Watch Steve Jobs describe the future and AI a year before the Mac
The Steve Jobs Archive has released a fascinating video of a 28-year-old Jobs explaining computers to a skeptical crowd in 1983.
![Man in a suit standing behind a vintage Macintosh computer on a desk, with a striped wallpaper background and a plant on the right.](https://photos5.appleinsider.com/gallery/60425-124267-000-lead-Steve-Jobs-1984-xl.jpg)
Steve Jobs one year after his Aspen talk, posing here with the original Macintosh
The Steve Jobs Archive was launched in 2022 by Laurene Powell Jobs, Tim Cook, and Jony Ive. From that start, it has aimed to be "an authoritative home for Steve's story," and include video, audio, and text resources about Apple's co-founder.
It's now released "The Objects of Our Life," a very rare 55-minute video from 1983 that shows a young Steve Jobs making one of his first major speeches. As Jony Ive says in his introduction, this was from the early days of Apple, yet Jobs was predicting the future that he would go on to help create.
![Man in a white shirt and bow tie speaking at a microphone with a brown background.](https://photos5.appleinsider.com/gallery/60425-124268-001-Jobs-talk-xl.jpg)
Steve Jobs talking at Aspen in 1983
"I find it breathtaking how profound his understanding was of the dramatic changes that were about to happen as the computer became broadly accessible," writes Ive. "Of course, beyond just being prophetic, he was fundamental in defining products that would change our culture and our lives forever."
Alongside Ive's introduction, this Steve Jobs Archive feature contains much more from this talk at the 1983 International Design Conference in Aspen. There's the 55-minute main video, plus more than 2,000 words of background -- and an even rarer series of clips from Jobs demonstrating the Lisa the night before his talk where he mentions artificial intelligence decades before Apple Intelligence came to be.
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Comments
Oh, my sweet summer child... : )
Chalk it up to his optimism, but one thing Jobs did get wrong (a bit more than halfway through) was his lack of concern for breaches of privacy.
Poe was writing about a (fake) chess playing machine called "The Turk" (which we now assume had a human hidden inside it, but at the time, this was not known.) He was trying to debunk the machine's capabilities, but the quote above is a mocking critique of what Poe says about the fools who believed that an intelligent chess-playing machine was the most astonishing invention of mankind. Ultimately, however, Poe was the fool, because we now have chess machines that match Poe's description, and are rated more than 1000 FIDE points higher than Magnus Carlsen. I do agree with Poe's implication that an intelligent machine is, beyond all comparison, the most astonishing of the inventions of mankind. None of the following inventions will have the same impact on mankind as AI: