Steve Jobs and the Uses of AI

In this video, Steve Jobs is at his most impressive -- visionary and charismatic. It's 1985, he's visiting a university in Sweden, a meeting to which he arrived via helicopter (and was roasted for it later in the video). Young and polished, wearing a suit, not the black and denim that would become his trademark, he offers his prescient vision and hopes for the future of computing, including what we call artificial intelligence. 

Jobs recounts that he was immensely jealous when he learned that Alexander the Great's tutor, for over a decade, was none other than Aristotle. Through the medium of books, we are able to read Aristotle's own words, unmediated. But we can't ask Aristotle questions, so the medium is static and fixed-bandwidth. 

Jobs sees his burgeoning industry and the soon-to-be ubiquity of personal computers (the original Macintosh was released in 1984) as the introduction to society of new medium. The existing media were print (text and images), radio (audio), television (video), etc. While books deliver information in the form of text on a page, computers transmit information in the form of/via software. Software, unlike print, is dynamic and high-bandwidth. 

In this clip (full video is below), Jobs describes his goal for software and computing is powerful enough to capture the worldview of humanity's greatest thinkers, so down the road, young pupils can interact with that person (or, specifically, with a computer generated rendition of that person), asking questions and receive thoughtful and insightful answers, even though the person has long since returned to dust.

I think it's fair to say that the internet has already allowed for the diffusion of knowledge/communications across space in ways that profoundly affect our system of education.

More than a decade after Jobs' death (aged 56), we are just now beginning to see the promise and power of "artificial intelligence." See OpenAI's DALL-E (plain language to image generator) and ChatGPT (plain language interactive chatbot) softwares. Link to news.

One software machine-learning company has produced an AI generated podcast/conversation between Joe Rogan and Steve Jobs that lasts 20 minutes. 

In Jobs' imagination, the next Aristotle would spend his whole life interacting with a computer, which would be intimately learning from the person about her thought processes, opinions, approaches to problem solving, personality, etc. Of course, this would require each person to have their own computer device that they interacted with frequently and deeply. That was so far from the reality of 1985, but it is exactly where we are today. Jobs was instrumental in pushing people and industry toward the 1:1 model of one person to one machine. Computers are personal devices today. 

For the podcast Rogan interview, a computer was fed Jobs's biography, and as much audio and video footage of him as exists online. In light of this, and the direction of current technology trends, Jobs's Aristotle thought experiment does not seem like such a wacky idea; it was a serious vision of the distant future. 

The iPhone is a powerful computer, chock full of sensors, that we interact with very intimately. It is always with us. In so many ways, it can be said that the device and its programs are learning about us as we use it. What if it actively studied its user? With the iPhone, Jobs produced in 2008 the perfect device for what he was anticipating in 1985.

I was inspired to go back and find the 1985 video of Jobs because of this article the NYTimes published today.