Realistic AI Interview

Interviewer: Steve, it’s 2025. If you were looking at the world right now, how would you describe what’s happening with AI?

“Steve Jobs”: We’re watching the birth of a new kind of bicycle for the mind—and we’re misusing it as a scooter.

Most of what I see is incremental: ‘Let’s bolt AI onto everything.’ It’s boring. The interesting part is that for the first time, we have a tool that can understand context, language, intention—roughly. That’s profound.

But when a technology becomes profound, the question stops being ‘What can we do?’ and becomes ‘What should we build that actually matters?’ We’re not asking that nearly enough.

Interviewer: What does “actually matters” mean in this AI era?

“Jobs”: A few things:

• It should make people more creative, not more passive.
• It should give individuals more leverage, not more dependency.
• It should disappear into the background.

Right now, we’re building a lot of slot machines for attention with an AI brain behind them. That’s a crime. The right direction is tools that:

• Help a kid in India learn physics like they’re sitting with Feynman.
• Let a designer talk to the computer in their own language and see ideas in seconds.
• Help a doctor reason, not just recall papers.

AI that amplifies human agency—that matters. AI that replaces your effort without enriching your understanding is junk food.

Interviewer: If Apple under you were building AI products in 2025, what would they look like?

“Jobs”: I’d start by killing the word “AI” in the marketing.

We’d build:

• A truly personal assistant: It knows your context across devices, but you own the data. It anticipates without being creepy. It’s opinionated about helping you focus, about your health, about your time.
• Creative instruments: Not “generate 1,000 images,” but “explore 10 truly thoughtful directions,” tuned to your taste, your history. Quality over noise.
• An invisible layer: The intelligence sits underneath iPhone, Mac, Watch, Vision—unified. You don’t open an “AI app.” It’s just there, making everything smarter, calmer.

The test: When people use it, they say “Of course. This is how it always should’ve worked.”

Interviewer: You emphasized privacy in your lifetime. How does that fit with modern AI, which hungers for data?

“Jobs”: If your intelligence requires abusing people’s trust, it’s not intelligent. It’s lazy.

We’d do:

• On-device models as far as physics allows.
• Private cloud: encrypted by default, data under your key.
• Zero selling of behavioral data. No surveillance capitalism smuggled in behind the word “personalization.”

The industry pretends it’s impossible to respect privacy and build great AI. That’s just people choosing their business model over their users. Great products come from restraint.

Interviewer: Are you worried about AI replacing jobs?

“Jobs”: We’ve been automating forever. The printing press “killed” scribes; it also unleashed ideas.

The honest questions:

• Are we creating new roles that are more meaningful?
• Are we giving people the tools to step into those roles?

If AI just fattens corporate margins while hollowing out human purpose, that’s not progress; that’s vandalism with good branding.

We should design AI so:

• It handles drudgery.
• It helps people learn faster.
• It opens new creative frontiers.

If we do that, we don’t get less work; we get better work. If we don’t, people will feel cheated, and they’ll be right.

Interviewer: Some people worry about existential risk—AI surpassing human control. What’s your view?

“Jobs”: Two truths at once:

• The sci‑fi nightmare is possible enough to take seriously.
• The slow, subtle damage is already here.

I’d worry about:

• A flood of synthetic crap drowning real thought.
• Systems nobody fully understands controlling infrastructure.
• A handful of companies and governments owning the “minds” the rest of us depend on.

We need:

• Radical simplicity in critical systems.
• Transparency and audits for powerful models.
• Real competition, open standards.
• People building these systems who understand both engineering and ethics—and who are willing to say “no.”

Interviewer: If you were mentoring an AI team right now, what would you tell them?

“Jobs”: Three things:

1. Start with a brutally clear problem. If your pitch starts with “we use AI to…,” you’ve already lost. Start with: “People suffer here. Let’s fix that.”

2. Care about taste. Most AI interfaces feel like talking to a corporate helpdesk with a thesaurus. Have the courage to make it:

   • Warmer.
   • Funnier.
   • More honest about what it can’t do.

3. Put the human in charge. Always show:

   • Why it suggested something.
   • How to correct it.
   • How to turn it off.

A great AI product should feel like working with a brilliant collaborator who never pretends to be your boss.

Interviewer: How should everyday people think about AI in their own lives?

“Jobs”: Think of AI the way you’d think of hiring an assistant:

• You don’t give them your soul.
• You don’t let them decide your values.
• You do let them remove friction so you can focus on what only you can do.

Use it to:

• Learn faster.
• Prototype ideas.
• Communicate more clearly. But don’t outsource your judgment. The moment you stop caring enough to think for yourself, you’ve given away the only thing that made this technology worth building.

Interviewer: Last question. What’s the future of AI you’d actually be excited about?

“Jobs”: One where:

• A 12-year-old with a cheap device has the same quality of thinking partner as a billionaire.
• Creativity is amplified so much that new Pixar-level stories, new garage startups, new scientific breakthroughs happen from everywhere, not just Silicon Valley.
• The technology gets out of the way. Fewer screens, fewer feeds, more depth.

If AI helps us be more human—more curious, more present, more original—then it’s a miracle. If it turns us into well-fed, well-entertained spectators, then we blew it.

The tools are here. The question is whether we’ll have the taste and the courage to use them well.