- A new exhibit at the Steve Jobs Archives reveals Jobs’ 1983 vision for generative AI.
- Jobs predicted that AI would be like a book that users could ask questions and interact with.
- Today’s AI chatbots are already realizing Jobs’ vision.
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Sometimes the best ideas aren’t even new ideas. Even the most talked-about technology today – chatbots powered by generative AI – was something Steve Jobs predicted would revolutionize the world.
a New Digital Exhibits Includes footage from the Steve Jobs Archive Taken from a presentation Jobs gave at the International Design Conference in Aspen in 1983. In this presentation, the Apple founder talks about the potential of new technologies that can answer questions and think like humans. For him, this was a natural follow-up to the book.
The books Jobs found as a student were “amazing. They went straight from source to destination, with no intermediate steps.” The problem was, there was no way to interact with them. Whether Jobs was reading Plato or Aristotle or some other work, he didn’t like the fact that he couldn’t stop and question the text.
His hopes for the future are:
“Looking ahead to the next 50 to 100 years, I think if we can really invent a machine that can capture the underlying ethos, the underlying set of principles, or the underlying worldview, then when the next Aristotle comes along, he’ll carry this machine around with him for the rest of his life, his whole life, and he’ll input all these things, and then after he passes away, we’ll be able to ask the machine, ‘Hey, what would Aristotle have said? What about this?'”
More than 40 years after Jobs’ speech, the world seems on track to develop these machines. AI companies are training AI chatbots like ChatGPT with data from books and other sources to answer questions from users. Some of the bots even pretend to be famous historical figures. Sometimes they get the facts right, as Jobs predicted, and sometimes they don’t, but these are new ways to interact with people, ideas, and history.