Setting: A minimalist, sun-drenched studio in Cupertino. The year is 2025. Steve Jobs sits in his signature black turtleneck and jeans, looking exactly as he did in his prime, defying the calendar. Across from him sits an interviewer, notebook ready. The atmosphere is quiet, intense, and focused.
Interviewer: Steve, it's been over a decade since you left us, yet here we are in 2025, and the world is obsessed with Artificial Intelligence. Everyone is talking about "agents," "generative models," and "singularity." If you were leading Apple today, how would you view this AI revolution?
Steve Jobs: (Leans forward, hands clasped, eyes intense)
Let's get one thing straight immediately. The world isn't obsessed with AI. The world is obsessed with magic. They just don't know how to name it yet.
When we built the Mac, we didn't say, "Let's put a processor in a box." We said, "Let's build a bicycle for the mind." Today, everyone is building faster bicycles, but they've forgotten where the rider is going. They are throwing algorithms at problems without asking if the problem is worth solving.
AI, as it stands right now in 2025, feels like the early days of the command line. It's powerful, yes. But it's cold. It's statistical. It predicts the next word; it doesn't understand the meaning of the sentence. My job wouldn't be to make AI smarter. My job would be to make it invisible.
Interviewer: Invisible? That seems counterintuitive. Right now, companies are racing to put chatbots everywhere, making the AI the star of the show.
Steve Jobs: (Shakes head slightly, a faint smile)
That's the mistake. That's the "feature creep" of the decade.
Think about the best technology you've ever used. You don't think about the technology. You think about the photo you took, the song you heard, the message you sent. The technology disappears.
Right now, people are talking to their computers. "Hey AI, do this. Hey AI, do that." That's not the future. That's a step backward. The future is when the computer anticipates what you need before you ask. It's not about a chatbot sitting in a window waiting for your command. It's about the device knowing your context, your rhythm, your life, and seamlessly weaving intelligence into the fabric of your day without ever saying, "I am using AI."
Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication. And right now, AI is incredibly complicated. It requires prompting, tuning, and managing. We need to strip that away until it feels like intuition.
Interviewer: But there's a fear, Steve. A genuine fear that AI will replace human creativity. Artists, writers, coders—they're worried the machine will do it all. How do you respond to that?
Steve Jobs:
Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn't really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while.
AI cannot connect things in a way that matters because AI has no soul. It has no experience of heartbreak, of walking through a park in autumn, of tasting a perfect peach. It can mimic those things, sure. It can generate a poem about a peach that rhymes perfectly. But it doesn't know the peach.
The danger isn't that AI will replace humans. The danger is that humans will stop trying to connect the dots themselves because the machine offers a "good enough" answer.
If we do our job right, AI becomes the ultimate tool for the craftsman. It's the chisel. But you still need the sculptor. You still need the vision. The machine can handle the syntax; the human must provide the semantics. The human must provide the why.
Interviewer: So, if you were unveiling a product today, an "Apple Intelligence" device, what would it look like?
Steve Jobs: (Pauses, looking out the window for a moment before turning back)
It wouldn't look like a robot. It wouldn't even look like a screen.
Imagine a device that knows you so well it feels like an extension of your own nervous system. It doesn't wait for a prompt. It sees you're stressed, and it subtly shifts your environment, curates your information flow, and connects you with the one person you need to talk to. It doesn't say, "I detected high cortisol levels." It just... helps.
It would be private. Absolutely private. Because if you don't trust the tool, you can't be intimate with it. And without intimacy, there is no true intelligence, only data processing.
We would take the neural engine, shrink it down, encrypt it locally, and hide it behind a piece of glass so beautiful you want to touch it. And when you use it, you wouldn't feel like you're interacting with a machine. You'd feel more human than ever before.
Interviewer: That's a very human-centric view in a world chasing raw compute power.
Steve Jobs:
Technology alone is not enough. It's technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the result that makes our heart sing.
AI is just math. Beautiful, complex math. But until that math serves the human spirit, until it amplifies our empathy and our creativity rather than replacing them, it's just a toy. And we don't make toys. We make tools for dreamers.
The future of AI isn't about the machine becoming human. It's about the machine allowing humans to become more human. That's the only future worth building.
Interviewer: Thank you, Steve.
Steve Jobs: (Nods)
Stay hungry. Stay curious. And don't let the algorithms tell you who you are.
