Steve Jobs didn’t only create the future during his lifetime through revolutionary products like the iPhone and the iPad, but he seemed to have had an eye for what technology might bring forth even after his passing.
Steve Jobs had appeared to “predict” the appearance of Generative AI in a speech in 1983. Jobs had come up with an idea of a “machine” which would record all of an individual’s writings and ideas when they’re alive, store it, and enable others to interact with them after they were no more.
“Going to school, I had a few great teachers and a lot of mediocre teachers. And, the thing that, 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. And a book was a phenomenal thing,” Jobs had said in 1983.
“(Books) got right from the source to the destination without anything in the middle. The problem was, you can’t ask Aristotle a question. And 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’s dead and gone, we can ask this machine, Hey, what would Aristotle have said?” he continued.
“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,” Jobs had said.
Jobs’ idea for such a machine appears to be coming to life with generative AI. It’s now easy to train an AI on large amounts of text, video and images, and then query it for answers. Several projects have already that answer questions from large corpuses of text have already been attempted — there are chatbots that aim to answer questions on the Bhagawad Gita, and some companies have even made chatbots on Aristotle as Jobs had envisaged. Jobs wasn’t only one of the world’s greatest entrepreneurs, but such a visionary that his ideas are coming true half-a-century after he’d predicted them.