Steve Jobs’ 1983 Prediction: How He Envisioned AI Chatbots and More Ahead of His Time

From the Macintosh computer to the iPhone, Apple’s late co-founder Steve Jobs was widely considered an innovative visionary who helped revolutionize the way we use technology in our everyday lives. Now, a newly released clip from 1983 reveals Jobs may have been more ahead of his time than we knew.

The Steve Jobs Archive’s latest digital exhibit features never before seen video footage of a presentation given by the tech legend at the 1983 International Design Conference.

During his speech, then 28-year-old Jobs explains how he sees technology developing in the future and describes functionality that sounds similar to the AI-powered chatbots we have today.

In the clip, Jobs said that while he enjoyed reading books by Aristotle and Plato, he wished he could ask them questions. But over the next 50 to 100 years, he envisioned a machine that would be able to encapsulate a person’s “underlying spirit, or underlying set of principles, or any underlying way of looking at the world.”

The machine would be able to generate responses to questions similar to how the real-life person may respond.

“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 have said?'” Jobs said during the speech.

Generative AI versus artificial general intelligence

About 40 years later, it appears society is catching up with Jobs’ prediction in the advent of generative AI tools such as large language models.

LLMs, commonly referred to as AI chatbots, are 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. It uses that knowledge to interpret prompts and generate new outputs of text, image or audio.

Similar to the Apple co-founder’s prediction, an LLM could be fed all known works of Aristotle and then be able to respond to users’ questions in a way similar to how the model believes Aristotle would answer.

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

But when we may reach that point is up for debate among today’s tech leaders.

SpaceX CEO and X owner Elon Musk said he believes that AGI is likely to become available by 2026. He made the comment during an April 24 interview on X with Nicolai Tangen, CEO of Norges Bank Investment Management.

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

Other Steve Jobs predictions that have come true

This isn’t the first time one of Jobs’ predictions about the future of technology came true.

In a 1985 interview with Playboy magazine, Jobs said people would eventually use computers during their free time outside of work or the office. “Computers will be essential in most homes,” he said.

In 1984, less than 10% of households in the U.S. owned a computer, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Now, around 95% of U.S. households own at least one type of computing device, per the latest available Census data.

In the Playboy interview, Jobs also predicted that we would be able to use computers to connect with each other online.

“The most compelling reason for most people to buy a computer for the home will be to link it into a nationwide communications network,” Jobs told Playboy.

This idea foreshadowed London-born computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee’s World Wide Web invention in 1989 as a way to help his colleagues share information.

While this iteration of the internet began with one website published by Berners-Lee in 1991, there are now close to 1.88 billion websites as of 2021, according to the World Economic Forum.

Steve Jobs’ forward-thinking ideas and predictions continue to shape the technology landscape today. As we move closer to achieving artificially intelligent machines that can mimic human behavior, we can reflect on the legacy of Jobs and the impact he had on the evolution of technology. Who knows what other innovations and advancements in AI await us in the future?