Steve Jobs: The Tech Expert’s Predictions That Came True

From the Macintosh computer to the iPhone, the late Apple co-founder Steve Jobs was synonymous with innovation. He made his mark as a visionary who worked tirelessly to revolutionize the way we use technology in our daily lives. A video from 1983 reveals that Jobs may have been more ahead of his time than we thought.

The latest digital exhibition from the Steve Jobs archive includes never-before-seen footage, written before the tech legend gave a speech at the 1983 International Design Conference.

During his speech, Jobs, then 28, explained how he saw technology evolving in the future and described jobs that sound similar to today’s AI-powered chatbots.

As he said, while he enjoyed reading Aristotle and Plato, he wished he could ask them questions. But he envisioned a machine that would, in the next 50 or 100 years, be able to encapsulate a person’s basic psyche, or a set of basic principles, or some basic way of looking at the world.

He said the machine would be able to give answers to questions similar to how a real person would answer them. At the same time, he knew how to motivate his listeners, whether subordinates or people who attended his speeches. He was a life coach before he made it a career.

“When the next Aristotle comes along, maybe if he carries one of these machines with him his whole life, his whole life and prints all this stuff, maybe one day after the person is dead and gone, we can ask the machine, ‘Hey, what would Aristotle say?’” Jobs said during that speech.

Generative AI vs. Artificial Intelligence

Nearly 40 years later, society appears to be responding to Jobs’ predictions with the emergence of AI-generating tools such as large language models.

LLMs, commonly referred to as AI chatbots, are a type of artificial intelligence algorithm that is trained on massive amounts of data and learns to recognize patterns and connections between words and topics. It uses this knowledge to interpret commands and generate new text, image, or audio outputs.

Similar to the Apple co-founder’s predictions, a law student could be fed all of Aristotle’s known works and then be able to answer users’ questions in a way similar to what the model believes Aristotle would have answered.

Additionally, today’s tech giants are targeting the next frontier of AI: generative AI, which broadly refers to AI that can complete a task at the same level as a human or even a step above.

But when we might reach that point is a topic of debate among technology leaders today.

Elon Musk has said he believes creative AI is likely to be available by 2026.

However, Robin Li, CEO of Baidu, one of China’s largest tech companies, recently said at the VivaTech conference in Paris that we are about 10 years away from reaching that point.

Other job predictions that have 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 essential in most homes,” he said.

In 1984, less than 10 percent of American households owned a computer, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Now, about 95 percent of American households own at least one type of computer, according to the most recent census data available.

In the same interview, he also predicted that we could use computers to communicate with each other over the Internet.

“The most compelling reason for most people to buy a home computer is to connect it to a national telecommunications network,” he said.

This idea was the forerunner of the World Wide Web (the Internet), which was introduced by London-born computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee in 1989 as a way to help his colleagues exchange information.

While there are also many things about jobs that are not known to the general public.