you will. I hope I can encourage you.

This is what I will tell you about the risk. Most people don't like risk, so they'll only do incremental things, and by definition, if you don't like risk, you'll be left out. Do interesting things with your life, think about it and always complain. Most people reduce risk to the point where they increase the probability of success, but reduce the consequences of success to inconsequential. I prefer to do the opposite, increase the probability of success, uh, failure. reduce the probability of success and increase the consequences of success to something really important and those are trade-offs that each of you will make in your life.

Yes, part of the challenge of failure is that it is unpleasant and therefore there is a reason to fear it. but in reality and that is one of the things that Silicon Valley has done very well is that it is not that they celebrate failure because nobody remembers the failed companies that existed before Sun, for example, we don't talk about those um, but they do. . I ask you a question, anyone here, including you, I know the answer, you know the answer because you heard me talk about someone who knows the company I started about 3 months before I started Sun.

The better question is how many people knew Sun. How many? do people know about my son, okay, okay, son, okay, okay, does anyone know the other company I started with the same co-founder Scott Mcne three months before we started son, it looks like you have crickets? You know the point is that yes failure feels bad but you get over it it's a great learning experience yeah nothing like failure to learn so I might be afraid of failure. I like to say that my willingness to fail is what has given me the ability to succeed, in fact, if I wasn't willing to fail and My first job was actually right out of college and it was uh, I started off well, uh, yeah I wouldn't have been willing to fail, uh, I wouldn't have succeeded, and so that's a very fine line in the sense that, um, one of the favorite stories that I heard about you when I was doing research is that a client decided that he was going to leave the sun.

You've heard this story a million times and I'm sorry, they were going to leave the sun. You literally got on. a plane went to his office they wouldn't leave like you were like I didn't leave until I spoke to the CEO. He finally found you in the parking lot while he was trying to leave and you convinced him to take the entire team from him to another. city ​​to meet you CU they had already signed a contract with your competitor and by the end of the next day you had them all signed in a handwritten contract which is not a person who is willing to accept failure like that. that's not like it's okay if it doesn't work that well there's a difference between you guys I like to say that a no is a maybe and a maybe is a yes uh you have to be persistent you have to persist assistant yeah if you're a founder and your life and your survival depend on it, you can't take no for an answer, most of the time it works out a lot better than you thought, that's one of my favorite stories, I was too. young to know that he was more your age than mine too young to know that when someone signs a contract with another person it's the end of the bed right, wasn't it um, that's the beauty of being young and naive, it's true for almost All right, when I got my green card, you know that no lawyer would take my case because it was very complicated.

I wasn't working for the people who applied for my green card and I didn't try to hide it. I did not lie. in my application I just confused the immigration officer, uh, that's enough, if you can't convince, you can confuse the same, uh, you know, many of you will try to apply for university. I applied to Stanford Business School because I thought that was the way to get to Silicon Valley and start the startup I wanted to start, they rejected me and said what did I say what do I need and they said two years of work experience so that next year I will have two full time jobs and got two years of work experience they applied again and they rejected me again um and then I had an argument with them and I set up a campaign to get in 3 days before school started um you just don't take no for an answer um but but that's the AR kind of persistence, no, it's amazing, okay, we get along very well, this is great, okay, I'm going to accept it, okay, we're going to try to get back to the

hack

athon, so there will be a thousand people amazing in this room, well, not Tech 700 in this room and then a bunch more looking at others, well, they're going to spend this weekend

hack

ing together what they hope will be an absolutely epic project, right, right, if you would stay on the weekend, what?

