Steve Jobs Foresaw AI Chatbots Over Four Decades Ago

At the International Design Conference in Aspen in 1983, Steve Jobs spoke about the potential of a new technology capable of answering questions and thinking like a human. The speech has been featured on the Steve Jobs Archive website.

The Apple co-founder described interacting with a technology akin to modern generative AI chatbots as akin to conversing with a book.

He noted that while a book is a phenomenal thing, it lacks the ability to interact. During his speech, Jobs admitted his fondness for reading Aristotle and Plato and expressed a desire to ask them questions.

The entrepreneur speculated that within the next 50-100 years, a machine might emerge capable of encapsulating a “fundamental spirit, or set of principles, or worldview.” It would be able to generate answers to questions in a manner similar to a real person.

“When the next Aristotle comes around, perhaps if he carries one of these machines with him all his life and inputs all his information into it, maybe when that person dies and is gone, we can ask this machine: ‘Hey, what would Aristotle have said?'” Jobs remarked.

More than 40 years after his speech, humanity is training AI models using information from books and other sources to enable them to answer users’ questions.

In June, Apple announced the integration of ChatGPT into Siri and other services in iOS, iPadOS, and macOS operating systems.

Earlier, OpenAI unveiled a “more human-like” version of ChatGPT capable of processing visual data.