Vinod Khosla says he thinks today's 5-year-olds probably won't need a job

• OpenAI investor Vinod Khosla predicts 80% of jobs will be done by AI by the early 2030s.
• The AI investor joins a list of high-earning executives who have warned about the future of jobs.
• He frames the battle between the US and China for AI dominance as a "techno-economic war."

Billionaire venture capitalist Vinod Khosla says most of today's children won't need jobs when they grow up.

In a recent interview with Fortune Magazine, the Sun Microsystems cofounder and tech investor predicted that artificial intelligence will be able to do up to 80% of jobs by the early 2030s.

"It's pretty unlikely a five-year-old today will be looking for a job," he said.

Khosla, the founder of Khosla Ventures, has built a reputation for making bold, well-timed technology bets. He was the first institutional investor in OpenAI in 2019, investing $50 million at a $1 billion valuation — the largest initial investment of his career at the time.

In the interview, released Wednesday, he argued that rapid advances in AI and robotics will make most labor effectively free within 15 years, creating an era of extreme abundance and lower prices.

Instead of money-making occupations, he said, people will pursue their passions.

"The need to work will go away," he said. "People will still work on the things they want to work on, not because they need to work."

Referring to manual labor jobs like assembly-line roles and farm work, Khosla said, "Those are not jobs. Those are servitude."

Khosla is the latest in a line of Silicon Valley executives who believe that some of today's most sought-after jobs might soon fade.

Last month, Boris Cherny, the creator of Claude Code, said that he believes AI will make the job title software engineer "go away," starting next year. Dario Amodei, Anthropic's CEO, also said he believes AI could soon eliminate 50% of entry-level office jobs.

Khosla said his vision is not apocalyptic — but only if America beats its competitors with better technology.

He framed the US-China AI competition as a "techno-economic war," arguing that whoever wins the race will shape global economic power.

Whoever wins that war, he said, will also enjoy a world filled with abundant tech, lower prices, and less human exploitation.

"I would suspect by 2040, $30,000 — and maybe $10,000 — will buy much more than you can buy if you have a $100,000 income today," he said.