Steve Jobs talk from 1983
What is a computer, appeal to artists, the early internet and artificial intelligence
I always come back to this aphorism when I get overwhelmed with what’s going on in the world.
One of my favorite things to listen to is old prophetic interviews. They ground me in reality and give me a sense of perspective. I particularly like listening to old talks Steve Jobs gave. The older the better, and one of the oldest ones is a talk he gave on June 15 1983 to a small audience at an event called the International Design Conference in Aspen (IDCA).
In the talk, Jobs talks about a range of topics, from the future of computing to artificial intelligence. Here are some of the highlights.
What is a computer?
It's really simple it's just a simple machine but it's a new type of machine. The gears, the Pistons have been replaced with electrons.
He doesn’t romanticize what a computer does but focuses on speed and how that translates to apparent magic:
Say I could move a hundred times faster than than anyone in here in the blink of your eye. I could run out there and I could grab a bouquet of fresh spring flowers or something and I could run back in here and I could snap my fingers and you would all think I was a magician or something and yet I was basically doing a series of really simple instructions.
He spoke plainly about what a computer is doing. But he understood abstraction and eventually being able to tell a computer the equivalent of “fetch me a bouquet of flowers” and it would appear magical.
I love the analogy because it speaks to something beautiful and magical. Others may have used an analogy of being able to calculate taxes or something more utilitarian, but Jobs was a romantic at heart.
He then tied this back into fractional share computing through an analogy:
It's probably analogy take the electric motor the electric motor was first invented in the late 1800s and was first invented it was only possible to build a very very large one which meant that it could only be cost justified for very large applications and therefore electric motors did not proliferate very fast at all. But the next breakthrough was when somebody took one of these large electric motors and they ran a shaft through the middle of a factory and through a series of belts and pulleys brought shared this with the horsepower. That's one large electric motor on 15 or 20 medium sized workstations thereby allowing one electric motor to be cost justified on some medium scale tab and electric motors proliferated even further then but the real breakthrough was the invention of the fractional horsepower electric motor we could then bring the horsepower directly to where it was needed and cost justified on a totally individual application. I think there's about fifty five or so fractional horsepower motors now in every household if we look at the development of computers we see a real parallel we look the first computer was called the ENIAC in 1947.
Calling out to artists
One thing that made Jobs stand out from other pioneers in the space is the importance he placed on designers and people to make the machines beautiful.
We have a chance to make these things beautiful and we have a chance to communicate something through the design of the objects themselves. In addition to that we're going to spend over a hundred million dollars in the next 12 months on
media advertising Apple alone. IBM will spend at least an equivalent amount and we generate tens of millions of dollars worth of brochures posters, more than the auto industry again as a comparison and this stuff can either be great or it can be lousy and we need help we really really need your help.
Some critics of Jobs argue that his focus on design lead to a lot of pitfalls. For instance, he spent a lot of resources at Next (the company he founded after he was kicked out of Apple) on making the computers a perfect square. There were excesses that effectively made his product a failure, but he was right about focusing not just on utility but beauty and design.
For instance, he spoke about efforts in supporting new and multiple fonts
On the screen as you know the I’s are just as wide as the W's. They're non proportionally spaced fonts we call them you call them and its really been impossible to use multiple fonts on the screen at any given time. Matter of fact the fonts have been just garbage and it's really been impossible to embed any kind of graphic with text if you take a look at Lisa it is totally proportionally spaced text.
We have 30-40 fonts on the screen that come out at approximately eighty dots per inch inch resolution on the screen approximately up to 300 dots per inch
Part of this is playing to the audience since his talk was at a design conference. But his commitment to beauty was evident. The terminology isn’t well known enough to describe monospace versus proportional width fonts, because no one was thinking about this at the time. He made similar efforts in having Apple computers use rounded rectangles despite the inefficiency and complexity that would entail.
Computers as a medium
He saw computers as a new medium of communication. He saw himself as part of the television generation. Prior to television, radios were the dominant medium. When television was first invented, they applied radio content to the television. TV programming was essentially pointing a camera at a radio. That all changed but it took some time. Jobs saw the JFK funeral and moon landing as a turning point in terms of what television can do.
Television was going to come into his own as its own medium and I really think the first time that a lot of people were shook into realizing the television had come of age was the JFK funeral the nation a lot of the world experienced the JFK funeral in their living room and a level of intensity that wouldn't have been possible with radio. I think another more upbeat example was the Apollo landing that experience was not possible with the previous medium and yet it took us the better part of 20 years for that one to really evolved
He predicted a similar trajectory for computers. At first people took print media and put it on the computer. In the 1990s, websites were essentially digitized newspapers and books. It took decades to evolve content to computers.
Internet
Electronic mail where we link a bunch of computers together and we can send messages to an electronic mailbox which people can then receive at their leisure. We see that indeed in one sense we're sending voice through these wires and in another sense we're sending ones and zeros through these wires so the content that's traveling through the medium is certainly different. But the most interesting thing that's different is the process of communication when I talk on a telephone with anyone we both have to be on the phone at the same time.
Again its interesting to note the terminology. In other parts of the talk he talks about “zipping” things over to someone’s “mailbox”. He also talks of computers communicating through “radio links” with “larger databases”.
with a radio link in it so you don't have to hook up to anything you're in communication with all these larger databases
Artificial intelligence
Jobs even talks about what today we would call artificial intelligence.
I think as we look towards the next 50 to 100 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 the person's dead and gone we can ask this machine hey what would Aristotle said, what about this and maybe we won't get the right answer but maybe we will and that's really exciting to me.
This wasn’t a big part of his talk, almost like aside. What’s fascinating about that statement is not its ambition, but its restraint. Jobs doesn’t make fanciful claims about “uploading our consciousness”. He talks very plainly and candidly about what would later be possible through artificial intelligence.
He imagines a computer in which we can “type” into to it our entire life, and it would be able to compress our thoughts in a meaningful way. So in the future we’ll be able to leverage that to gain new insights from the person.
That’s exactly what modern natural language processing does for us today. We don’t need to “type” into it, but it can analyze vast quantities of text and make a reasonable effort into predicting what someone would have thought on various topics.
He doesn’t pretend this is more than it actually is. It may give us the wrong answer, but it may also give us the right one. It’s important to note that this was before the resurgence and excitement about AI. At the time, “expert systems” built on logical inference were in vogue. The thinking at the time was that we can design a set of relationships and reasoning, and that would give us something resembling intelligence. This turned out to be limited and led to an AI winter in which research and optimism fell.
Jobs believed in a more holistic, unstructured approach that dominates research today. Instead of trying to curate the learning process, machines would analyze text and infer their own relationships. This is what led to breakthroughs like the GPT-3 language model and pretty much all modern AI advances.
There’s a lot more in the talk and I would highly recommend it. It’s important to note the state of the world at the time he gave the talk. The CD was just invented in 1982 and the first general interest CD (Grolier’s Electronic Encyclopedia) was two years away.
Jobs was incredibly prophetic and visionary. He was a flawed man, but he had a clear vision of what computers and the internet which was more right than wrong. If you’re interested in more, I would recommend reading the great Isaacson biography.