Watch Steve Jobs describe the future & 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.

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.

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.

5 Comments

ddawson100 530 comments · 16 Years

About 1 month ago

"You know, by '86, '87, pick a year, people are going to be spending more time interacting with these machines than they do interacting with their big automobile machines today. People are going to be spending two, three hours a day sometimes, interacting with these machines."

Oh, my sweet summer child... : )

9secondkox2 2964 comments · 8 Years

Ai wasn’t a new concept. Sci-fi gee Kerry in Hollywood and tech circles had been dreaming it up for a long time prior.

But Jobs always knew that tech was the only way to accomplish crazy sci fi dreams and desires. But he was always very practical about it.

While he maintained the “intersection of life snd tech” philosophy, Gates and others would alternate between utilitarian, boring ways to compute spreadsheets or swing wildly to total nerd fantasy projects which had no practical grounding.

Leave it to the legacy of Steve Jobs to encompass all of the above and turn magical dreams into practical reality.

The legend keeps growing - and unlike most, deservedly so.

alterbentzion 38 comments · 6 Years

Fascinating! Thank you for sharing this.

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.

alterbentzion said:

Fascinating! Thank you for sharing this.

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.

For the first couple of decades, the focus was much more on interconnectivity and broadening access. It would have been wild for anyone to be thinking about USING computers at all never mind uploading personal data. In the forseeable future, from the vantagepoint of the early 80s, access to electronic databases would only have been reachable by anyone in physical proximity. Simply getting people to see the possibilities is what Steve was after.

22july2013 3665 comments · 11 Years

My favourite quote about AI comes from Edgar Allen Poe around 1824 (200 years ago):

and accordingly we find every where men of mechanical genius, of great general acuteness, and discriminative understanding, who make no scruple in pronouncing the Automaton a pure machine, unconnected with human agency in its movements, and consequently, beyond all comparison, the most astonishing of the inventions of mankind.

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: