Steve Jobs knew how to make an entrance.
In 1985, he descended onto the grounds of Svaneholm Castle in Sweden in a chopper to discuss the impact of the personal-computing revolution on education. Back then, we were just on the cusp of what he called the era of "free intellectual energy." And this revolution, he assured a room full of educators, would forever change the way we learned.
In this new world, a computer would be more than a utilitarian, number-crunching appliance. It would give us information, anytime, anywhere. That was already starting to happen in the '80s at universities and research institutions that were hooked up to the burgeoning internet. He'd said similar things before, and these days, we are in fact living in Steve's prophesied wonderland of on-demand information.
But Jobs doesn't stop here. He goes on to explain that he's jealous of Alexander the Great: not because he conquered the world -- as Steve so wanted to do with Apple -- but because he had Aristotle as his personal tutor.
"I can't ask Aristotle a question. I mean -- I can, but I won't get an answer," Jobs jokes in that meeting in Sweden, which you can see above. "My hope is someday -- when the next Aristotle is alive -- we can capture the underlying world view of that Aristotle in a computer and someday, some student...will be able to ask Aristotle a question and get an answer."
>'I can’t ask Aristotle a question. I mean — I can, but I won’t get an answer.'
What Jobs seems to be saying is that more so than books, software could make us immortal -- an idea that surely piqued his interest. One day human intellect -- the human mind -- could become an on-demand commodity. In some ways, that is already happening with internet services that let us tap experts' knowledge around the clock in personalized ways and learn from them through online courses we take on our time. Some of that is driven by artificial intelligence, and like so many others, Jobs was an AI believer.
He understood that for software to take on some form of intelligence, it had to be interactive and ingest lots and lots of data -- and that could only happen when computers evolved into extensions of ourselves. It was just a matter of time before that happened -- thanks in large part to Apple, of course.
Years later, one of Jobs' last moves as Apple chief was to buy Siri's voice recognition software and the AI chops of the people who built it. Siri isn't very good yet, but it's supposed to learn to adapt to a user's specific needs. Soon, though, Siri could be up for an intelligence tune-up. Some speculate that Apple -- like every other big tech company -- is moving toward deep learning, a type of artificial intelligence that seeks to build software that mimics how the human brain works. Deep learning algorithms shine when they're challenged with large datasets -- the types that are now available in large part thanks to mobile devices -- like the iPhone and iPad -- and internet-enabled gadgets.
To be sure, Steve's mind-as-software prediction still hasn't come to pass. We're still a long ways off from recreating even parts of the brain and we're nowhere near being able to boot up the essence of Einstein or Boole or Tesla in a computer. For now, all we have is relatively primitive AI-powered tools that make it easier to search the net for information and make sense of the world around us. That much Steve got right. Now if we could just ask him a question.
