AI Apologists and the Humanist Legacy of Steve Jobs
“The whole computer industry wants to forget about the humanist side and just focus on the technology.” Essay by Jared White.
TL;DR: People who argue the merits of generative AI—especially as some “Next Big Thing” in the history of computing—are at odds with the philosophy of the most impactful creative computing tool-maker of our lifetime. Here's what they need to know about the heart behind Apple's 2000s-era renaissance, expressed beautifully by Steve Jobs in a 2001 interview on Japanese television.
🎙️ and on Vibe Coded Episode 8, The Pro-Craft Mission (and Refuting Stupid Arguments), Part 1: the same tired arguments keep coming up why we should all welcome our new robot overlords, so I'm here to knock 'em all down and push back systematically…but most importantly, make the case for the Pro-Craft Movement and how vital it is that we preserve and champion the historical & emotional components of Human Creativity.
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Before diving into today's main topic, I posted the following on LinkedIn which I can claim, with no hyperbole, went viral. (And for the first time on that platform! Yay? 😅)
I wish I didn't have to keep saying this.
No, it's not "AI-generated music." It's synthetic sound data extruded from a dataset.
No, it's not "AI-generated film." It's synthetic pixel frame data extruded from a dataset.
No, it's not "AI-generated novel." It's synthetic text extruded from a dataset.
Music, films, novels, artwork, and various other artforms are created by human minds and can only be understood and appreciated by other human minds. The only "mind" behind extruded synthetic data is an algorithmically-regurgitated mix of what real minds have produced and—in most cases—never agreed to having their creative work regurgitated in the first place.
Real artistic tools are used by artists to help them express themselves emotionally via a combination of clever skill, inherent talent, and a willingness to try new things. Without the grounding of experience-based emotion, what you get is dead and meaningless.
GenAI "art" is nothing more than digital zombie barf. And sharing it with anyone outside your private chambers is rude!
As you can imagine, this elicited many responses; some in favor of my position, others against (mostly with the same predictable clichés you always see in these conversations). I counted up which comments seemed to be pro-post vs. against my post, and it was around 18 vs. 15 (I didn't count some comments which were ambiguous or went off on an intellectual tangent).
Let's be generous to the AI apologists and say it was an even split. Anecdotally that's where I feel we are at with this conversation right now, and that's a good thing for the Pro-Craft movement! It used to be heavily weighted on the AI side, and people looked at you like you had two heads if you dared to question it. Now lots of people are questioning the slop-peddlers, and we're the side that's growing.
BTW, here's my favorite negative comment which I found to be quite funny! 😂
Absolute horse droppings! Yo Yo Ma doesnt create the cello's sound. He uses the cello as a tool to explore the cello's sound potential to achieve his sublime musical output. Same goes for AI music. Most is crap but there are the few creative AI wranglers that can explore AI's potential to achieve great musical output. The bottom line is that 99% of the audience doesnt give a rat's patooie how music is made...as long as they enjoy it.
I love how wrong you are, Gary, but you say it with style!
Alright, enough of that. On with my analysis of Steve Jobs' legacy which pushes back on so much of the sloppy Silicon Valley bullshit floating around out there…
“The whole computer industry wants to forget about the humanist side and just focus on the technology.”
These words were uttered by Apple CEO Steve Jobs in an interview in February 2001, shortly after the unveiling of one of my personal favorite Macs of all time, the Titanium PowerBook G4. This is part of a TV interview aired on NHK (Japan Broadcasting Corporation), and finding it isn't easy. There are a small handful of copies on YouTube, some better quality than others, and finding a clean and accurate transcript of the interview was impossible. So I transcribed it by hand and posted it on The Internet Review. You're welcome!
Several quotes stand out to me when I listen to Jobs speak, and they convey a very special kind of philosophy he had which I believe is the reason for Apple's tremendous success in the 2000s and 2010s prior to his untimely death. I'll share these quotes with you, then offer some commentary:
Steve Jobs: When something’s not quite good enough, do you stop and make it better, or do you just ship it? And everybody watches to see how the senior management makes those decisions. And what we’ve tried to do is stop, and make it great before we ship it. When we have problems, stop, and fix them. And by example, you can say anything you want, but everybody watches very carefully when you’re in a difficult situation what decisions you make, what values you have.