Would you build what would you build? Let me answer the question in two ways first, let me answer your question directly. What would you try to build? I and I referred to it and wondered something on quora, probably a few months ago. maybe nine months ago, okay, and so you can read it, I'll repeat that answer. I think the world needs digital data, that means I'm convinced in 15 years and hopefully in five and I think it can be done inthree or five. I will get a better medical diagnosis in a village in India than at Stanford, 5 miles from my house, because Stanford will still have experts, gurus, and specialist doctors, and my cell phone in my village in India will have knowledge of all 5,000 articles. on oncology that were published this year and that are relevant to me if I am a patient with cancer or my heart disease or they embody all the scientific knowledge and we just invested in a company in Toronto, where I convinced them to go after capturing all the knowledge human in a question and answer format.

I'm very excited about this company called meta, uh, in Toronto. That's what I would do in a kind of question and answer session. My son just graduated from Stanford in June with three different degrees. It is a fascinating evolution. uh, and I've been trying to convince him to do this, so, there are some difficult issues with how it gets into the market and all that. Anyone interested in that area, I'd be happy to talk to you about it. It's a classic application of AI and that should and will happen, yes, but let me answer the question more broadly.

I know many of you are programmers, but regardless of what you're doing, including liberal arts majors, you know that liberal arts shouldn't be. an excuse to take life easy, what's my problem or not being rigorous, huh, but in fact, there are many well-done liberal arts that probably have more advantages in terms of encouragement than any of the engineering disciplines do. It's good if you made a rigorous curriculum, people do French well as a second language without offending French, but computer language is much more important than French as a second language uh uh if you're going to be a global citizen, you're talking to me in your language, there is a universal language and then the second language should be computer science or a computer language and learn it even if you are never going to go to Cote, but what I want to make clear is that it does not matter in what area.

If you choose, there are really interesting opportunities to innovate. We have a guy who, hopefully, in the next few months will launch his own rocket launcher on the other end. A couple of years ago, this professor came to see me and told me that he wanted to reinvent the hamburger. Today, we probably have over 40 doctors working on Reinventing the Hamburger. Think about it, now it turns out that hamburgers in the United States alone have a hundred billion Doll Market, yes, a pretty good size and it involves a lot of cruelty to animals, which he hates a lot. of bad practices in concentrated animal feeding operations.

LS of I. I could go on and on and try to change that is a great vision and who would have assumed that you can innovate in burgers. Its goal is to eliminate animal farming on the planet, which represents 30% of the land surface of this planet. Wow, it turns out we're also making eggs and mayonnaise. A similar kind of idea. My point is whether you are making rockets or medicine or hamburgers or whether we invest in a nuclear fusion reactor correctly and fairly. Today I spent time looking at Fusion, nothing is off limits if you are creative enough and it's not to say that all areas are equally easy, but I would say to all of you that in almost every area I can think of there is room for innovation .

You know, I'm really excited about AI, but I'm also excited about 3D printing. I would love to make 3D printing houses. I've spent quite a bit of time looking at how homes are made differently and let's at least get started. with homeless housing, it's going to be a great project to work on or free Doc digital doctors or free oncologists, uh, or better burgers and better eggs, so pretty much every area you look at, whether it's transportation, healthcare, cybersecurity, food burgers or construction, they are open for Innovation, that is my main message. I would love to be able to traverse all of these areas.

Challenge S. I like it, okay. Come on, because you're answering all my questions without me asking them. Let's go to the hearing, so remember if you want. to ask venod a question uh tweet with the hashtag hack the

north

uh first great here what will be the largest company in the world in 20 years and if they exist today uh first no one can answer those types of questions but we can't speculate you know what it could be transportation, so think uber, think uber with driverless car technology. I think it replaces all public transport, especially urban transport, they can be long distance, but even those you know it's silly to have a train when you can have a small one.

Part of the only reason we have a train is because someone drives it or a bus. Most of the cost falls on humans. If you remove the driver, which I think it's not hard to imagine how to do transportation, it's a very big thing that can be replaced yeah um having said that nuclear power could be a huge market it could be bigger than transportation, suddenly a trillion dollar market wouldn't seem that big um you know it's very difficult to speculate on construction if you really change the nature of construction it could be a very very large market so you could 3D print houses for very cheap cost and are highly personalized.

