While artificial intelligence as a technology may have picked up steam after the launch of ChatGPT two years ago, the concept is far from new. Apple founder Steve Jobs, a visionary in the tech world, predicted the potential of AI as far back as 40 years ago, envisioning machines that may answer questions and think like humans.
On the Steve Jobs Archive, there’s footage from 1983 in which Jobs is talking to people at the International Design Conference in Aspen.The old video shows what Jobs thought about computers at that time, how books may be replaced by computers one day and the amount of work that is being done to understand the architecture of the brain to help machines emulate it.
You can watch the video and a bunch of others using this link
This is what is he talks about AI
And so we’re finding the way we’ve built computers in the past isn’t working for the kinds of things we want to do in the future. And we’re examining new architectures, these fancy words like non–von Neumann machines, etcetera. And what we’re doing is we’re starting to look to the human brain. How is the human brain architected? And we’re finding that computers are very good at doing very simple things extremely accurately. And the human mind is very good at doing very complex things adequately. And there’s a ton of people now starting to look to the brain as a model of an architecture to build a computer.
The main differentiation that exists now between the two machines, and I’m going to use the word “machine” to describe the brain for a moment, is that man is self-conscious, obviously. We are conscious that we’re conscious: “I am thinking.” And to our knowledge, no computer or any even of the high primates has yet to say, “I am thinking.”
And so a tremendous amount of work is going on in the artificial intelligence community to try to understand what self-consciousness is, to try to understand if a computer can ever be self-conscious. But I think the biggest thing that motivates a lot of us is, unlike what we just heard, we don’t know. We honestly don’t know whether we are more than just a machine.
And we are building better and better computers. We’re running up against roadblocks. A lot of people are spending the best parts of their lives right now to try to understand the architecture of the brain and how we can make better and better machines to emulate it. And I actually think, by the end of our lifetimes, we’re going to know the answer to this question. And that’s what’s driving a lot of us.