Date: May 14, 2025
Location: A minimalist, glass-walled conference room at Apple Park, Cupertino.
Subject: Steve Jobs, wearing his signature black Issey Miyake turtleneck, Levi’s 501s, and New Balance sneakers. He looks older, but his eyes retain that piercing, unblinking intensity.
Interviewer: Steve, thank you for sitting down with us. Let’s get right to it. The last three years have been entirely dominated by Artificial Intelligence. Generative AI, Large Language Models, ChatGPT. The world is obsessed. What is your take on where we are right now?
Steve Jobs: (Leans back, steepling his fingers) It’s fascinating. The underlying technology is profound. I mean, it’s truly a breakthrough in computer science. But the products? The products are mostly crap.
Interviewer: Crap? Even with hundreds of millions of people using them?
Steve Jobs: (Leans forward) Look at how people are interacting with it. They are typing text into a little box, hoping the machine understands what they want, and trying different "prompts" to trick it into giving a good answer. Do you know what that is? That’s the command-line interface. That’s MS-DOS in 1980. We spent the last forty years getting rid of the command line, making technology intuitive, and suddenly the whole industry is celebrating because they’ve forced everyday people to become programmers again. It lacks elegance. It lacks... taste.
Interviewer: So how should it work? In the 80s, you called the personal computer a "bicycle for the mind." What is AI?
Steve Jobs: If the Mac was a bicycle for the mind, AI is an engine for your intuition. But right now, everyone is just giving people the raw engine block and saying, "Here, hold this, it gets a little hot."
Our job—the job of anyone who actually cares about the user—is to build the car around the engine. The steering wheel, the suspension, the design. AI shouldn’t feel like you’re interrogating a robot in a chat window. It should disappear. It should be woven into the fabric of the OS so seamlessly that you don’t even know it’s there. It should just feel like you got smarter, faster, and more capable.
Interviewer: Microsoft and Google have been racing to integrate AI into everything. Search, word processors, spreadsheets. They are moving incredibly fast. Is Apple behind?
Steve Jobs: (Scoffs, shaking his head slightly) It’s the same old story. Microsoft is bolting a chatbot onto the side of Bing and Word like a spoiler on a minivan. They’re in a panic. They’re shipping things that hallucinate, things that lie to users, just to win a press cycle.
We don’t care about being first. We care about being best. We have the patience to wait until the technology can actually deliver a magical experience. I’d rather ship nothing than ship something that frustrates our users. When we integrate AI, it’s not going to be a gimmick you click on. It’s going to understand your context, your life, your privacy. And privacy... my god, these other guys are just vacuuming up your life to feed their models. It’s fundamentally anti-user.
Interviewer: Let’s talk about the creative aspect. AI can now write code, compose music, and generate photorealistic art in seconds. As someone who has always championed the intersection of technology and the liberal arts, does this worry you? Does it threaten human creativity?
Steve Jobs: (Pauses, looking out the window for a long moment) Technology is nothing. What matters is that you have a faith in people, that they’re basically good and smart, and if you give them tools, they’ll do wonderful things with them.
Can AI paint a picture? Sure. Can it write a song? Yes. But it doesn’t have a soul. It hasn’t had its heart broken. It hasn’t felt the joy of holding a child, or the grief of losing a friend. Art is a transmission of human experience. AI is just a mirror reflecting our past data back at us.
The danger isn't that AI will replace artists. The danger is that lazy people will accept mediocre, machine-generated garbage as "good enough." Our job is to build tools that elevate the human spirit, not replace it. AI should do the drudgery so the human can focus on the poetry.
Interviewer: There’s a lot of fear about Artificial General Intelligence (AGI)—the idea that these systems will outsmart us and become uncontrollable. Do you share that fear?
Steve Jobs: I think it’s arrogant of us to assume we understand consciousness well enough to accidentally build it in a server farm.
But look, every revolutionary technology is dangerous. Fire burns your house down. The internal combustion engine pollutes. The internet gave us access to all human knowledge, but it also gave a megaphone to every bozo with a keyboard. It comes down to stewardship. The people building these models right now are mathematicians and engineers. Brilliant people. But you cannot leave the future of human-computer interaction entirely to engineers. You need philosophers, designers, artists. You need people who ask "Why?" instead of just "How fast?"
Interviewer: If we sit down again in 2035, ten years from now, what does the perfect AI product look like?
Steve Jobs: (Smiles, a rare, genuine grin) You won’t see it.
You won’t be looking at a screen, typing prompts. The device will be an extension of your intent. You’ll think about a problem, you’ll gesture, you’ll speak, and the friction between your idea and reality will be zero. It will anticipate your needs without being creepy. It will protect your data like a vault.
It will just... work. And it will feel like magic.
Interviewer: Steve, thank you for your time.
Steve Jobs: My pleasure. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go look at some new glass prototypes for the iPhone 18. The bevels are off by a fraction of a millimeter and it’s driving me crazy.