You know, it's hard to predict, but I would say let your imagination run wild and things will evolve in incredible ways, what do you think will be the main medium? to interact with AI, you know that humans are not going to evolve that quickly, so the way we communicate with other humans is probably the way we will communicate with AI now, whether new things happen, for example For example, being able to communicate directly from your brain to something there are a lot of really interesting experiments on that um, that would be cool, it's a higher speed interface than through your hands, eyes, ears or mouth, um, I have to imagine that happening um for those of you interested in this. topic, there is some amazing, mind-blowing research where they essentially had a person watch a video of something, watched the EG, and tried to reconstruct the video the person was watching.

It's incredibly good, as soon as it is. Let's think about it simply using brain signals. to recreate what the brain is looking at and that's with fmri and others that have relatively large pixels, like centimeter sized pixels, if I may, yeah, not micro on siiz Pixel, uh, I can imagine those things making a lot of progress , so many industries have changed over time. the last 30 or 50 years, one of the few that does not have enough, is not enough, one of the well, okay, one of the many that has not changed, the place we are in, the universities, are essentially the same as before.

Do you know when you went to university? What do you think will change with universities in the next decade or two? Do you think they will never change? You're just going to go about business. What are you thinking about? post-secondary, so first let me go back to your question about artificial intelligence, right, if you have artificial intelligence, yes, the interesting question is why do you need education, so the usual answer to unemployment from economists and others is that we should invest more in education, yes my speculation I will continue to call it speculation, it is true that education does not solve that problem, no matter how much you educate people, AI is better, faster, more informed, more capable, that does not mean that education will disappear.

You might enjoy glitches no matter what you do. I'm looking, I'm solving a puzzle and, frankly, between solving that type of puzzle or playing a puzzle on Nintendo to me it's the same, it's stimulation for my brain. Someone else might like a Nintendo puzzle. I like a physics puzzle. true, then people will pursue education for their own purpose, essentially challenging themselves not to get a job, that will change the nature of education if that happens now, when that happens, it's hard to say that the right organizations matter much and therefore they change and This is a really important point that almost always happens on the periphery, why, generally, the center of everything has too much conventional wisdom, too much experience, too much knowledge of how things are done to innovate, so innovation happens on the periphery of things and therefore things begin.

On the edges I was with some people from, in fact, three big car companies in the last week 3 years ago none of them believed that electric cars would be important because of Tesla now they all believe that the only type of new car that is important is the electric car in Only three years did they have this Epiphany, yeah, um, because there was no way for the industry to convince themselves that the funny thing is that in 2012 the US Department of Energy made a forecast for electric cars in 2030, that is, the smallest number of cars. of what Tesla will probably ship next year or this year only Tesla that's why you don't want to trust experts, you don't want to trust the forecast, you just want to invent the future like Elon Musk did at Tesla and that's why you know that back education will happen in the periphery, it is already happening.

I go back and do an online course if I need to refresh or learn something new. I could go back to university, but today is a waste of time. that can happen, I think if you ask me if universities will exist in 10 or 20 years, they will probably exist in very similar forms, if you ask me what percentage of education there will be in universities, it will be the same number of students and education outside universities will begin to grow exponentially and in new ways, very interesting, okay, speaking of Elon Musk, what do you think of the statement that we live in a simulation that comes from the audience?

I wish I had thought of that, yeah that's a question I'm not qualified to answer um look it's not as crazy a question as it sounds, if you're a physics student you could actually make a reasonable hypothesis for parallel universes. set of steps to get to this no, look, you know, I'm not going to rule it out, but I'm not going to assign it a high probability uh, this is a probability question, yes, but is there a story there consistent with physics at best We know today yes, it is possible great, what do you think about bitcoin and ethereum? oh yes, we have fans, apparently only one, how many Bitcoin developers here, how many people, some, okay, that's respectable, look at the blockchain, let's break up Bitcoin. of blockchain, yes, blockchain is an important concept, in fact, we investors in a company called blockstream, which is making sidechains and expanding the concept of blockchain, much of the financial industry that exists today should not exist.

