Steve Jobs made grand predictions of computing that appeared to predict the modern generative AI revolution over 40 years ago – or at least he made an educated guess on how human-computer interaction would evolve.
Taking to the stage in 1983 for the International Design Conference, newly-released footage from the Steve Jobs Archive shows a fresh-faced Jobs sharing his vision for the future of personal computing and Apple, the company he co-founded some seven years prior.
At the 20-minute mark, Jobs talks about the role of teachers in society, mentioning specifically his own experiences in school and the extent to which books helped him stay out of trouble.
“When I was going to school, I had a few great teachers and a lot of mediocre teachers, and the thing that probably kept me out of jail was books because I could go read what Aristotle wrote, or what Plato wrote, and I didn't have to have an intermediary in the way,” Jobs said.
He described a book as a “phenomenal thing” in its ability to journey right from source to destination as a method of teaching. The only problem - “You can’t ask Aristotle a question.”
To solve this problem, Jobs felt that the next 50 to 100 years of development in computing should in some way look to create machines capable of capturing an “underlying set of principles or an underlying way of looking at the world.”
This would mean, Jobs thought, the world’s next Aristotle could carry one of these “machines” around, input all their thinking, and leave a digital footprint for future generations to interact with.
“Maybe someday, after the person's dead and gone, we can ask this machine: ‘hey, what would Aristotle have said? What about this?’” Jobs said.
“And maybe we won't get the right answer, but maybe we will, and that's really exciting to me, and that's one of the reasons I'm doing what I'm doing,” he added.
The parallels with modern generative AI are interesting – a form of computing technology that allows users to interact with it conversationally and receive answers to broad or complex questions.
That being said, Jobs’ vision of the future is more amorphous and less a like-for-like depiction of the chatbots most people are using. Few ChatGPT users would expect the tool’s responses to accurately mimic the musings of an ancient philosopher, for example.
One company is currently drawing on inspiration from the learned minds of that period, however. Pegasystems unveiled a generative AI tool dubbed ‘Socrates’ in a similar reference to ancient Greece at its annual conference earlier this year.
Designed to provide tuition within companies, the firm described it as a generative AI teacher that will serve as a “radical departure from traditional online corporate learning. ”
