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Steve Jobs is 28 years old, and seems a little nervous as he starts his speech to a group of designers gathered under a large tent in Aspen, Colorado. He fiddles with his bow tie and soon removes his suit jacket, dropping it to the floor when he finds no other place to set it down. It is 1983, and he’s about to ask designers for their help in improving the look of the coming wave of personal computers. But first he will tell them that those computers will shatter the lives they have led to date.
“How many of you are 36 years … older than 36?” he asks. That’s how old the computer is, he says. But even the younger people in the room, including himself, are sort of “precomputer,” members of the television generation. A distinct new generation, he says, is emerging: “In their lifetimes, the computer will be the predominant medium of communication.”
Quite a statement at the time, considering that very few of the audience, according to Jobs’ impromptu polling, owns a personal computer or has even seen one. Jobs tells the designers that they not only will soon use one, but it will be indispensable, and deeply woven into the fabric of their lives.
The video of this speech is the centerpiece of an online exhibit called The Objects of Our Life, presented by the Steve Jobs Archive, the ambitious history project devoted to telling the story of Apple’s fabled cofounder. When the exhibit went live earlier this month—after the discovery of a long-forgotten VHS tape in Jobs’ personal collection—I found it not only a compelling reminder of the late CEO, but pertinent to our own time, when another new technology is arriving with equal promise and peril.
The occasion of the speech was the annual Aspen International Design Conference. The theme of that year’s event was “The Future Isn’t What It Used to Be,” making Jobs the perfect speaker. While much of the talk is about his views on making products beautiful, the underlying message is straight out of that Bob Dylan tune: Something is happening and you don’t know what it is. He told his audience things that seemed preposterous: that in a few years more computers would be shipped than cars, and that people would spend more time with those computers than they spend riding in those cars. He told them that computers would become connected with each other, and everyone would use something called electronic mail, which he had to describe because it was such a strange concept then. Computers, he insisted, would become the dominant medium of communication. His goal was to make all that happen, to get to the point “where people are using these things and they go, ‘Wasn’t this the way it always was?’”
Jobs’ vision seemed to sway his audience, which gave him a standing ovation. Before he left Aspen that week, Jobs was asked to donate an object that would be placed in a time capsule that would commemorate the event. It was to be dug up in 2000. Jobs unhooked the mouse from the Lisa Computer he had brought to demo, and it was sealed in the capsule, along with an 8-track tape of the Moody Blues and a six-pack of beer.
The speech itself is kind of a time capsule. Jobs was right when he said one day we would not be able to imagine what life was like before these new tools he was ushering into the mainstream. Those of us still around who are, in Jobs’ term, “born precomputer” often astound young people by describing how we did our work (manual typewriters! carbon copies!), communicated with each other (phone booths!), and entertained ourselves (three TV channels! Bonanza!) before computers became our virtual appendages.
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But on that sunny day in June, Jobs’ prism was rose-colored. The evolution he foretold came at a price. Just this past weekend, for instance, we experienced one of many downsides of this technology’s ubiquity. An update error in a security program called CrowdStrike crashed millions of mission-crucial Windows computers, and much of the world ground to a halt. Businesses curtailed operations. Doctors had to postpone medical procedures. Airports turned into all-night shelters for the stranded.
At Aspen, Jobs wasn’t bothered by the specter of unintended consequences. When an audience member asked him about privacy violations—another headache caused by pervasive digital tech—he shrugged off the question. “I haven’t heard a ton of issues concerning these giant databases knowing everything about us that had much substance to them,” he said. “The thing I’m most concerned with is the ability to turn all this stuff into something we can do something about.”
Eventually Jobs came to recognize the double-edged nature of computer tech, and tried to shape Apple as a champion of privacy. But his early apparent naivety is one of the startling aspects of this speech. Just as digital tech was finding its way, so was Steve Jobs. Technology historian Leslie Berlin, executive director of the archive, says revealing that was a big reason for the exhibit. “It shows Steve very young, with so many of the elements that made him great, and also still figuring things out,” she says. “We felt this talk could really resonate with that stage of people's lives where they’re working outside the main lanes, trying to pull together things that haven’t been pulled together in exactly this way before.”
That tension helps make Objects of Our Lives chillingly relevant to our present moment. In 1983, Jobs was trying to help people come to grips with a new technology that would change their lives. Some were tinkering with it, and some savvy pioneers had already transformed their businesses with it. But most people, whether they were intimidated or skeptical, hadn’t adopted it.
That sounds to me like society’s current status with artificial intelligence. Like computer technology 40 years ago, it’s been stealthily baked into infrastructure and is finally becoming available to all in a powerful form. But only a minority of people are actually using it, and a relatively modest subset are making full use of it. Others are, well, intimidated or skeptical.
