Steve Jobs' Prescient Vision: AI and the Future of Computing in 1983

A young Steve Jobs talks AI in this video recorded a year before the Macintosh debut

New exhibit in the Steve Jobs Archive features videos from the 1983 International Design Conference in Aspen. On Thursday, the Steve Jobs Archive revealed a new online exhibit that features Steve Jobs's presentation at the 1983 International Design Conference. "The Objects of Our Life" exhibit features video footage of a 28-year-old Jobs explaining how technology will change the way things are done. In the 55-minute video, Jobs talks about the history of computers and how the kids of the time are part of the "computer generation" and that, "in their lifetimes, the computer will become the predominant medium of communication." He explains how computers can be used in education, financial transactions, software development, etc. At the time, the Lisa computer had just arrived in January, so Jobs talked about how it was made for creative design. The exhibit has additional footage from other talks Jobs did at the event. One clip shows Jobs explaining what essentially is early work done with AI. "The human mind is very good at doing very complex things adequately," said Jobs, "And there's a ton of people now starting to look to the brain as a model of an architecture to build a computer." With an introduction written by Jony Ive, the online exhibit also features video clips of Jobs talking about design simplicity, the future of personal computers, how computers can augment human abilities, and more. The exhibit is available to visit for free at the Steve Jobs Archive.

Watch Steve Jobs describe the future and AI a year before the Mac

Steve Jobs one year after his Aspen talk, posing here with the original Macintosh The Steve Jobs Archive has released a fascinating video of a 28-year-old Jobs explaining computers to a skeptical crowd in 1983. The Steve Jobs Archive was launched in 2022 by Laurene Powell Jobs, Tim Cook, and Jony Ive. From that start, it has aimed to be "an authoritative home for Steve's story," and include video, audio, and text resources about Apple's co-founder. It's now released "The Objects of Our Life," a very rare 55-minute video from 1983 that shows a young Steve Jobs making one of his first major speeches. As Jony Ive says in his introduction, this was from the early days of Apple, yet Jobs was predicting the future that he would go on to help create. "I find it breathtaking how profound his understanding was of the dramatic changes that were about to happen as the computer became broadly accessible," writes Ive. "Of course, beyond just being prophetic, he was fundamental in defining products that would change our culture and our lives forever." Alongside Ive's introduction, this Steve Jobs Archive feature contains much more from this talk at the 1983 International Design Conference in Aspen. There's the 55-minute main video, plus more than 2,000 words of background -- and an even rarer series of clips from Jobs demonstrating the Lisa the night before his talk where he mentions artificial intelligence decades before Apple Intelligence came to be.