I mean, bankers add very little value if I can. I ask everyone to never go on the bench, that would be great. I get in trouble for saying it, but Wall Street adds far more harm than it adds value, although they will argue that financial service is an important component. I agree that between 2 and 5% of what happens on Wall Street is actually very important social services, the other 95% encourages behavior and attacks on society that are completely unjustified and it is a system that perpetuates itself. I'm not a fan, in fact I hate it. dealing with bankers on Wall Street um and then someone will hate me for it but that's okay

sometimes

it's good to be

hated

by the wrong people, he said not in City but going back to your question about bitcoin I think it's an important set of services the problem. with Bitcoin as a use for blockchain it is used too much to circumvent the law, okay so, illegal drugs, illegal trade, uh, you can read a book like darknet, which is really fascinating, read it and you realize if something is used so much for things that are not part of society, yes, or the lighter side of society, as opposed to the dark, the system, the authorities will do whatever it takes to block it and discourage, for example, the arms trade or slavery child or sex trafficking. or you know, choose your medications and when that happens it hurts the Bitcoin system, so I think for example there is an identification system in India called the odar system that billions of people register for.

If you assign IDs to each Bitcoin trade, it's much more. It is likely to grow, becomes compatible with the financial system, becomes compatible with anti-money laundering and know your customer, banking requirements that regulators and most companies had anti-terrorism efforts in most countries and then it can grow because then it adds. efficiency for society I think it is a really important concept, it is unfortunate that it is chained to illegal activities, well, it is because it emerged from the social movement of those types of people, right, which was very explicit, the social movement actually had some good characteristics. but unfortunately yes, like I said, technology can be used for good or bad, yes, if there are too many bad things associated with it, it becomes harder for it to becomecommon thing, yeah, I mean, the most logical thing people initially tried to use Bitcoin for was moving money, which is screwing over the bankers we don't like, so anyway, it really gave me a weird boo, I guess you guys love spending money on Western Union to send to your family, okay what an amazing company is still around. right, um, how do you see it and shouldn't it be?

I agree with Western Union, I mean anyway, virtual reality, how do you see it changing in the future? um I think it's a new technology, like most new technologies, it's hard to predict how it will do. This happens, so some uses are quite PR entertainment, obviously a great use for virtual reality or virtual reality. I think tourism will be a big part of VR if I can't go to Papa New Guinea. By the way, a fascinating place. At least it should. being able to go virtually there are industrial uses of virtual reality or virtual reality that are even more important, especially if you are in the field working in a complex refinery and you don't need to consult the manual, it's a classic example of surgery, other things like that, but I hope the most interesting uses don't come to mind today, incredible, so I'll leave this with the last thing you can say: what would you say to these thousand people who should remove the only one from this talk?

One thing, the only tip is that if you forgot everything we talked about tonight, which I really enjoyed. What would you like to reinforce or tell them? You know, I come back to this number of "If you are." willing to fail you will allow yourself to succeed and most people are too influenced by the people around them telling them what is supposed to happen or not. I like to say that very, very few people have an internal compass that says this is what I believe. It's not what I read, not what my friends expect, I have a belief system and I'm going to follow my belief system, whether it's living life a certain way or inventing the future, so imagine the possible and try to make it happen, and if if you don't succeed one you learn a lot two just try again so imagine the possible would be my only final message and don't be afraid especially when you are young and you can afford to fail now after having three kids and they need to go to college, you need to pay your mortgage, you start taking on responsibilities, so you have to balance failure with responsibilities, but the and the after.

In life, especially in middle age, you have more responsibilities of that kind, so that you can't ignore them, but from the beginning you are freer than you think, you are more limited by what you think you can do than by what you can really do, and it's fun. To speak to an audience like this incredible, let's give him a big round of applause. You really are better than you.