Make Something Wonderful: Steve Jobs In His Own Words

Steve Jobs always had a very special, intense and also direct way of communicating. I never had the privilege of meeting him in person, but I greatly enjoyed watching his keynotes, public talks and interviews. I cannot remember any other person in the technology business that could create such tension on stage and at the same time talk about everything in such a natural and interesting way.

Naturally, I was one of the first to check out the "Steve Jobs Archive" when it went online. However, I never really had the time to go through everything in detail, so I really appreciated when they launched "Make Something Wonderful": a free e-book containing a "collection of Steve’s speeches, interviews, and emails". Now I could read the book during my ten-hour flight to Denver a few weeks ago.

And I really liked it. It is just as they described it on the Steve Jobs Archive: a loose collection of speeches, interviews and emails, roughly put into chronological order. If you liked the way Steve talked you definitely have to download the book and read it. Of course you can also read it online, but - at least in my opinion - it is not the same. There is a reason why we have e-readers like Apple Books.

There are many great quotes in this book, but I want to mention one that caught my intention as, on one side, it is so relevant in the dawn of generational AI, and on the other side, it also showcases his special way of connecting art and science:

“The problem was, you can’t ask Aristotle a question. And I think, as we look towards the next fifty to one hundred years, if we really can come up with these machines that can capture an underlying spirit, or an underlying set of principles, or an underlying way of looking at the world, then, when the next Aristotle comes around, maybe if he carries around one of these machines with him his whole life — his or her whole life — and types in all this stuff, then maybe someday, after this person’s dead and gone, we can ask this machine, “Hey, what would Aristotle have said? What about this?” And maybe we won’t get the right answer, but maybe we will. And that’s really exciting to me. And that’s one of the reasons I’m doing what I’m doing.” [Steve Jobs in "Make Something Wonderful"]

With the upcoming advancements we see in GPT-4 and other next-generation large language models we probably in fact can emulate a discussion with Aristotle. Or with the late Steve Jobs maybe? If we are talking about other persons we probably have to ask whether we should do it. But even though I never met him, I am pretty sure that Steve would have liked the idea - regardless of whether the AI Steve will give the right answers, or not. Who knows, maybe this is already something the makers of the Steve Jobs Archive are discussing right now...?