Vinod Khosla on value of knowledge: Will farmers, oncologists with same AI expertise get equal pay?

Vinod Khosla is the founder of Khosla Ventures. He is worth $11.9 billion, as per Forbes

OpenAI’s first institutional backer and Indian American investor Vinod Khosla has raised a blunt question about the value of human knowledge in the AI world: if AI can perform 80 percent of all jobs by 2030, will farmers and oncologists—armed with the same AI systems—end up earning the same?

By 2030, Khosla told Fortune, two‑thirds of all jobs will be “capable of being done by an AI”, including professions historically insulated by specialised knowledge—physicians, radiologists, accountants, chip designers, and salespeople among them. In his view, AI will outperform humans in most knowledge-driven tasks, reshaping not just labour markets but the very meaning of expertise.

He illustrated the scale of the shift with a stark economic calculation: $15 trillion of US GDP—labour—will “mostly go away.” That disappearance, he argued, should not be read as collapse but as a structural transformation, a deflationary shock that conventional economic models fail to capture. Lower prices, abundant goods, and widespread automation, he said, could push purchasing power to extremes—by 2040, even $10,000 may buy more than today’s $100,000.

But embedded within those forecasts is the deeper provocation: When AI distributes expert-level competence to everyone, does the traditional hierarchy of wages still hold? If an AI system can guide a farm worker through precision agriculture as effectively as it can assist an oncologist through complex diagnostics, what becomes of pay scales built on the scarcity of skill?

"Here’s the thing to imagine," Khosla said. "Almost all expertise globally will be free. It’ll raise lots of interesting questions. Do you pay a farm worker the same as an oncologist? Because they happen to have the same expertise, which is the expertise of AI."

He added that humans in the future may not feel the need to do jobs. "On the enterprise side, functions left for humans to do are very hard to predict. It’s pretty unlikely a 5-year-old today will be looking for a job," he said. "First, the need to work will go away. People will still work on the things they want to work on, not because they need to work."