QUESTION: Hi Martin,
Considering the potential influence of AI, also taking into account the behaviour of the 80 percent that went with the COVID narrative, I was wondering. The AI is being fed by human interaction on the internet, probably somewhere else as well, but very much directed. Now that does not seem to direct to a real advancement, does it? What if the human spirit will be directed to a more animal like behaviour? Like a programmed nature thing that birds show. Go south in winter and go north in spring to get your food. Would not that be a degradation of the general human?
Cheers,
L.
ANSWER: I have been involved in AI, actually, since the late 1960s. I have explained how the TV show Star Trek not only secured funding from Congress for NASA’s Moon mission and named the first Space Shuttle, Enterprise, but also inspired us in the computer industry to dream big. We all knew each other back then. Even the clamshell flip communicators used by the crew of the USS Enterprise are a clear visual and conceptual precursor to the flip phones that dominated the market before the iPhone, and by extension, the iPhone itself.
While Steve never said, “I copied the Communicator,” he did explicitly reference Star Trek when introducing the iPhone. At the 2007 Macworld keynote, while demonstrating the iPhone’s multi-touch interface for the first time, he said, “Boy, have we patented it!” This was a direct and knowing wink to the “pinch-to-zoom” and swipe gestures that looked exactly like the magic interfaces everyone had seen in science fiction for decades, with Star Trek being the prime example. The idea of a sleek, portable, handheld device used for instant communication, information access, and computation is pure Star Trek. The iPhone made that science fiction a reality.
Long before tablets were a practical reality, Star Trek: The Next Generation featured characters using flat, touch-screen devices called PADDs (Personal Access Display Devices). The crew members would carry these thin, slate-like devices to read reports, access data, and input commands. They were used exactly as we use tablets today: for reading, browsing, and as a portable terminal. When Steve introduced the iPad, he framed it as a new category of device between a laptop and a smartphone. For any fan of Star Trek, it was immediately recognizable as the realization of the PADD. The form factor, the touch interface, and its purpose as an information consumption device were all directly inspired by that vision of the future.
The idea of talking to your computer and it talking back to you in a natural, conversational way was a staple of Star Trek. The crew could walk onto the bridge and ask the computer any question and get a verbal answer. In the early 1980s, I was working with Dragon System when this was all hardware. Today it is software. My kids grew up talking to the computer. They were my guinea pigs to teach Socrates how even to have a conversation with them. My daughter thought it was completely normal and would ask her friends, You don’t talk to your father’s computer? She would bring her girlfriends over, and they would be stunned.
This vision of a voice-activated, intelligent assistant is the entire concept behind Siri (which Apple acquired and integrated into the iPhone) and other voice assistants like Alexa and Google Assistant. The goal was to create the Star Trek computer: an intuitive, omnipresent interface that required no keyboard.
The inspiration wasn’t just about specific gadgets. It was also about a philosophy. In Star Trek, technology isn’t clunky. It’s intuitive, elegant, and seamlessly integrated into daily life. It just works. This was a step back, a second, and take a look at Steve’s core design principle for Apple products. The glowing, glass-like, multi-touch displays of the LCARS system in Star Trek: The Next Generation were a radical departure from the blinking command prompts of 1980s computers. They presented a vision of computing that was visual, graphical, and friendly—a vision Apple brought to life first with the Macintosh and later with iOS.
There’s a wonderful, direct link between Steve’s company, NeXT, and Star Trek. In the mid-1990s, the development team for the video game Star Trek: The Next Generation – A Final Unity used NeXT computers as their development platform. They even sent a letter to Steve (on a NeXT computer, of course) asking for permission to use the NeXTstep operating system’s alert sound as the beep for Geordi La Forge’s communicator badge. Steve, of course, instantly agreed.
Steve Jobs’ brilliance lay in his compelling vision of the future, inspired by science fiction, and in applying Apple’s design and engineering prowess to make it a reality. He didn’t invent the concepts of the smartphone, tablet, or voice assistant, but their most popular and idealized depictions directly inspired him in Star Trek. He was far more inspired by Star Trek than most would ever imagine. We all were!
Then Came the Intelligence
Beyond the gadgets, how can we create a computer that truly understands you and conducts legitimate, original research? There were two theories running around. The original path that 99% of those in AI followed, except me, was the core idea that a neural web (or network) could mimic the brain and that complexity, which could lead to consciousness. This theory is primarily credited to Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts, known as the Foundational Theory: McCulloch and Pitts (1943).
Download their 1843 Article
mccolloch.logical.calculus.ideas.1943
Because I had to do the electrical engineering learning how to create a computer from the ground up, I saw the obvious connection between the McCulloch-Pitts (MCP) neuron, proposed in their seminal 1943 paper, “A Logical Calculus of Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity,” which was explicitly and directly based on the principles of electrical circuits and Boolean logic.
The presumption was that our minds are just supercomputers, all stems from the 1943 theory of McCulloch and Pitts. They ignored perhaps the critical understanding of what makes one person brilliant at math and another a brilliant artist who can’t count beyond 1,000.
This theory that our minds are simply supercomputers ignores some critical traits and how to distinguish one person from another. There was this idea that if you create a neural net and stuff in all this knowledge, it will learn all by itself. This was just a giant fiction to me, which was up there with the theory that somehow the machine will come to life and decide it wants to rule the world and take over humankind.
My approach was to teach them HOW to analyze, not WHAT to analyze. I incorporated as much of myself as possible into the code, without the human flaws that make life interesting. I taught Socrates how to analyze, rather than relying on the chance of a neural net that cannot be tested. I’ve chosen a completely different path, rejecting the black-box approach of throwing in a heap of information, shaking well, and hoping for the best, like James Bond. WATSON failed because they followed McCulloch and Pitts, when I did not.