We try to focus and do very few things well. And focusing’s hard because focusing doesn’t mean saying yes, it means saying no. So we decide not to do a lot of things, so we can focus on a few handfuls of things and do them well.
At Apple, one of the things we’ve always felt is that we want to stand at the intersection of Technology and Humanities. We want to bring the humanist element into these tools, and not have them just serve our intellectual side, but have them serve some other sides of us as well. And so that’s I think what we do particularly well.
There’s a lot of forces in life that tend to funnel us down into this institutionalized path, and where people sometimes forget that they’re very unique, and that they have very unique feelings and perspectives. Again, the whole computer industry wants to forget about the humanist side and just focus on the technology. And a lot of our industry focuses just on “more is better”—more megahertz and megabytes and, you know, “speeds and feeds” we call it. But we think there’s a whole other side to the coin which is what do you do with these things? Can we do more than just spreadsheets and word processors? Can we help you express yourself in richer ways—in your music, in your movies, in your photography, and these kinds of things that people want to do?
And finally, this exchange was very compelling:
Steve Jobs: I have some children and I shoot some footage, and I remember making my first iMovie where I could edit the clips together, and I could put some cross-dissolves in and some titles on. And I then took one of my favorite pieces of music and I stuck it in and added a soundtrack, and I made about a three minute movie. And I showed it to my wife, and she started crying!
Interviewer: But you have to be so creative yourself.
Steve Jobs: Actually you don’t!
Interviewer: I don’t know how many people can be so creative as to want to spend their time making movies and listening to digital music; maybe somebody like you who are very, very digitalized can help.
Steve Jobs: Actually, you know we’ve had over a million customers make movies now with iMovie. Over a million! And some of the movies are, you know, maybe not better than others, but they all are very emotional. And yet our industry, the whole personal computer industry, hasn’t really talked to that side of people before. We just talked to the side of people that has to add up numbers and write a letter, but there’s so much more to it than that. And I think we’re finally with this Digital Lifestyle era opening, we’re going to be addressing those other things that all of us do some of every single day.
Now to be clear, this interview was right at the dawn of Apple's big Digital Lifestyle push with the iLife suite of apps and all that, so of course Jobs was going to emphasize the artistic side of what you could do with Macs and devices like digital cameras and camcorders.
But the thing is, this wasn't just marketing for Steve. He really lived for this stuff. Going back to the very first Macintosh, Jobs talked about personal computers being “bicycles for the mind” and tried to infuse the new operating system with (for those times!) high-quality typography and other creative sensibilities. There's a reason applications like Photoshop and QuarkXPress blew up on the Mac platform, and artists forever remained one of Apple's key demographics. The celebrated computer game Myst was developed on the Mac, for the Mac, and the World-Wide Web was invented on a NeXTcube (made by Steve Jobs' other company during his time away from Apple).
And of course, the incredible launch of the iPhone which revolutionized smartphones and became one of the most successful consumer products of all time was made possible by its wildly successful predecessor, the iPod. The reason the iPod was a massive hit, and meanwhile nobody was interested in squirting with Zunes, was because Steve Jobs loved music, and Steve Ballmer was…really excited about developers developers developers developers.
So when Steve Jobs says things like “we want to bring the humanist element into these tools”, or “people sometimes forget that they’re very unique, and that they have very unique feelings and perspectives”, or “our industry, the whole personal computer industry, hasn’t really talked to the emotional side of people before”, I believe he was all in.
Contrast that with the cynical arguments regularly put forth by AI apologists. 😂
- Most humans aren't that special.
- Most "art" is mediocre anyway.
- Computer algorithms now learn just like humans do.
- Nobody cares how something is made, they only care about the results.
- Stop standing in the way of technology, luddite.
- You're just gatekeeping if you expect people to learn how to make art in a traditional manner.
