Realistic AI Interview

[Scene: A minimalist black-and-white studio, 2025. A single ring light throws a perfect halo on a familiar silhouette: black mock-turtleneck, faded Levi’s, white New Balance. The chair creaks as Steve Jobs leans forward. No intro music—just that stare.]

Interviewer (I): Steve, you’ve been gone fourteen years. The world thinks it knows what you’d say about AI. Prove us wrong.

Steve Jobs (SJ): [half-smile] I’m not here to prove anyone wrong. I’m here to make the wrong people uncomfortable.

I: Fair. Let’s start with the obvious: generative AI. In 2024 alone we saw 10-billion-parameter models running on a phone. Where do we go from “good enough”?

SJ: “Good enough” is the enemy of magical. Remember the first iPhone? It didn’t have copy-and-paste. Everyone screamed. But it felt alive in your hand. That’s the bar. If AI doesn’t feel alive—if it doesn’t make the hair on your arm stand up—it’s just a faster fax machine.

I: Alive how?

SJ: You ever watch a great jazz trio? The notes aren’t new; the space between them is. AI needs to own the silence. Today it’s jamming every beat—hallucinating filler because we reward word count over whitespace. The next leap isn’t parameter size; it’s taste. We need models that know when not to speak.

I: Apple’s first “AI-powered” device cycle underperformed last year. Critics say the company lost its narrative.

SJ: We didn’t lose the narrative; we rented it from the wrong storytellers. Slapping a “neural engine” sticker on a spec sheet is like putting a Ferrari badge on a lawnmower. People don’t buy silicon; they buy metaphors. We forgot the metaphor.

I: Give us one.

SJ: [leans in] AI is a mirror, not a flashlight. A flashlight blinds you to what’s already there. A mirror—if it’s polished—shows you the zits you missed. The moment AI becomes a crutch, design has failed. The moment it becomes a coach, design wins.

I: Privacy versus capability—still a false dichotomy?

SJ: Privacy is the capability. The second I sense my device gossiping about me in the cloud, the romance dies. We should be shipping silicon vows, not terms-of-service prenups. If the model can’t run naked on my night-stand without blushing, it’s not ready for my bedroom.

I: Open source versus closed?

SJ: [shrugs] It’s not open versus closed; it’s coherent versus chaotic. Linux won the server, but nobody craved it. People crave coherence. If open source can ship a narrative as tight as Shakespeare, it’ll win. Until then, it’s a parts catalog in search of a playwright.

I: You once said computers are bicycles for the mind. What’s AI?

SJ: Elephants for the heart. A bicycle lets you outrun the fastest human. An elephant lets you remember every watering hole you’ve ever loved—and forget the ones that poisoned you. But beware: if you don’t train the elephant, it’ll sit on you.

I: Existential risk—overblown or under-discussed?

SJ: Both. The wrong people are screaming. Politicians who can’t rotate a PDF are regulating tensors they can’t spell. Meanwhile, the engineers inside the labs are so sleep-deprived they’re hallucinating alignment papers. We need a third seat at the table: poets. People who’ve stared into a sunset and come back speechless. If your risk model doesn’t account for awe, it’s not modeling humans.

I: Last question. You’re granted one more product cycle. What do you ship?

SJ: [pauses, fingers steepled] A pocket-sized stone. Looks like river rock, feels like worry beads. No screen. It listens—to your breath, to the cadence of your day. When your inner monologue turns cruel, it warms—just enough to notice. That’s it. No app, no cloud. The machine learning happens on the edge of your own skin. We call it “Hum.”

I: Because it hums?

SJ: Because you will.

[He stands, offers a slight bow, and walks off-set. The ring light dims to a single point—like a period at the end of a sentence the world is still writing.]