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Sometimes, the best ideas aren't new ideas. Even the buzziest technology of the moment — chatbots driven by generative AI — was something Steve Jobs predicted would revolutionize our world.
A new digital exhibit from the Steve Jobs Archive includes footage from a 1983 presentation Jobs gave at the International Design Conference in Aspen. In it, the Apple founder talks about the promise of a new technology that could respond to questions and think like a human. In his mind, it was the natural successor to a book.
A book Jobs said he discovered in his school days "was a phenomenal thing. It got right from the source to the destination without anything in the middle." The problem was that there was no way to interact with it. Whether Jobs was reading Plato or Aristotle or something else, he didn't like that he couldn't stop and ask the text a question.
His hope for the future was the following:
"I think as we look towards the next 50 to 100 years, if we really can come up with these machines that can capture an underlying spirit, or an underlying set of principles, or an underlying way of looking at the world, then when the next Aristotle comes around, maybe if he carries around one of these machines with him his whole life, his or her whole life, and types in all this stuff, then maybe someday after the person is dead and gone, we can ask this machine, 'Hey, what would Aristotle have said? What about this?'"
It's been a little over 40 years since Jobs' speech, and the world seems well on its way to developing these machines. AI companies are training AI chatbots like ChatGPT with data from books and other sources to respond to questions from users. Some of them will even respond as if they are famous historical figures. Sometimes they get their facts right and sometimes they don't, as Jobs predicted, but they're a new way of interacting with people, ideas, and history.
