In his speech, Jobs, then 28, explained how he saw technology evolving in the future and described features that resembled the AI-powered chatbots we have today.
In the video, Jobs said that while he enjoyed reading the books of Aristotle and Plato, he wished he could ask them questions. But over the next 50 to 100 years, he envisioned a machine that could encapsulate “a person’s underlying mind, or an underlying set of principles, or any underlying way of looking at the world.”
The machine would be able to generate answers to questions similar to those a real person could answer.
“When the next Aristotle comes along, maybe if he carries one of these machines around with him his whole life, his whole life, and he types all these things, then maybe one day, after he’s dead, we can ask that machine, ‘Hey, what would Aristotle have said?'” Jobs said during his speech.
Nearly 40 years later, it appears the company is catching up to Jobs’ prediction about the advent of generative AI tools like large language models.
LLMs, commonly known as AI chatbots, are a type of AI algorithm that trains on large amounts of data and learns to identify patterns and connections between words and topics. It uses this knowledge to interpret prompts and generate new text, image, or audio outputs.
Similar to the Apple co-founder’s prediction, an LLM could be fed all of Aristotle’s known works and then be able to answer users’ questions in a way similar to how the model thinks Aristotle would answer.
Additionally, today’s tech giants are pursuing the next frontier of AI: artificial general intelligence, which generally refers to artificial intelligence that can perform a task at the same level as a human, or even one level above.
But when we might reach that point is a topic of debate among today’s technology leaders.
Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX and owner of X, said he believes AGI will likely be available by 2026. He made the comment during an April 24 interview on X with Nicolai Tangen, CEO of Norges Bank Investment Management.
However, Robin Li, CEO of Baidu, one of China’s largest tech companies, said at the VivaTech conference in Paris in May that we were about 10 years away from reaching that point.
This isn’t the first time that one of Jobs’ predictions about the future of technology has come true.
In a 1985 interview with Playboy magazine, Jobs said that people would eventually use computers in their free time outside of work or the office. “Computers will be indispensable in most homes,” he said.
In 1984, less than 10% of American households owned a computer, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Today, about 95% of American households own at least one type of computing device, according to the latest available census data.
In the Playboy interview, Jobs also predicted that we could use computers to connect with each other online.
“The most compelling reason most people will buy a home computer will be to connect it to a national communications network,” Jobs told Playboy.
This idea foreshadowed the invention of the World Wide Web by London computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee in 1989, as a way to help colleagues share information.
Although this iteration of the internet began with a website published by Berners-Lee in 1991, there are now nearly 1.88 billion websites as of 2021, according to the World Economic Forum.
