There are fears that AI might end up increasing inequality in the coming years, but one of US’s top VCs believes that it will bring about equality in an important sector — healthcare.
Vinod Khosla, who’d co-founded Sun Microsystems and then founded VC firm Khosla Ventures, believes that AI will cause the gap between the healthcare received by rich and poor people to shrink. “If you take a million doctors in the US, on average making 300K a year, that’s $300 billion worth of expertise that will operate like 10 times as much (with AI). It could be $3 trillion worth of expertise, but it costs a fraction. And so these trends of expertise being free will also be hugely deflationary on the economy, and because of that, accessible to everybody,” he said in an interview.
He said that this would democratize access to healthcare. “I don’t think there’ll be a major difference between what the rich can access and the poor can access. I don’t think compute will cost enough to matter. It will for a while, for a decade or so probably. Long term, very unlikely (that compute costs will matter). In fact, there’s almost no chance (that compute will matter) in 20 years as these AI systems develop more reasoning capability, and greater depth of precision in their thinking,” he added.
Khosla also said that AI would help in making new scientific discoveries. “You’ll start to have amazing creativity from scientists. People don’t think of creativity in science, but if you imagine DNA, it was conceived in a dream. And those kinds of thinking out of the box, imagining other things, AI scientists will be able to do and complement a real scientist. So that’s another example of expertise being near free, but it’s much more important than that, because they’ll exponentially increase the rate of innovation,” he added.
Khosla makes a good point. AI systems have already shown that they can diagnose diseases, and giving access to an AI model to someone in rural Africa would tremendously improve health outcomes. It could’ve taken decades for qualified doctors to reach all parts of the world, but AI can end up doing it in a few short years. Also, AI will eventually get so good that doctors at the best hospitals will refer to AI as well, which would mean that someone in Mayo Clinic could essentially receive the same as someone in rural Africa. Also, AI will accelerate drug discovery and other breakthroughs, and likely make them accessible to all kinds of people. AI could well lead to some inequality, based primarily on how well people are able to adapt to the new technology, but there’s a solid argument to be made that it could potentially democratize healthcare.