I simply don't see how any of those arguments (some of which I've been refuting at length on Vibe Coded) square with the legacy of Steve Jobs. In that interview and many others, Steve Jobs made it quite clear:
- All humans are special.
- Everyone has a unique perspective and a unique way of seeing the world and expressing how they feel.
- Computers are helpful tools to enhance human creativity.
- People will notice when you truly care about quality, when you stop and take the time to ensure that what you build is better, and better still.
- The computer industry often makes the mistake of focusing heavily on technology for technology's sake, and not enough on the liberal arts and a humanist philosophy.
- Apple's strength is to take artistic tools which are expensive and hard to use (so only the most privileged creators have access to them) and place them in the hands of anyone ready to tap into their creative potential and make something awesome.
These are the very reasons I became an Apple “switcher” in 2001 (my first Mac was the aforementioned TiBook!), and they are the reasons I was an Apple fanboy for these many years since. Sad to say, I think much of this philosophy has been obscured during the reign of Tim Cook, but even so I still believe that on the whole, Macs (and iPads) are the best computing tools for creators. An everyday person with a MacBook Air and a good camera or MIDI keyboard, or perhaps an iPad and an Apple Pencil, has the potential to become a world-class filmmaker, music producer, fine-art photographer, book author, illustrator, or anything else they put their mind to.
I don't see anything compelling about slop machines that reminds me of Steve Jobs. I honestly think Sir Jony Ive has lost his marbles trying to recapture the magic with Sam “Dyson Sphere” Altman, and while it's impossible to know what Jobs would have felt were he alive to witness products like ChatGPT and Veo, I can't help but wonder if he would be disappointed that these aren't tools designed to enhance artists, rather they're tools which rip off artists and attempt to replace them.
I think this may be why the Apple Intelligence initiative has turned out to be such a nothing-burger. Even in spite of Tim Cook's philosophical missteps, there's still enough of the Jobsian DNA lingering at Apple to grasp instinctually that it's a laughable mismatch to shoehorn slop machines into a product line conceived at the intersection of Technology and the Liberal Arts. My best guess is that while we'll see future attempts to make Siri act more like ChatGPT, perhaps even to reasonable success, Apple will subtly shift direction to remaining the hardware/software platform vendor that other companies can run their slop machines on; and for those of us who find them abhorrent in the extreme, we can simply ignore them and move on with our lives. That's a perfectly reasonable outcome for all concerned, and I found it very reassuring that this year's WWDC25 and the recent iPhone event were quite exciting not because of Apple Intelligence but because, honestly, nobody needed to care about it at all.
In summary, I completely agree with Steve Jobs circa 2001. “The whole computer industry wants to forget about the humanist side and just focus on the technology.” You know what's changed since 2001? NOTHING! And that's why the computer industry has made one colossal blunder after another in recent years:
- Cryptocurrency. (lol)
- web3 & NFTs. (lol)
- Metaverse. (lol)
- Generative AI. (lol)
The tech bros really need to go back to school and learn ethics & morality, political history, cultural anthropology, arts & crafts, literature, and other important aspects of humanity outside of Capitalism™. The reason Steve Jobs was so successful wasn't because he was a great technologist, it was because he rightly understood that you can only invent great technology having developed genuine insight into everything else that's meaningful about humanity.
May we be inspired by such a legacy and, in our own place and time, strive to embrace that magical intersection of Technology and the Humanities.
Thank you for reading Cycles Hyped No More. Join Intuitive+ and support my independent publishing, and please share with a friend! See you here next week.
Jared ✌️
🤔🌩️ Things that make you think:
Steve Jobs in 1994: The Rolling Stone Interview
Even at one of the low points in his career, Jobs still had confidence in the limitless potential of personal computing
Technology is nothing. What’s important is that you have a faith in people, that they’re basically good and smart, and if you give them tools, they’ll do wonderful things with them. It’s not the tools that you have faith in — tools are just tools. They work, or they don’t work. It’s people you have faith in or not.
–Steve Jobs