[Setting: A minimalist studio in 2025. One white couch, one clear-glass coffee table, a single red apple. The lighting is soft and theatrical. Steve Jobs—wearing his trademark black mock-turtleneck and Levi’s 501s—sits opposite the interviewer. A holographic “A12” logo floats above them. The camera rolls.]
Interviewer (I): Steve, thank you for joining us—even if only in this simulated 2025.
Steve Jobs (SJ): My pleasure. Reality is negotiable; good taste isn’t.
I: Let’s dive in. In 2025, AI is everywhere. What excites you most?
SJ: The transition from “artificial intelligence” to “ambient intuition.” We no longer ask if a device is smart; we ask if it disappears. When the room itself anticipates what you need—lighting, music, thermal comfort, even the exact paragraph you were about to reread—that’s progress. The technology has finally learned to be quiet.
I: Critics say we’ve traded privacy for convenience.
SJ: Privacy isn’t a knob you turn from zero to ten. It’s a composition—like music. You decide which instruments play and when. The real breakthrough is differential privacy at the silicon level. Your data never leaves the device; instead, the model comes to you, trains on you, then forgets. Think of it as a dinner guest who brings their own wine, shares the meal, and leaves without memorizing your house layout.
I: Apple was late to generative AI compared with Google or OpenAI. Intentional?
SJ: Being early is easy; being right is hard. The first MP3 players were out years before the iPod. We waited until we could make something that didn’t suck. Same with AI. The moment we could run a 200-billion-parameter transformer on-device at 3-watt thermal budget and ship a battery that still lasted all day—only then did we speak.
I: You once said the computer is “a bicycle for the mind.” What’s AI?
SJ: It’s the electric jetpack for the soul. But jetpacks need safety interlocks. Without taste, without discernment, you just hit a tree at 200 mph. That’s why curation is the new superpower. Any fool can generate 10,000 images; it takes an artist to pick the one that matters.
I: Siri was ahead in 2011, then stalled. How do you fix it in 2025?
SJ: We stopped treating Siri like a search box with a voice and started treating her like a stage director. She now understands scenes, not sentences. Say, “I want to feel like I’m in Kyoto during cherry-blossom season,” and within three seconds the room re-lights, the scent diffusers bloom with sakura, and the wallscreen plays a 16K loop from Phil Schiller’s drone. That shift—from command to context—is everything.
I: What about jobs? The doomsayers paint a pretty bleak picture.
SJ: Every tool obsoletes some tasks and invents new ones. The cotton gin didn’t end agriculture; it ended hand-seeding. AI will vaporize rote work, yes, but it will crystallize roles we haven’t named yet—empathy designers, algorithm choreographers, memory curators. My worry isn’t unemployment; it’s miseducation. If we keep teaching kids to act like robots, robots will deserve the job.
I: Any product you regret not seeing to market?
SJ: “iMatter.” A lapel pin that measures micro-expressions in real time and whispers in your AirPods, “She’s anxious, slow down,” or “He’s lying, ask why.” We killed it at the last moment. Too much power in too small a package. Maybe that was cowardice. Maybe wisdom. Hard to tell the difference until ten years later.
I: Final question. You’re famously private, yet AI craves data. Reconcile the paradox.
SJ: The highest form of technology is indistinguishable from your own intuition. If it knows everything about you, it should also forget what’s irrelevant. Perfect memory is a curse; perfect forgetting is grace. Build machines that remember the melody but forget the noise.
[Steve stands, straightens his turtleneck, and nods at the camera.]
SJ: And one more thing—don’t trust simulations. Even this one.
[He winks. Fade to black.]
