During the speech, Jobs, who was 28 years old at the time, talked about how technology would develop in the future and described features similar to AI-powered chatbots that exist today.
In the video, Jobs said he enjoyed reading Aristotle and Plato and wished he could question them, but over the next 50 to 100 years he envisioned machines that could encapsulate a person’s “underlying ethos, or an underlying set of principles, or any underlying way of looking at the world.”
Machines will be able to generate responses to questions similar to how real humans would respond.
“When the next Aristotle comes along, he could carry this machine around with him for the rest of his life and input all this information, and then after he passes away, we might be able to ask the machine, ‘Hey, what would Aristotle have said?'” Jobs said in his speech.
Nearly 40 years later, with the advent of generative AI tools such as large-scale language models, society seems to be catching up to Jobs’ prediction.
Commonly referred to as an AI chatbot, LLM is a type of AI algorithm that is trained on vast amounts of data and learns how to identify patterns and connections between words and topics, then uses that knowledge to interpret prompts and generate new output in text, images, or audio.
Similar to Apple’s co-founder’s prediction, if you feed the LLM with all of Aristotle’s known works, the model will be able to answer users’ questions in a similar way to how it predicted Aristotle would answer them.
Moreover, today’s tech giants are pursuing the next frontier of AI: artificial general intelligence, which broadly refers to artificial intelligence that can complete tasks at the same level as, or even better than, humans.
But when that point will be reached is an ongoing debate among today’s technology leaders.
SpaceX CEO and X owner Elon Musk said he believes AGI will likely be available by 2026. He made the comments during an April 24 interview with Norges Bank Investment Management CEO Nikolai Tangen.
But Robin Li, CEO of Baidu, one of China’s largest technology companies, said at the VivaTech conference in Paris in May that it would still be around 10 years before they reached that stage.
This isn’t the first time one of Jobs’ predictions about the future of technology has come true.
In a 1985 interview with Playboy magazine, Jobs said people would eventually use computers in their free time, outside of work or the office. “The computer will become an essential part of most homes,” he said.
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, fewer than 10 percent of American households owned a computer in 1984. Today, according to the most recent census data, about 95 percent of American households own at least one type of computing device.
In the Playboy interview, Jobs also predicted that we would be able to use computers to connect with each other online.
“For most people, the most compelling reason to buy a home computer is to connect it to a nationwide communications network,” Jobs told Playboy magazine.
The idea was a precursor to the World Wide Web, invented in 1989 by London-born computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee as a way to help colleagues share information.
This iteration of the internet began with a single website launched by Berners-Lee in 1991, but as of 2021, there are nearly 1.88 billion websites, according to the World Economic Forum.