But for better or worse, it’s coming, and it will be transformative. Jobs himself in the speech flicked at the idea when he said in the next 50 years we might “come up with these machines that can capture an underlying view of the world.” A future Aristotle, he speculated, might log all his thoughts into one of those systems. “Someday after the person is dead and gone, we could ask this machine, ‘Hey what would Aristotle have said?’”
That vision is straight out of the playbook of those who are trying to build AI. To date, though, none have pulled together as charming a presentation as Steve Jobs did. Maybe that’s a good thing. This time around, we should be cognizant of the dangers early on.
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That aforementioned time capsule, by the way, has a story of its own. When it came time to unearth it in 2000, no one seemed to know where it was. But in 2014, a National Geographic team used scientific techniques to locate it, and publicly cut it open. The first item they pulled out was the mouse that Jobs donated. It did not seem like an antique at all, but something you might find on a desktop right now.
We’re living today in 1983’s tomorrow. As artificial intelligence improves, and worms itself more deeply into society, our own future is definitely not what it used to be.
Time Travel
My own first encounter with Steve Jobs came several months after the June 1983 Aspen appearance, when I was writing about the new Macintosh computer for Rolling Stone. In the interview, which I published as a Q&A in the 20th anniversary edition of my book Insanely Great, he explained why the unique moment of emerging digital technology led him to obsessively build this new machine—even though it meant, he told me, putting a romantic relationship on hold.
What’s driving you?
Well, it’s like computers and society are out on a first date in this decade, and for some crazy reason we’re just in the right place at the right time to make that romance blossom. We can make them great, we can make a great product that people can easily use. They’ll have great experiences. And if we don’t do it, IBM’s going to take over … [We’re] the only thing standing between IBM and a monopoly of the entire computer business. If having really great products—if having much better products isn’t enough to compete with them—then they’ll have the whole thing. They’ll be the greatest monopoly of all time. It’d be like owning every oil company and every car company in 1920. A lot of people would say, ‘Well, yeah … that’s a shame but there’s a woman who’s important to me, and I have to pay attention to that.’ It gets back to what you think is important, What do you do when you wake up every morning? And to me, for now, I just look at this whole experience as like boot camp. Great basic training. And for what I don’t know. Also, I look at most of the people I get to work with as artists. I look at myself as an artist if anything.
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Really?
Sort of trapeze artist.
With or without a net?
Without.
Ask Me One Thing
Rick asks, “Will the content licensing deals media are doing to fuel Google’s AI offset the loss in ad revenue from Google Overviews?”
Thanks for the question, Rick. You specifically mention Google, which now presents the AI Overviews you mention. But many AI companies are involved in an industry-wide effort to legally license content, partly as a hedge against more lawsuits from companies like The New York Times, which is suing OpenAI and Microsoft for using its journalism to train chatbots.
While the terms of these deals are seldom shared, there’s reason to think that they could reach millions of dollars, representing a significant revenue source. Nonetheless, I believe it would be a mistake to think that this could be a lasting replacement for lost money from ads or subscriptions. A few years ago, many media organizations took Facebook’s money when the social media giant said it would pay to populate a special tab for news. Those publishers were left hanging when Facebook/Meta discontinued the project. No wonder some journalistic veterans like Jessica Lessin, editor of The Information, wrote in The Atlantic that news firms have a history of making such deals, lured by tech’s fat wallets and wide distribution channels. “It never, ever, works as planned,” she wrote.
The Atlantic’s CEO, Nick Thompson (former WIRED top editor), who negotiated a license with OpenAI, defends such deals. He even provided a cheerleading quote when OpenAI announced a prototype of its AI-powered search this week. His deal, Thompson says, is not a suicide pact, because the content-licensing is limited to only LLMs trained during the period of the contract. Speaking generally and not to the specific Atlantic deal, though, I’m not sure that such a strategy protects media outlets. Even if these agreements last only a few years, during that time the business models might change so much it would be impossible to return to a world before people got all their information from chatbots.
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There’s something else to think about here. It’s media corporations that make these deals with the AI powers. But the writers that produce the content aren’t getting any of the money, even though it's their work that gets sucked up into the giant corpus. While the terms of employment might legally allow big publishers to resell the work, in almost all cases, this reuse wasn’t considered when people took their jobs. What if a columnist wrote with a distinctive style for a newspaper for years? When the paper licenses content, that scribe’s very personality can be replicated in the licensee’s LLM—and be put to use even after the columnist goes to another venue or starts their own Substack.
Just as the internet presented an organic threat to journalism’s business model, so does AI. I’m skeptical that licensing content to tech companies will solve that problem.
You can submit questions to mail@wired.com. Write ASK LEVY in the subject line.
End Times Chronicle
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