Computers and Society: From First Date to an Endearing Life Together

Forty years ago this week, on June 15th?1983, just five months after 苹果 released the Lisa computer, Steve Jobs delivered a speech at the International Design Conference in Aspen, Colorado titled “Computers and society are out on a first date”. The speech can be found on page 47 of the newly released e-book, ‘Make Something Wonderful’ which is available for free at?www.stevejobsarchive.com. As I was flipping through the various writings, speeches and fun photographs in this 200-page compilation I came across the Aspen speech. Jobs was speaking to an audience of designers because he knew what was coming, “By ’86, ’87, pick a year, people are going to spend more time interacting with these machines than they do interacting with automobiles today. People are going to be spending two, three hours a day interacting with these machines—longer than they spend in the car.” His plea was to get their help, insights and focus on enabling better computer interfaces – if people are going to spend a significant portion of their day interacting with these machines then the interface, the experience, the simplicity needed to improve. This obsession eventually led to the foundational breakthrough in mobile computing with the seamless and intuitive touch interfaces first appearing on the iPhone twenty-five years later.

Toward the end of the speech, Steve went on a bit of a digression:

“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 the books. I could go and read what Aristotle or Plato wrote without an intermediary in the way. And a book was a phenomenal thing. It 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 fifty to one hundred 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 this person’s dead and gone, we can ask this machine, “Hey, what would Aristotle have said? What about this?” 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.”

As I read the excerpt above, I couldn’t help but to think of the age we have entered in 2023, forty years later. The next age of AI computing ushered in by generative AI and the ability for a large language model to ingest a massive corpus of data and capture an “underlying spirit, an underlying set of principles or an underlying way of looking at the world”. As usual, Steve had it right, somewhere in the neighborhood of 50 to 100 years after his 1983 speech we would start that journey of coming up with machines that could do what he described. He also knew that for a machine to do this it would need access to a documented streaming consciousness of individuals throughout their lives. At first blush it almost sounds comical when he states, ‘if he carries one of these machines with him his whole life – his or her whole life – and types in all this stuff…” But that is precisely what is happening through social media, wiki-authors, the capture, translation and digitization of writings, presentations, and speeches into text, voice, and video. Sometimes ‘the machine’ is carried around with us and sometimes it is captured by infrastructure or by others, but the offline world is twinning with the online world like never before and that will only continue to accelerate. As generative AI systems splinter from the current stage of horizontal knowledge interaction and generation to subject matter experts to the ability to adapt and learn a personality what does that mean for the future of education, entertainment, decision-making, etc.? As some creative Redditors demonstrated, generative AI is already making Steve Jobs’ prediction a reality – learning not just from writings that exhibit conversational style but also from voice qualities, sound and personality. Creating the ability to ask Steve Jobs questions and get back a completely authentic sounding response in terms of both content and timbre:?https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/11ickjz/steve_jobs_voicebot_on_covid19/

The variations on this theme are endless and applicable to nearly every domain. What if a college professor were a generative-AI that could deliver traditional lectures but also be able to field questions directly from students and do that in a one-on-one fashion? A course in physics in which the AI is trained on the collective writings, discoveries, and personalities of Feynman, Bohr, Einstein and Heisenberg. Lectures delivered with the enthusiasm of Feynman who could teach the most complex topics in the easiest to understand fashion, while also tapping into the collective brilliance of Bohr, Einstein and Heisenberg during a Q&A.?https://futurism.com/the-feynman-lectures-are-now-online-and-free

Entertainment - dialing-up a duet between two vocalists in their prime, neutralizing their age difference and delivering that performance in a way that is true to the audio characteristics of a specific venue. Ray Charles singing with Lady Gaga at the Roman Colosseum in 100AD. Make that request and gen-AI spits out an on-demand concert based on the corpus of data surrounding those artists and the acoustics of the coliseum given what is known about its design at that time. It’s great that the new Apple VisionPro can leverage the existing Apple ecosystem of applications and media and it’s also neat to think of watching a movie within its immersive envelope. But generative-AI is the killer-app for that interface, I don’t want to watch a movie in VR I want to experience a?curated on-demand reality?(CODRs) like the one described above. One day, we’ll be able to ask a generative AI app to, ‘show me a debate between Plato and Aristotle moderated by Robin Williams on the subject of modern comedy’ and that event, which never existed before until it was summoned by that user will be an entirely new form of entertainment delivered “live” in a VR format which will be the most compelling way to consume it. Yet another example of Robert C. Wolcott 's concept of Proximity that states, ”Digital technologies push the production and provision of value ever closer to the moment of demand in time and space.”

Steve Jobs continues to deliver insights long after he has left us and once again as happened with the desktop and mobile devices before it the content will catch-up to the experience enabled by AR/VR devices like the Vision Pro. The killer app for VR is leveraging AI to deliver CODRs, perhaps even selecting one among a library of CODRs that were prompted by others – a Youtube if you will for curated realities.?

Generative AI is a powerful tool and it will be the underlying content engine for virtual experiences spanning education to entertainment. Computers and society are way past that first date in Aspen in the summer of 1983 and have gotten much more serious about their relationship here in 2023 as they prepare to walk down the aisle of becoming one….a singularity. With that in mind, I’ll leave you with two closing quotes:?

“Man as a toolmaker has the ability to make a tool to amplify the inherent capability that he/she has. And that's exactly what we are doing here…. We are building tools that amplify a human ability." – Steve Jobs, 2014

“When the first human-being picked up a club, was it a tool or a weapon? With AI, I see wonderful tools, but I see weapons too.” – Father Paolo Benanti , Technology Ethical Advisor, 2023

What do you think?

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