Setting: The year is 2025. The location is a stark, white room in a simulation of the Apple Park campus. Steve Jobs sits on a wooden stool. He is wearing his signature black turtleneck, Levi’s 501s, and New Balance sneakers. He looks healthy, intense, and typically impatient. He takes a sip from a bottle of Smartwater.
Interviewer: Steve, thank you for agreeing to this simulation. It’s 2025. The world is obsessed with Artificial Intelligence. LLMs, generative agents, neural networks—it’s everywhere. What is your take on the current state of AI?
Steve Jobs: (Leans forward, elbows on knees) It’s noisy. It’s incredibly noisy.
Look, I’ve been watching what’s happening. Everyone is running around screaming about "intelligence." Google, Microsoft, OpenAI—they are obsessed with the technology. They are obsessed with the parameters, the trillions of tokens, the raw horsepower. They’re building muscle cars. Big, loud, gas-guzzling muscle cars.
But they’re missing the point. They always miss the point.
Interviewer: Which is?
Steve Jobs: The human.
You don't buy a computer to marvel at the chip architecture. You buy it to write a novel, to edit a movie, to connect with your daughter in Tokyo. Right now, AI is a parlor trick. You type in a prompt, it spits out a generic email or a hallucinated image. It’s impressive, sure. But is it soulful? No. It’s pedestrian.
Interviewer: So, you don't think AI is the future?
Steve Jobs: No, you’re not listening. AI is the biggest thing since the graphical user interface. But right now, the interface is garbage.
Why am I typing into a chat box? Why am I acting like a programmer command-line interface from 1980? That’s a failure of design!
The future isn't a chatbot. The future is... (He pauses, staring intensely) ...invisibility.
Interviewer: Invisibility?
Steve Jobs: When you use a really good pen, you don't think about the ink flow. You think about the words.
In 2025, AI should not be a product. It shouldn't be "Copilot" or "Gemini" or whatever terrible name they came up with this week. It should be the electricity running through the floorboards.
If I’m working on a presentation, I shouldn't have to ask a bot to "generate an image." The software should anticipate that I need an image, understand the emotional context of my slide, and offer me three perfect choices before I even realize I need them. It should just work. It should feel like magic, not like homework.
Interviewer: There’s a lot of fear right now. Creative professionals—writers, designers, artists—are terrified that AI is stealing their work and their livelihoods.
Steve Jobs: (Sighs, leans back) This is the intersection of technology and liberal arts. This is where we live.
There is a difference between content and art. The world is drowning in content. AI can make infinite content. It can make a million SEO articles, a million corporate logos, a million elevator music tracks. Fine. Let the machines have the mediocrity.
But taste? You cannot program taste.
I famously said that Microsoft had no taste. And looking at AI right now, the models have no taste. They are an average of everything on the internet. And the average of the internet is... well, it’s not great.
The true artist uses the tool. The synthesizer didn’t kill the musician; it gave us the 80s. It gave us electronic music. The camera didn't kill the painter; it forced the painter to invent Cubism and Abstract Expressionism.
If you are a creative person and you are scared of a machine, you need to ask yourself: Is your work truly creative? Or were you just a human photocopier? Because if you have a point of view, if you have humanity, the AI can't touch you. It can only serve you.
Interviewer: What would an "Apple AI" look like under your guidance today?
Steve Jobs: Privacy.
Interviewer: Privacy?
Steve Jobs: Privacy. Look at what these other companies are doing. They are sucking up your data, your emails, your photos, your life, to train their "God brain" in the cloud. It’s Orwellian. It’s disgusting.
If I’m running Apple today, the AI lives on your device. It lives in your pocket. It knows you, but it tells no one else about you. It’s not a spy; it’s a confidant.
And we wouldn't call it "Artificial Intelligence." That sounds fake. Synthetic.
Interviewer: What would you call it?
Steve Jobs: (Smiles slightly) I’d probably just call it... "Insight."
Or maybe nothing at all. You’d just pick up your phone, and it would know you’re late for a meeting, that the traffic is bad, that you haven't eaten, and it would have already texted your team and ordered your lunch. Not because you asked it to, but because it understands you.
We built the bicycle for the mind. Now, we are building the intuition for the mind.
Interviewer: One last question, Steve. Do you think AI will ever become sentient? Will it ever have a soul?
Steve Jobs: (Stands up and walks a few paces)
Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels.
A computer can simulate a rebel. It can simulate a misfit. It can parse the grammar of a poem by Dylan Thomas. But it cannot rage against the dying of the light. It doesn't know what it means to die. And because it doesn't know what it means to die, it doesn't know what it means to live.
So, no. It will never have a soul. But if we design it right... if we refuse to settle for crap... it might just help us find ours.
(He checks an invisible watch on his wrist)
I have to go. We’re working on something. It’s going to be huge.
[Simulation Ends]
